Chapter 8: Origins of Personality Testing (notes)

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1. Personality tests seek to measure one or more of the following: personality traits, dynamic motivation, personal adjustment, psychiatric symptomatology, social skills, and attitudinal characteristics

2. Each person is consistent to some extent; we have coherent traits and action patterns that arise repeatedly - second each person is distinctive to some extent; behavioral differences exist between individuals

3. Id = a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement", entirely unconscious;; Ego = conscious self;; Super ego = synonymous with conscience and compromises the societal standards of right and wrong

4. Defense mechanisms have three characteristics: 1. Their exclusive purpose is to help the ego reduce anxiety created by the conflicting demands of id, ego, and super ego and external reality, 2. They operate unconsciously, 3. They distort our inner and outer reality

5. Mature mechanisms of defense appear to the beholder as convenient virtues - an example is certain forms of humor that do not distort reality but can ease the burden of matters too terrible to be borne

6. Type-A behavior patterns: 1. Insecurity of status, 2. Hyperaggressiveness, 3. Free-floating hostility, 4. Sense of time urgency (hurry sickness)

1 = No matter how successful, they often compare themselves to other individuals, 2 = a desire to dominate others and damage their self esteem, 3 = Finding too many things to get upset about, 4 = speeding up daily activities and doing many things at once

Type A behavior patients were at greatly increased risk of coronary disease and heart attack

7. Phenomenological theories share a common focus on the person's subjective experience, personal worldview, and self-concept as the major wellsprings of behavior

8. The Q-TECHNIQUE is a procedure for studying changes in the self-concept, a key element in Roger's self theory; AKA Q-SORT it is especially useful for studying changes in self-concept

9. Behaviorists believe that behaviors that make up personality are learned

10. Behavioral theorists disagree mainly on the role that cognitions play in determining behavior

11. A problem with traits is their low predictive validity - Mischel noted trait scales provided coefficients with an upper limit of .3; he coined the term personality coefficient to describe how low it was

12. Many concede that five main trait for personality provide a good way to look at it overall = 1. Neuroticism, 2. Openness, 3. Extraversion, 4. Agreeableness, 5. Contientiousness

13. The PROJECTIVE HYPOTHESIS is the assumption that personal interpretations of ambiguous stimuli must necessarily reflect the unconscious needs, motives, and conflicts of the examinee

14. Lindzey divided projectives into five categories: 1. Associations to inkblots or words, 2. Construction of stories or sequences, 3. Completions of sentences or stories, 4. Arrangement/selection of pictures or verbal choices, 5. Expression with drawings or play

15. I administering the Rorschach, the examiner sits on the examinee's side to minimize body language communication

16. In the COMPLETED SENTENCE TASK the examiner assumes that the underlying motivations, fears, etc of the participant are reflected in the responses - there are multiple opportunities to obtain various information about different topics

17. The ROSENZWEIG PICTURE FRUSTRATION STUDY requires the examinee to produce a verbal response to highly structured verbal-pictoral stimuli - the PF study comes in three forms: child, ado, and adult

18. The interscorer reliability of the PF study is reportedly in the range of .8-.85 for well-trained, conscientious examiners - test retest is stability of the instrument is somewhere between fair and marginal;; more appropriate for research than individual assessment

19. There was no single preferred mode of administration, no single preferred system of scoring, and no single preferred method of interpretation - a predicament that still endures today

20. Many clinicians do not use projective methods as tests at all but as auxiliary approaches to the clinical interview

Chapter 8: Origins of Personality Testing