Understanding Personality and Personality Assessment: A Comprehensive Overview, Lecture notes of Personality Psychology

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Understanding Personality and

personality assessment

• (^) Personality: An individual’s unique constellation of psychological traits that is relatively stable over time
• (^) Personality assessment: The measurement and evaluation of psychological traits, states, values, interests, attitudes, worldview, acculturation, sense of humor, cognitive and behavioral styles, and/or related individual characteristics

Personality types

• (^) Cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman developed a two- category personality typology
• (^) Type A personality: A personality type characterized by competitiveness, haste, restlessness, impatience, feelings of being time-pressured, and strong needs for achievement and dominance
• (^) Type B personality: A personality type that is completely opposite of Type A personality Characterized as being mellow or laid-back.

• (^) The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is frequently discussed in terms of the patterns of scores that emerge and these patterns are referred to as a profile
• (^) Personality profile : A narrative description of the extent to which a person has demonstrated certain personality traits, states, or types
• (^) Personality state - The transitory exhibition of some personality trait, a relatively temporary predisposition. They are short term ,concrete patterns of acting ,feeling and thinking.
• (^) Personality trait-behaviors and feelings that are consistent and long lasting.

• (^) Who is being assessed and who is assessing?
• (^) Some methods of personality assessment rely on the assessee’s own self-report
• (^) Assessee’s may respond to interview questions and answer questionnaires in writing or on a computer.
• (^) Some forms of personality assessment rely on informants such as parents, teachers, or peers.

• (^) Self-report methods are very common when exploring an assessee’s self-concept
• (^) Self-concept: One’s attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and related thoughts about oneself
• (^) Some self-concept measures are based on the notion that states and traits related to self-concept are to a large degree context-dependent
• (^) Self-concept differentiation: The degree to which a person has different self-concepts in different roles.

What is assessed when a personality assessment is conducted?

• (^) Some tests are designed to measure particular traits (e.g., introversion) or states (e.g., test anxiety)
• (^) Other tests focus on descriptions of behavior, usually in particular contexts

What is assessed when a personality assessment is

conducted?

• (^) Response style: A tendency to respond to a test item or interview question in some characteristic manner regardless of the content of the item or question.
• (^) Impression management: The attempt to manipulate others’ impressions through “the selective exposure of some information…coupled with suppression of [other] information” (Braginsky et al., 1969, p. 51).
• (^) Response styles can affect the validity of the outcome and can be countered through the use of a validity scale.
• Validity scale: A subscale of a test designed to assist in judgments regarding how honestly the test-taker responded and whether responses were products of response style, carelessness, deception, or misunderstanding.

Personality Assessment Methods

• (^) Objective Methods of Personality Assessment
• (^) Typically administered by paper-and-pencil or by computer and contain short-answer items for which the assessee’s task is to select one response from those provided
• (^) The term “objective” in relation to personality measures must be considered cautiously
• (^) Personality tests do not contain one correct answer
• (^) A distinct lack of objectivity is associated with self-report

Projective Measures

• (^) Projective hypothesis: The idea that an individual supplies structure to unstructured stimuli in a manner consistent with the individual’s own unique pattern of conscious and unconscious needs, fears, desires, impulses, conflicts, and ways of perceiving and responding
• (^) Projective techniques are indirect methods of personality assessment

Inkblots as Projective Stimuli

• (^) Rorschach inkblots
• (^) Hermann Rorschach
• (^) There is debate on how to precisely classify Rorschach inkblots
• (^) Consist of 10 bilaterally symmetrical inkblots on separate cards, half of which are achromatic
• (^) Inkblot cards are initially presented in order from 1 to 10; the test-takers are asked to interpret the inkblot and are provided a great deal of freedom
• (^) After the entire set of inkblots has been administered, an inquiry is conducted and the assessor attempts to determine what features of the inkblot played a role in formulating the test-taker’s percept.

• (^) Test Responses: 01: Card I Orientation: v Rx Time: 7
• (^) v 2 little birds carrying something, it looks like a chicken but that's impossible, but that's what it looks like, they r carrying this up
• (^) INQUIRY: bird {D2} chicken {Dd21}, I didnt know what else to make it. It's an impossibility but...the beaks {outside small d}, the eyes {inside shading d}, the crop of feathers at the top, and the wings {projection toward bottom)
• (^) ANYTHING ELSE? this is the shape of the chicken {Dd24}, but it has shoes {top of Dd21)on [laughs]