Personality Testing Notes
Personality Testing S 4
Dr. AIT ALI OUSAID, Department of Psychology, 2024/2025
Course Contents: Module: Personality Assessment
Conceptual issues in personality theory
The trait approach to personality
Methods of personality assessment
Structural models of personality
The Five-Factor Model of personality traits: consensus and controversy
Applied Personality Psychology
Plage Horaire
Mardi, 08H30 – 10H30
Mode d’enseignement: Présentiel
Definition of Terms
Assessment Qualifications
Assessment qualifications refer to the combination of knowledge, skills, abilities, training, experience, and practice credentials deemed desirable for using psychological tests and assessment materials (APA, 2001).
Assessment
Assessment is a complex activity integrating knowledge, clinical judgment, reliable collateral information (e.g., observation, semi-structured or structured interviews, third-party reports), and psychometric constructs with expertise in an area of professional practice or application.
Evaluation
Evaluation is a component and often the end product of the assessment process (APA, 2001), though the terms evaluation and assessment are often used interchangeably.
Psychological Tests
Psychological tests are defined as any psychometrically derived measurement instrument that assesses the psychological constructs in which a structured sample of an examinee’s behavior in a specified domain is obtained and subsequently quantified, scored, interpreted, and synthesized using a standardized process for evaluative conclusion or recommendation (AERA et al., 2014).
Personality Assessment
Personality psychology focuses on understanding individual variability in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Why is one person shy and another sociable?
Why is one person irritable and another even-tempered?
Why is one person reliable and another irresponsible? (Robins & Donnellan, 2008)
Conceptual Issues in Personality Theory
Examples:
Would you prefer a 2025, preowned electric car right now or a brand new electric car in 2 years?
Would you prefer a dh prize today or a dh one the year after your graduation?
Choice is based on many factors.
Are you a person who usually waits to carefully select your choices? Or, are you a person driven by your immediate calculations?
Debates in the Field
Nomothetic vs. Idiographic: Is personality a ‘nomothetic’ quality, described by general principles applying to all individuals? Or should personality be studied ‘idiographically’, focusing on the uniqueness of each individual?
Personality vs. Situation: Does behavior primarily depend on personality, or is it more powerfully shaped by situation and context?
Conscious vs. Unconscious: Is personality infused into conscious experience, so that people can explicitly describe their own traits? Or, as Freud argued, is much of personality unconscious, so that people lack insight into their own natures?
Brain Function vs. Social Learning: Is personality primarily a consequence of individual differences in brain functioning, or of social learning and culture?
DNA vs. Environment: Is personality mainly determined by the individual’s DNA, or by environmental factors?
Fixed vs. Changeable: Is personality fixed and stable throughout adulthood, or does the person generally change over time, and perhaps grow into maturity and wisdom?
Allport (1937)
Allport (1937) saw personality traits as possessing causal force. Traits correspond to ‘generalized neuropsychic structures’ that modulate the individual’s understanding of stimuli and choice of adaptive behaviors.
Gordon Allport's Definition of Personality
“The dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine [the individual’s] characteristic behavior and thought.”
The Trait Approach to Personality
A trait is formally defined as a relatively stable, enduring predisposition to behave in a certain way. A trait theory of personality, then, is one that focuses on identifying, describing, and measuring individual differences in behavioral predispositions (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2011).
Allport & Odbert (1936)
Personality researcher Gordon Allport combed through an English-language dictionary and discovered more than 4,000 words that described specific personality traits (Allport & Odbert, 1936).
Raymond Cattell
Pioneer trait theorist Raymond Cattell reduced Allport’s list of 4,000 terms to about 171 characteristics by eliminating terms that seemed to be redundant or uncommon. Cattell collected data on a large sample of people, who were rated on each of the 171 terms.
He then used a statistical technique called factor analysis to identify the traits that were most closely related to one another. After further research, Cattell eventually reduced his list to 16 key personality factors.
Cattell's 16 Personality Factors
Reserved, unsociable <---> Outgoing, sociable
Less intelligent, concrete <---> More intelligent, abstract
Affected by feelings <---> Emotionally stable
Submissive, humble <---> Dominant, assertive
Serious <---> Happy-go-lucky
Expedient <---> Conscientious
Timid <---> Venturesome
Tough-minded <---> Sensitive
Trusting <---> Suspicious
Practical <---> Imaginative
Forthright <---> Shrewd, calculating
Self-assured <---> Apprehensive
Conservative <---> Experimenting
Group-dependent <---> Self-sufficient
Undisciplined <---> Controlled
Relaxed <---> Tense
Cattell (1994) believed that these 16 personality factors represent the essential source traits of human personality. To measure these traits, Cattell developed the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire.
