Lecture 10: Personality Assessment

What does objective personality assessment involve?

Administration of standard set of questions or statements with fixed set of potential responses

Is objective or projective personality assessment generally associated with higher standardization reliability, validity, and utility?

Objective

What does projective personality assessment involve?

Administration of unstructured or ambiguous stimuli with open-ended responses

What are responses to projective personality assessment assumed to reflect?

Client's projection of unconscious thoughts/urges/experiences onto stimuli

Is objective or projective personality assessment generally associated with more complex and expensive administration and scoring?

Projective

What is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-3 (MMPI-3)?

Widely used and psychometrically sound self-report inventory of personality and psychopathology

Is the AUDIT, VRAG, SCID-5, or MMPI-3 widely used to assess/predict clinical phenomena in clinical, legal, penal, work, and educational contexts?

MMPI-3

What is the Empirical Approach to test construction?

Items are included only if responses discriminate between clinical and control groups

Does the Empirical or Theoretical Approach to test construction have low content validity?

Empirical

What is the Theoretical (Content Validity) Approach to test construction?

Included items are developed to tap the concept of interest

Which version of the MMPI included items that were developed using the Theoretical (Content Validity) Approach to test construction?

Second and Third

What do the Validity Scales on the MMPI-3 assess?

Potential threats to the interpretability of responses to the MMPI-3

What do the Higher-Order Scales on the MMPI-3 assess?

Broad areas of three areas of psychopathology

What are the three Higher-Order Scales on the MMPI-3?

Emotional/Internalizing Dysfunction, Thought Dysfunction, and Behavioral/Externalizing Dysfunction

What do the Restructured Clinical Scales on the MMPI-3 assess?

Empirically-derived scales measuring various dimensions of psychopathology

What do the Specific Problems Scales on the MMPI-3 assess?

Fine-grained specific problem areas of mental health that an individual may be experiencing

What do the Personality Psychopathology Five Scales (PSY-5) on the MMPI-3 assess.

Five dimensional personality traits associated with nonadaptive functioning and psychopathology

What is a T-Score?

A standardized score with a mean of 50 based on a normative sample

A T-Score is an example of what kind of assessment?

Norm-referenced assessment

What is the F scale on the MMPI-3?

Validity scale that assess faking bad (exaggerating problems)

What is the L scale on the MMPI-3?

Validity scale that assesses faking good (claiming an unusual number of uncommon virtues)

What is the K scale on the MMPI-3?

Validity scale that assesses denial of psychological problems

Might a parent in a custody dispute who desperately wants to obtain full custody show a high L or F score on the MMPI-3?

L score

Might someone who desperately wants to be deemed incompetent to stand trial show a high L or F score on the MMPI-3?

F score

Would you expect someone who is unaware of their psychological difficulties to show a high F, L, or K score on the MMPI-3?

K score

What is malingering?

Feigning (faking) or exaggerating symptoms for external gain

Can the MMPI-3 Validity Scales generally detect malingering?

Yes

Does the MMPI-3 assess normative/normal individual differences in personality?

No

Are the reliability, concurrent, and predictive validity of the MMPI-3 high or low?

High