Psych 377 Personality

An individual’s unique collection of psychological states and traits

• Personality category/classification
• Representative of your collection of psychological states and traits

Seeks to identify differences in the way people take information in and make decisions

• Used exclusively in vocational guidance
• Self-administered, scored, interpreted
• Problems with overlapping/isolation
• Need to use more than one source
• Proposes six personality types:
• Artistic
• Enterprising
• Investigative
• Social
• Realistic
• Conventional

• Assesses two personality types:
• Type A
• Quick to anger, hyper meticulous
• Type B
• Laid back, less competitive and anger

• 6th grade reading level/not for small children 14+
• No time limit/60-90 mins to accomplish
• Yields a personality “profile”
• 566 True/False items (550 with 16 repeated)
• 10 clinical scales
• Each one of those scales represents a collection of items that are trying to measure the same psychological characteristic
• Item endorsement index

Group of items that assesses when the assessee is lying; especially when assessee fails to identify anything negative about him/herself, aka fake good or bad

• Items that a non-psychopathic person would not endorse
• If assessee endorses the items, something may be wrong with them or they may be faking bad

• Identifies faking good/endorsing only positive items that cast him/her in a positive way
• Defensiveness

• The number of times that individual endorsed cannot say options or skipped them all together for a reason
• Defensiveness

Attempt to change language and content and make it more applicable to adolescents

• Any distinguishable, relatively enduring way in which one individual varies from another
• Expected way that a person is going to behave or think like but that does not mean that they cannot change due to environmental influences
• ex. Optimism

• More temporary
• ex. Happiness

• measure for distinguishing between traits and states
• Respond to a series of short statements with respect to 4 evaluation criteria:
• How do you feel right now?
• How strongly do you feel that way?
• How do you generally feel?
• How often do you feel that way?

• Respondent seeks to assess her/his “self-concept” via a self-concept measure
• Exercise of self-exploration
• Usually involves some form of “self-report” method
• Beck Self-Concept Test (Adults)
• Tennessee Self-Concept Scales and Piers Harris Self-Concept Scale (Kids)
• “Self-Concept differentiation” (The area of role identity/conflict)

• 3rd party refers the individual for assessment and may serve as the “respondent”
• ex. A dementia person may not be able to respond to the questions; so the respondent may answer those for him/her
• Personality Inventory for Children (PIC/PIC-2) (Children as the referees)

• Rating error
• Rating context

Leniency, severity, central tendency, halo/horns

the circumstances surrounding the rating process (any and everything connected to the rating context)

• Primary content
• Response style

The principal focus of the personality measures are tools used to gain insight into a wide array of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors associated with all aspects of the human experience

• The manner in which a test taker responds to test items regardless of their content
• It speaks to an identifiable respondent / the respondent is responding in the same way to all of the items regardless of the content

agreeing with everything (regardless of the content)

• a dichotomous response style (only endorsing the extreme ends of the continuum)
• Never/always

it’s an either or style were there will be some kind of expected response to the respondent

guessing/skip it

• the respondents is endorsing only those atypical responses / such as those that will pertain to the MMPI like frequency
• trying to fake the responds

• social presentation
• to present yourself in a favorable way

• you are truly convinced of your own greatness
• not revealing any negative qualities

• the essence that it does not apply to the respondent
• disagreeing with everything regardless of the content

• is all about consciously or unconsciously presenting or withholding information
• usually present one self in a favorable way

• Traditional settings (Ex. private practice, hospitals)
• Contemporary settings (Ex. naturalistic, schools, prison

• Scope
• Theory
• Procedures
• Item format
• Frame of reference
• Scoring & interpretation

• how broad or narrow of the sampling we are attempting to use
• Ex. MMPI is abroad

a particular assessment may be associated with a theory

• how is this thing administered
• what are the protocols of the assessment strategies

can differ because of frame of reference

• the respondent can be asked in the present, future, and past tense
• you may be asked to change your perspective
• can be a time reference

Nomothetic vs. Idiographic

The idea that there are a number of characteristic that applies to everyone (several flavors)

vs.

proposes that we are unique entities to ourselves when it come to personality (as unique to us as our finger prints)

Culture can have a strong influence on personality states and traits

The process by which an individual’s personality is shaped by her/his culture

• we cannot assume that one size fits all
• Assessment that is responsive to cultural issues

• Typically multiple-choice format
• little or no room for discretionary scoring
• There is no room for the assessor to use his/her judgement
• Selected response

