Week 6/7 - Personality Assessment Flashcards
What were the five basic paradigms in personality assessment that Wiggins proposed?
Psychoanalytic Interpersonal Personological Multivariate (trait) Empirical approach
What other 2 approaches to personality are there that Wiggins did not propose?
Social-cognitive
Positive psychology
What type of technique is the Rorschach?
Projective
The concept of personality is the observers way of attempting to ______________
Capture what is happening when two people interact
What did the pioneering work of Timothy Leary lead to?
The interpersonal circumplex, a way of describing interpersonal behaviour in terms of a circle of relationships
What dimensions of the interpersonal circumplex have received reasonable consensus?
Dominance-submission (seeking control) and warm-cold (seeking belongingness)
What technique did Murray and Morgan develop?
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) - By using a set of ambiguous pictures that were depictions of people and places and allowed for more than one interpretation
What did Murray look for when examining the life history?
Proceedings - significant events
Themes - ideas that recur in the life of the person and help to give it some structure or coherence
What did Wiggins propose?
That there were five basic paradigms in personality assessment
What were the four temperament types described in earlier times?
Melancholic
Phlegmatic
Choleric
Sanguine
Who was the first to formulate a trait theory of personality?
Allport, although he saw certain traits as unique to individuals rather than being common to all
What three major dimensions of personality did Eysenck label using factor analysis?
Neuroticism
Psychoticism
Extraversion
What are the Big Five personality factors argued by Costa and McCrae?
Neuroticism Extraversion Openness Agreeableness Conscientiousness
How is assessment of personality using the trait approach most commonly done?
Using the personality questionnaire
What is the main difference between the empirical approach and the trait approach?
The trait approach is concerned principally with the dimensions that make for human individuality; whereas the empirical approach is concerned with personality description in the service of predicting socially relevant criteria (I.e mental illness, criminality)
Humanistic psychology
was the forerunner of the positive psychology movement
sought to define what made people truly human and focused heavily on the self as a major construct
The Rasch model models
the difference between the person’s standing on a trait and item difficulty
Self-efficacy involves
beliefs about performance
A 2PL model estimates
item difficulty and item discrimination
The idea of an assessment centre
was first implemented at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company after the Second World War
Self-efficacy is important in determining what 3 things?
the effort in sustaining behaviour
the decision about what to terminate a behaviour
the choice of actions to perform
The Likert scale
asks the respondent to rate their strength of endorsement on a seven-point scale
basic reference dimensions of socially important behaviour include
dominance-submission
Typologies differ from dimensional descriptions in
relying on a set of categories that exhaust all differences among individuals
IRT models are now used in constructing ability tests because they
can provide interval level measurement
facilitate tailored testing
provide tests of differential validity
Who created the most widely used system for scoring the Rorschach Inkblot test?
Exner
The projective hypothesis holds that
an individual supplies structure to unstructured stimuli
The scenes in the cards from the Thermatic Apperception Test are designed to present the testtaker with
classical human situations
When scoring the Rorschach inkblot test, Popularity refers to
the frequency with which a certain response has been found to correspond with a particular inkblot or section of an inkblot
Assessing PD using structured interviews is problematic because
pathology can be concealed
it is tedious
it is time-consuming
Objective personality tests can be
answered quickly, scored by a computer and scored by hand
Exner’s system for scoring the Rorschach enabled which type of reliability to be calculated
inter-scorer
When scoring the Rorschach inkblot test, Content refers to
The content category of the response (such as human figures, animal figures, clouds)
Dissimulation by individuals with a personality disorder can be both conscious and unconscious. True or False?
True
The empirical approach to personality description is
solely interested in the prediction of socially significant outcomes
It is advisable to draw up a plan for the specification of items for a psychological test because
item writers need to know what they do
otherwise important aspects of the construct being measured may be overlooked
creativity alone usually generates bad items
Assessment of personality
requires knowing only as much as is necessary to accomplish the purpose of assessment
a test manual
is required to explain how a test is administered and scored
provides technical information about the test including test norms
outlines the theoretical or conceptual background to the test
Which of the following concepts would you not expect to be on the agenda of research in positive psychology?
anxiety
Concepts considered are flow, optimism, forgiveness etc.
