Lecture 2: Personality Assessment Flashcards
personality (as a field)
the field of psychology that studies the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, goals, and interests of individuals.
humanistic-oriented models
people have clear, well-defined goals, so it makes sense to ask them directly about themselves and their goals
psychodynamically oriented theories
people have no understanding of their feelings and motives, so it does not make sense to ask about them directly. researchers need to find a way to identify these non-conscious factors
objective tests
involves administering a standard set of items, each of which is answered with a limited set of response options
self-reporting measures
most widely used tests in modern personality research, it asks people to describe themselves
benefits of self-reporting
- have access to a great deal of (internal) information, such as their own thoughts, feelings and motives.
- the simplest, easiest and most cost-effective approach to assessing personality
- impressive validity across a wide range of important
outcomes. - self-reported personality is a predictor of job performance, divorce and mortality.
- personality assessments collected at a young age were related to happiness, physical health and mortality risks assessed decades later.
- self-assessed neuroticism is associated with a wide range of clinical syndromes.
disadvantages of self-reporting
- Assessors may be motivated to present themselves in a favorable, socially desirable way.
- This is of particular concern in high-stakes testing
- Social desirable responding
- Personality ratings of oneself reflect a self-enhancement bias
- Self-valuations are subject to the reference group effect (= the tendency of people to base their self-perceptions on comparisons with others in the sociocultural reference group).
- High cognitive demands (e.g. for children or elderly people).
- Participants may lack self-reflection/introspection, making responding to items problematic.
- Participants may lack motivation which could lead to careless responding
Response styles: - Acquiescence = persistently agreeing to statements of items in general.
- Extreme response styles = preference for extreme response categories (very low or very high)
- Middle response styles = preference for middle response categories (responses in the middle).
- self-reports in high-stakes assessment is easy to fake
experience sampling
short self-report questionnaires administered via smartphone several times per day, for several days/weeks.
observer report
a self-reported questionnaire that can be administered as an other report
completeness in personality testing
dimension which personality tests differ in the extent to which they attempt to asses personality in a reasonably comprehensive way
- can measure one trait
- can contain a large number of specific scales
projective tests
originally based on the projective hypothesis, which is that if a person is asked to describe or interpret ambiguous stimuli, their answers will be influenced by unconscious needs, feelings and experiences
limitations of projective tests
- time consuming
- what do they really measure?
Interpretations of the same stimulus can vary across repeated measurements occasions, which is not ideal for a stable personality
implicit motives
goals that are important to a person but that person cannot consciously express
implicit tests
based on the assumption that people form automatic or implicit associations between certain concepts based on their previous experiences and behaviors.
implicit association test
a reaction time test that is used to measure undesirable attitudes such as racism