• Assessee asked to provide structure for an unstructured stimulus
• May be differentially scored (score people diff from one to another)
• Room for discretionary scoring
• Inter-rater reliability issues
• Potential bias
• Constructed response

• The structure an assessee provides to an unstructured stimulus is indicative of her/his personality characteristics
• Assessee is asked to comment on something else besides themselves
• Asked to see what they see in a vague picture and see what they say
• Considered even more indirect than objective techniques

• First distinguished for papers on the interpretation of art
• Ink blood test
• Because we have so many systems there are a variarity of interpretations/evaluations

Showing the card

• Assessee is shown the cards again and the assessors assesses whether the interpretations are repeated
• The assessor asks the assessee what made it look like that
• Are there any new novel perceptions?
• It could denote defensiveness

• Used when the assessee is having difficulty with coming up with an interpretation
• You have to be in a formal operational stage
• Asks them to comment on a specific part of the shape/helps them narrow their focus
• Might be a reflection of assessors’ bias
• Facilitate projection process

• Location
• On what part of the image are they basing their interpretation?

• Determinants
• Qualities of the image that contributed to the ind interpretation

• Content
• Can we categorize these responses?
• Is every image being interpreted having an anatomical category?
• Look for patterns

• Popularity
• Frequency
• How often does this response occur in the population

• Form
• Most controversial
• An assessment to the degree to which the ind interpretation of that image or parts of that image coenside with its actual configuration

• Comment on a vague scene in regards to 3 elements:
• What led up to this scene?
• What is happening now?
• What will happen?

The assessee is believed to identify with the protagonist and as such project onto that protagonist elements his own personality/life

Has blank cards

• Need
• Intra-indv factors
• Arising from needs that you have

• Press
• Extra-personal factors
• Outside of the person/environmental

• Thema
• Interaction between need and press
• How your needs interact with the environment and play out

• Assessee is shown a series of cards that depic hands in diff positions
• Has blank cards

• Depics a character who is frustrated
• Assessee is asked to provide a response
• It assesses 2 general categories of responses:
• Aggression
• Reaction

• Intro-cunitive
• The aggression is being directed towards himself

• Extra-punitive
• Aggression being directed outwards

• Inpunitive response
• Non-aggression being expressed

• Obstacle dominance
• The central focus of the indv’s response is on that frustrating barrier

• Ego defense
• The central focus of the indv’s response is on protecting the ego of the frustrated person

• Need persistence
• Focuses on solving the frustrating problem

• 60 words
• Some neutral, some emotion evoking
• 3 parts:
• -The words are presented and the assessee is asked to come up w a word that comes to his mind first
• -The process is repeated, and the assessors is looking for changes and elapsed time from the first time.
• -Inquiry phase (what were you thinking? why did you say this?)

• Respondents usually put negative responses
• Participant bias

• Draw a person without any guidelines or restrictions
• Useful for children, cognitively challenged, language barriers
• The structure the assessee imposes on the figure is believed to be revealing of her personality
• It is assumed that the drawing is of the assessee her self

how realistic is it?

• is the figure clothed?
• -Not clothed might indicate a lack of control

• does the figure have hands?
• -No hands might indicated helplessness/abuse

• Asks to draw a house, tree, and person in the same scene
• Might be prone to measurement error

• Does the house have windows or doors?
• -Might be feeling trapped

What is the size of the tree in relation of the person?

Is the figure in the scene interacting with the house and tree?

Draw a family interacting

• The more vague or ambiguous the stimulus, the more projection will occur
• Has not been conclusively demonstrated
• The closer the stimulus is to the person, the more projection will occur

• Every response is meaningful or revealing/ related to assessee need
• Not conclusively demonstrated

The assessee does not know what she is revealing about her self

There are critics who argue the existence of the unconscious mind or that these test tap into something that does not exists

• Environment
• Response style
• Experimenter effects
• -The assessor may do some projection while evaluating the data
• Test construction/administration

Due to being projective tests, it has the appearance of being less psychometrically sound because we can't apply the same evaluation criteria/questions about it than non-projective tests

Analysis of “behavioral samples”

• Antecedent
• Behavior
• Consequence

• Self reports
• Observation
• Situational performance

• Verbal
• Written

• Assessee may think she is being observed
• May cause Hawthorn effect

• Assessee does not know she is being watched
• Unethical/illegal due to privacy

Role-playing exercises