Ch.8 : Origins of personality testing Flashcards
Two fundamental features of personality
- Each person is consistent to some extent
2. Each person is distinctive to some extent
Freud’s three structures of the mind
Id: entirely unconscious, pleasure principle
Ego: Conscious self, reality principle
Superego: ethical component
Psychotic defense mechanisms
Distort reality
Acting out defense mechanisms
Passive aggressive, impulsive, complaining but rejecting help
Borderline defense mechanisms
Others are all good/all bad, projection
Neurotic defense mechanisms
Repression, displacement
Obsessive defense mechanisms
Isolation of affect, intellectualization
Mature defense mechanisms
Humour, anticipation, sublimation, suppression, altruism
Meta-analysis on Type A personality and coronary heart disease?
Not an independent risk factor
- Effect sizes were about 0
- Regardless of interviews or questionnaires
Q technique
Carl Rogers’ procedure for studying changes in self-concept
- Rank ‘personality’ cards in 9 piles, with a fix number for each (forces normal distribution), from very like them to not at all like them
Q technique self-sort vs ideal sort
Discrepancy between the two is an index of adjustment (correlates the two: successful therapy increases correlation)
Internal-External Scale
Locus of control (reinforcement contingent on their behavior or on the outside world)
Cattell & traits
Factor analysis identified 16-20 bipolar traits (source traits)
Eysenck & traits
12s of traits into two overriding dimension
Goldberg & traits
Big 5
Problem with traits
- Traits cause or describe behavior?
- Low predictive validity (Mischel)?
Projective tests
Examinee encounters vague stimuli and responds with their own constructions
- very psychoanalytic
5 categories of projective tests
- Association to inkblots or words (Rorschach)
- Telling stories
- Completing sentences/stories
- Arranging or selecting pictures or verbal choices
- Drawing/play
Rorschach administration
- Projective test
- Sit to the side, ask for 2-3 responses (response optimization for better fit with norms)
- Scored on location (part of blot/white space), content (human, explosion, synthesis, vague, pair), form quality (ordinary, unusual, popular, minus - distorted, unrealistic), thought processes (morbid, deviant), determinants (movement, color, form, texture)-
- Good interrater reliability
Rorschach Prognostic Rating Scale
- Validation: being able to recover (human dancing: high score; human sleeping: 0; explosion: negative score)
- Meta-analysis: 78% success therapy for high scores; but only 22% for low scores
Thought Disorder Index
- Useful scoring system for Rorschach
- Assesses formal thought disorder
- Good split half r (.80) and interrater (.90)
Experiment to see if Rorschach can spot fakers
Sample: Paranoid SZ patients; Paranoid fakers but uninformed; Paranoid fakers but informed; control
Results: Informed fakers (72%) more diagnosed than actual SZ (48%); uninformed fakers (46%); controls (24%)
- Missed actual SZ
- Found control SZ
Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank
40 sentence stems written at 1st person
- Rated on adjustment (0: good; 6: poor) - conflict response (4-6), positive response (0-2), neutral responses (none)
- high reliability
- high validity: delinquent youths (good sensitivity and specificity), drug users
- today’s students score differently then they did before
Thematic Apperception Test
- Pictures for adult males/females, boys/girls
- examinee makes up story
- initially made for need/motive assessment
- psychometric analyses are hard to conduct - but very low test-retest (.28)
