Personality: an individual’s unique constellation of psychological traits that is relatively stable over time
Personality Assessment: 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 Trait: “any distinguishable, relatively enduring way in which one individual varies from another”
Personality Type: a constellation of traits that is similar in pattern to 1 identified category of personality within a taxonomy of personalities
- John Holland argued that most people can be categorized as 1 of the 6 personality types
- Conventional: data driven, analytical, detail-oriented
- biostatistician, data administrator
- Realistic: practical, scientific, methodological
- public health veterinarian or dentists
- Investigative: observe, analyze, evaluate
- epidemiologist, environmental health specialist, health services researcher
- Enterprising: influence, persuade, perform
- public health policymaker and planner
- Social: enlighten, inform, train
- health educator, health promotion specialist
- Artistic: innovative, intuitive, creative
- public health communications specialist
- Cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Roseman developed a 2 category personality typology
- Type A Personality: a personality type characterized by competitiveness, haste, restlessness, impatience, feelings of being time-pressured, and strong needs for achievement and dominance
- Type B Personality: a personality type that is completely opposite of type A personality, characterizes as being mellow or laid-back
Personality Profile: a narrative description of the extent to which a person has demonstrated certain personality traits, states, or types
- Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): frequently discussed in terms of the patterns of scores that emerge, referred to as a profile
- MMPI and MMPI-2
- introduced several innovations in the construction of structured personality traits
- true-false self-report questionnaire; Statements are typically of the self-reference type such as “I like good food” and “I never have trouble falling sleep.” The heart of the test consists of its validity, clinical, and content scales.
- Validity Scale: provide information about the person’s approach to testing, such as whether an attempt was made either to “fake bad” by endorsing more items of pathological content than any person’s actual problems could justify or to “fake good” by avoiding pathological items
- Clinical Scale: designed to identify psychological disorders such as depression and schizophrenia
- Content Scale: consist of groups of items that are empirically related to a specific content area
- the anger scale contains references to irritability, hotheadedness, and other symptoms of anger or control problems
- Purpose: to assist in distinguishing normal from abnormal groups
- designed to aid in the diagnosis or assessment of the major psychiatric or psychological disorders
- Masculinity-Femininity (MF) Scale: contained items differentially endorsed by men and women
- Social-Introversion (Si) Scale: measures introversion and extraversion
- Validity Scales: measure test-taking attitudes and to assess whether the subject took a normal, honest approach to the test
Validity Scales
- L Scale (Lie Scale): designed to detect individuals who attempted to present themselves in an overly favorable way
- K Scale: attempts to locate those items that distinguished normal from abnormal groups when both groups produced a normal test pattern
- F Scale (Infrequency Scale): designed to detect individuals who attempt to fake bad, consists of those items endorsed by less than 10% of the control group
Restandardization: MMPI-2
Additional Validity Scales
- Variable Response Inconsistency Scale (VRIN): attempts to evaluate random responding
- True Response Inconsistency Scale (TRIN): attempts to measure acquiescence -- the tendency to agree or mark “true” regardless of content
- 15 Content Scales: HEA (health concerns), TP (hard-driving, irritable, impatient Type A Personality), FAM (family problems), WRK (work interference)