Personality Assessment

• He defined personality as “the most adequate conceptualization of a person’s behavior in all its detail.”

  McClelland
• It is our conviction that no substantive definition of personality can be

  applied with any generality” and “Personality is defined by the particular empirical concepts which are a part of the theory of personality employed by the observer

  Hall and Lindzey
• An individual’s unique constellation of psychological traits that is relatively stable over time.

  Personality
• The measurement and evaluation of psychological traits, states, values, interests, attitudes, worldview, acculturation, sense of humor, cognitive and behavioral styles, and/or related individual characteristics.

  Personality assessment
• A trait is a “generalized and focalized neuropsychic system (peculiar to the individual) with the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide consistent (equivalent) forms of adaptive and expressive behavior

  Allport
• “Learning causes submicroscopic structural changes in the brain, probably in the organization of its biochemical substance”


  Robert Holt
• Any distinguishable, relatively enduring way in which one individual varies from another

  Personality Trait
• These researchers concluded that trait consistency increases in a steplike pattern until one is 50 to 59 years old, at which time such consistency peaks

  Robert and DelVecchio
• Constellation of traits that is similar in pattern to one identified category of personality within a taxonomy of personalities

  Personality type
• Artistic, Enterprising, Investigative, Social, Realistic, or Conventional

  John Holland
• Characterized by competitiveness, haste, restlessness, impatience, feelings of being time-pressured, and strong needs for achievement and dominance

  Type A Personality
• Opposite of the Type A’s traits: mellow or laid-back.

  Type B Personality
• This has been used to type respondents as Type A or Type B personalities


  Jenkins Activity Survey
• A narrative description, graph, table, or other representation of the extent to which a person has demonstrated certain targeted characteristics as a result of the administration or application of tools of assessment

  Profile
• The targeted characteristics are typically traits, states, or types.


  Personality profile
• Refers to the interpretation of patterns of scores on a test or test battery.


  Profile analysis
• Indicative of a relatively temporary predisposition

  State
• Process wherein information about assessees is supplied by the assessees themselves.

  Self-report
• Defined as one’s attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and related thoughts about

  oneself

  Self-concept
• An instrument designed to yield information relevant to how an individual sees him- or herself with regard to selected psychological variables.


  Self-concept measure
• Respondents are asked to compare themselves to other people on

  variables such as looks, knowledge, and the ability to tell jokes.

  Beck Self Concept Test
• The degree to which a person has different self-concepts in different roles

  Self-concept differentiation
• "People with low levels of self-concept differentiation tend to be healthier psychologically, perhaps because of their more unified and coherent sense of self."

  Donahue
• Example of a kind of standardized interview of a child’s parent


  Personality Inventory for Children (PIC)
• Leniency error or generosity error and severity error


  Generalized biases to rate
• General tendency to rate everyone near the midpoint of a rating scale


  Error of central tendency
• Variety of favorable response bias

  Halo effect
• The system is an approach to the assessment of children and adolescents that incorporates cognitive and physical assessments of the subject, self-report of the subject, and ratings by parents and teachers.

  Multiaxial Empirically Based Assessment system
• Refers to a tendency to respond to a test item or interview question in some characteristic manner regardless of the content of the item or question

  Response style
• A term used to describe the attempt to manipulate others’ impressions through “the selective exposure of some information (it may be false information) coupled with suppression of [other] information”


  Impression management
• A person’s perception about the source of things that happen to him or her

  Locus of control
• People who see themselves as largely responsible for what happens to them are said to have 


  Internal locus of control
• People who are prone to attribute what happens to them to external factors (such as fate or the actions of others) are said to have

  External locus of control
• Consists of cartoonlike pictures of a dog named Blacky in various situations, and each image is designed to elicit fantasies associated with various psychoanalytic themes.

  Blacky picture test
• The epitome of an atheoretical, ‘dust bowl empiricism’ approach to the development of a tool to measure personality traits

  MMPI
• Learn something about the assessee by handwriting analysis

  Graphology
• Defined as aspects of the focus of exploration such as the time frame (the past, the present, or the future) as well as other contextual issues that involve people, places, and events

  Frame of reference
• An assessment technique in which the task is to sort a group of statements, usually in perceived rank order ranging from most descriptive to least descriptive.

  Q sort technique
• Characterized by efforts to learn how a limited number of personality traits can be applied to all people.


  Nomothetic approach
• Characterized by efforts to learn about each individual’s unique constellation of personality traits, with no attempt to characterize each person according to any particular set of traits.

  Idiographic approach