Action in social situations can sometimes be understood as
the importance of the self-dynamism
attempts to reduce anxiety associated with low self-esteem
attempts to increase security of relationships
Integration of different personality theories
can lead to incoherence in explantion
The idea of mechanisms of defence
was elaborated by Freud’s daughter based on his original thinking
To diagnose a personality disorder you need to establish that
it is present over time
it is currently present
it is pervasive
the client DOES NOT need to be aware of it
Assessing personality disorders is a difficult task because of persistent problems related to the ______ validity of existing instruments
concurrent
Projective tests are usually used to measure
personality
What are the common characteristics of objective methods of personality assessment?
one response for each item is chosen from two or more options
there are a set of procedures for scoring
short-answer items
NOT clinical judgement for scoring
What tests were based on the empirical approach?
MMPI
California Psychological Inventory (CPI)
Strong Vocational Interest Blank (SVIB)
What is meant by the term ‘person variables’ coined by Mischel
to characterise the consistencies in behaviour and thought that make for differences among individuals
What are the person variables as identified by Mischel & Shoda (1995)
competencies encodings expectancies and beliefs affects, goals and values self-regulatory plans
What are encoding strategies?
ways of perceiving the world or processing information about it
How are values often thought of?
in terms of the amount of reward or reinforcement potential actions produce
What do self-regulating systems and plans refer to?
The ways people learn to control their behaviour, and the strategies they employ and the goals they set in guiding their behaviour
Who was a founder of humanistic psychology?
Abraham Maslow - he began work in experimental psychology but moved to the study of personality and abnormal psychology
What did Maslow propose in terms of human motivations?
a pyramid of human motivations - at the base of the pyramid are physiological needs, above those are security, higher still are the needs for self-esteem and at the highest point the need to actualise self
Martin Seligman coined what term?
‘positive psychology’ to characterise the study of what was right with people rather than what was wrong
What were the possible levels of knowing another person according to McAdams?
Knowing at the level of the stranger (i.e. questionnaires) Intermediate knowing (i.e. self-report; ratings) Intimate knowing (i.e. clinical interview)
What are the methods for personality test construction?
content (logical/rational) method
theory approach
factor analysis
criterion referencing
What is a response-set?
a person’s tendency, either conscious or unconscious, to respond to items in a certain way, independent of the person’s true feeling about the item
What is personality?
‘a unique, relatively consistent pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviours’ - personality is not fixed but relatively consistent
What do trait theorists view personality as?
a set of attributes that are identified in an effort to locate threads of consistency in behavioural patterns
What is the lexical hypothesis?
basically, if there is a word for a trait, it must be a real trait
What does Hare’s Psychopathy Check-List explore?
important dimensions of psychopathic functioning that are relatively unrelated to the manifestations of criminal behaviour emphasised by the DSM criteria for antisocial PD
What does Wagner’s Hand Test help to predict?
self-aggressive or hetero-aggressive acting-out among potentially dangerous patients
What does the projective hypothesis hold?
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
Define projective method
a technique of personality assessment in which some judgment of the assessee’s personality is made on the basis of performance on a task that involves supplying some sort of structure to relatively unstructured or incomplete stimuli
What categories are used to score Rorschach protocols?
determinants
content
popularity
form
What is the spectrum hypothesis?
psychopathology represents maladaptively extreme versions of normal personality traits
What is the PAI?
Personality assessment inventory
What are the scales of the PAI?
Validity scales
treatment scales
interpersonal scales
What are the 3 ‘spectrums’ assessed by the PAI?
neurotic spectrum
psychotic spectrum
behaviour disorder or impulse control
