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PSYC 2130 (181)
Chapter 5


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York University
PSYC 2130
Krista Phillips

CHAPTER 5 THE NATURE OF PERSONALITYASSESSMENT personality assessment is a professional activity of numerous research, clinical, and industrial psychologists, as well a prosperous business that seems to fullfill a persistent need an individual's personality consists of characteristic patterns of behaviour, thought, or emotional experience that exhibit relative consistency across time and situations these patterns include many kinds of variable, including motives, intentions, goals, strategies, and subjective representations (the ways in which people perceive and construct their world) they indicate the degree to which a person desires one goal over another, or thinks the world is changeable as opposed to fixed all of these variables and many others are relatively stable attribute of the psychological makeup of individuals, so in that sense they are all personality traits; and any attempt to measure them necessarily means personality assessment personality traits are a fundamental part of how we think about eachother and ourselves evaluations of professional personality judgements or personality tests are said to appraise their validity, whereas evaluations of amateur judgements generally use the term accuracy the basic evaluation is the same either way; two basic criteria are available agreement and prediction the agreement criteria asks whether the judgment agrees with other agreements obtained through other techniques or from other judgements the prediction criteia asks: Can this judgement of personality be used to predict behaviour or other life outcomes? Personality assessment- how personality is judged by professionals and amateurs PERSONALITYTESTS MMPI was designed for use in clinical assessment of individuals with psychological difficulties, but has also been used in employment screening, California Psychological Inventory is similar to MMPI but is designed for use with nondisturbed individuals Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF); the Strong Vocational Interest Blank(SVIB), used for vocational guidance in school settings; the Hogan Personality inventory (HPI), used by employers for personnel selection many personality tests are omnibus inventories, which means they are designed to measure a wide variety of personality traits some are measure to measure just one trait TypeApersonality- a pattern of hostility that makes a person vulnerable to heart attack Type C personality- a pattern of passivity that makes a person vulnerable to cancer S Data VS B Data Personality Tests most personality tests provide S data MMPI is B data- it presents items not becuase they are interested in the answer, but because answer are informative about some aspect of personality preferring a shower over a bath is the empathetic response ImplicitAssociation Test measures how quickly particpants respond to instructions to discriminate between terms that apply to me or others, and between terms that are relevant, or not, the trait being measured one study measured shyness; each participant sat at a computer and responded as quickly as possible to whether terms referred to me or others and then whetn other items referred to shy or nonshy participant's did both tasks at the same time the theory is that people who implicitly know they are shy will have faster associations between me and shy than between me and nonshy also gather self report data of shyness the participants were videotaped as they chatted with an attractive member of the opposite sex, a task selected as one that just might induce shyness in some people the aspects of shyness that participants consciously controlled could be predicted by the S data shyness scores more spontaneous indicators of shyness such as facial expressions and tense body posture were predicted much better by the IAT measure although peoples awareness of their own shyness is only partially conscious, their deeper, underlying knowlege can be not only measured, but also used to predict behaviour tests of intelligence also yield B data IQ tests ask people questions of varying difficulty, which have and specific correct answers the right or wrong answers comprise B data PROJECTIVE TESTS Projecting the Mind projective tests are based on a particular theory, called projective hypothesis, of how to see into someones mind ask someone to interpret meaningless/ambiguous stimuli, interpret their answers to infer needs, feelings, experience, thought process, hidden aspects of the mind Rorschach inkblot test- dropped blots of India ink onto note cards, folded them in half, then unfolded them show cards to clients and asked what
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