Hans Eysenck
An even simpler model of universal source traits was proposed by British psychologist Hans Eysenck (1916–1997). Eysenck’s methods were similar to Cattell’s, but his conception of personality includes just three dimensions.
Eysenck's Dimensions
Introversion-Extraversion: A person high on introversion might be quiet, solitary, and reserved, avoiding new experiences. A person high on extraversion would be outgoing and sociable, enjoying new experiences and stimulating environments.
Neuroticism-Emotional Stability: Neuroticism refers to a person’s predisposition to become emotionally upset, while stability reflects a person’s predisposition to be emotionally even.
Eysenck believed that by combining these two dimensions, people can be classified into four basic types: introverted-neurotic, introverted-stable, extraverted-neurotic, and extraverted-stable. Each basic type is associated with a different combination of surface traits.
In later research, Eysenck identified a third personality dimension, called psychoticism (Eysenck, 1990). A person high on this trait is antisocial, cold, hostile, and unconcerned about others. A person who is low on psychoticism is warm and caring toward others.
The Five-Factor Model
Today, the consensus among many trait researchers is that the essential building blocks of personality can be described in terms of five basic personality dimensions, sometimes called “the Big Five” (Funder, 2001). According to the five-factor model of personality, these five dimensions represent the structural organization of personality traits (McCrae & Costa, 2003).
The Big Five Factors
Neuroticism:
Low: Calm, even-tempered, unemotional, hardy
High: Worrying, temperamental, emotional, affectionate
Extraversion:
Low: Reserved, loner, quiet
High: Affectionate, joiner, talkative
Openness to Experience:
Low: Down-to-earth, conventional, uncreative, prefer routine
High: Imaginative, original, creative, prefer variety
Agreeableness:
Low: Antagonistic, ruthless, suspicious
High: Acquiescent, softhearted, trusting
Conscientiousness:
Low: Lazy, aimless, quitting
High: Hardworking, ambitious, persevering
Methods of Personality Assessment
Psychological Tests
Objective Measures of Personality
Self-Report Inventories
Self-report inventories typically use a paper-and-pencil format and take a direct, structured approach to assessing personality. People answer specific questions or rate themselves on various dimensions of behavior or psychological functioning.
Unlike projective tests, self-report inventories are objectively scored by comparing a person’s answers to standardized norms collected on large groups of people.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
The most widely used self-report inventory is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) (Butcher & Rouse, 1996). The MMPI consists of over 500 statements. The person responds to each statement with “True,” “False,” or “Cannot say.”
Other Inventories
California Personality Inventory and the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire are personality inventories that were designed to assess normal populations.
Big Five Factor Model
The two most important strengths of self-report inventories are their standardization and their use of established norms.
The reliability and validity of self-report inventories are far greater than those of projective tests. Thousands of studies have demonstrated that the MMPI, the CPI, and the 16PF provide accurate, consistent results that can be used to generally predict behavior (Anastasi & Urbina, 1997).
Self-report inventories also have their weaknesses.
People can still successfully fake responses and answer in socially desirable ways (Anastasi & Urbina, 1997; Holden, 2008).
Some people are prone to responding in a set way.
People are not always accurate judges of their own behavior, attitudes, or attributes. And some people defensively deny their true feelings, needs, and attitudes, even to themselves (Cousineau & Shedler, 2006).
Projective Tests
Like Seeing Things in the Clouds
Projective tests developed out of psychoanalytic approaches to personality. In the most commonly used projective tests, a person is presented with a vague image, such as an inkblot or an ambiguous scene, then asked to describe what she “sees” in the image.
Rorschach Inkblot Test
The first projective test was the famous Rorschach Inkblot Test, published by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in 1921 (Hertz, 1992).
The Rorschach test consists of 10 cards, 5 that show black-and-white inkblots and 5 that depict colored inkblots. One card at a time, the person describes whatever he sees in the inkblot. The examiner records the person’s responses verbatim and also observes his behavior, gestures, and reactions.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
In the TAT, the person looks at a series of cards, each depicting an ambiguous scene. The person is asked to create a story about the scene, including what the characters are feeling and how the story turns out.