1. Assessing Personality
Personality Testing

2. Psychological Testing
Psychological tests assess a person’s abilities, aptitudes, interests or personality based on a systematically obtained sample of behavior.
2 Basic Goals
Accurately & consistently reflect a person’s characteristics on some dimension.
Predicts a person’s future psychological functioning or behavior.

3. Personality Assessment
Projective Techniques
Interpretation of an ambiguous to trigger projection of one’s inner thoughts and feelings
Used to determine unconscious motives, conflicts, and psychological defenses & traits

4. Rorschach Inkblot Test
Presentation and interpretation of a series of black and white and colored inkblots
Developed in 1921.
Personality test that seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of 10 inkblots
Numerous scoring systems exist

5. Comer, Abnormal Psychology 4e Clinical Assessment, Diagnosis, and Treatment Figure An inkblot similar to those used in the Rorschach test

6. Thematic Apperception Test
Series of pictures depicting ambiguous scenes
Subject is asked to create a story about the scene
Answers are scored based on themes, motives, and anxieties of main character

7. Comer, Abnormal Psychology 4e Clinical Assessment, Diagnosis, and Treatment Figure 4.02

8. Drawbacks to Projective Tests
Examiner or test situation may influence individual’s response
Scoring is highly subjective
Tests fail to produce consistent results (reliability problem)
Tests are poor predictors of future behavior (validity problem)

9. Testing for Traits: Self-Report Inventories

10. Personality Inventories
Questionnaires on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors
Used to assess selected personality traits
Often true-false, agree-disagree, etc. types of questions
Person’s responses to standardized questions are compared to established norms.

11. Validity
The extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is suppose to test
Personality inventories offer greater validity than do projective tests (e.g. Rorschach; used by proponents of the humanistic perspective).

12. Reliability
The extent to which a test yields consistent results, regardless of who gives the test or when or where it is given
Personality inventories are more reliable than projective tests.

13. MMPI Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
Most clinically-used personality test
500 total questions
Originally designed to assess abnormal behavior

14. MMPI Scoring Profile

15. MMPI-2 Revised and updated version of the MMPI
Assesses test takers on 10 clinical scales and 15 content scales
Sometimes the MMPI-2 is not used as it was intended.

16. Other Self-Report Inventories
California Personality Inventory (CPI) – assesses personality characteristics in normal populations.
Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF) – Cattell’s test that creates a personality profile on 16 trait dimensions.

17. Strengths of Self-Reports
Standardized—each person receives same instructions and responds to the same questions
Use of established norms: results are compared to previously established norms and are not subjectively evaluated
Greater reliability and validity than projective tests.

18. Weaknesses of Self-Reports
Evidence that people can “fake” responses to look better (or worse)
Some people are prone to responding in a set way, whether the item accurately reflects them or not.
Tests contain hundreds of items and become tedious
People may not be good judges of their own behavior