PERSONALITY III:Assessment of Personality, Interview, Behavioral Assessment

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Introduction to Psychology PSY101

Lesson 33

PERSONALITY III

Assessment of Personality

1. Interview

2. Observation and behavioral assessment

3. Psychological tests

4. Self-report measures

5. Projective tests

Interview

· Interview refers to direct face-to-face encounter and interaction.

· Verbal as well as non-verbal information is available to the psychologist.

· Interviews are usually used to supplement information gathered through other sources.

· Skill of the interviewer is very important since the worth and utility of the interview depends on how well

he can draw relevant information from the interviewee.

Behavioral Assessment

·Direct observation measure for studying and describing personality characteristics.

Psychological Tests

·In order to objectively assess personality and behavior standard measures are devised. These measures are

called psychological tests.

·Psychological tests have to be valid and reliable. Besides they need to be based on norms.

Self- report measures

· Measures wherein the subjects are asked questions about a sample of their behavior. These are paper and

pencil tools or tests.

MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory)

·The most frequently used personality test. It was initially developed to identify people having specific sorts

of psychological difficulties. But it can predict a variety of other behaviors too.

·It can identify problems and tendencies like Depression, Hysteria, Paranoia, and Schizophrenia for

example.

·At the same time it has been used to predict if college students will marry within 10 years, and whether the

will get an advanced degree.

Projective Tests/ Techniques

Tests in which the subject is first shown an ambiguous stimulus and then he has to describe it or tell a story

about it.

The most famous and frequently used projective tests are:

i. Rorschach test, and

ii. TAT or Thematic Apperception TestRorschach test

The test consists of Inkblot presses. These have no definite shape.

The shapes are symmetrical, and are presented to the subject on separate cards.

Some cards are black and white and some colored.

Procedure of Rorschach administration

The subject is shown the stimulus card and then asked as to what the figures represent to them?

The responses are recorded.

Using a complex set of clinical judgments, the subjects are classified into different personality types.

The skill and the clinical judgment of the psychologist or the examiner are very important.

Thematic Apperception Test/ Tat

A series of ambiguous pictures is shown to the subject, who has to write a story. This story is

considered as a reflection of the subject's personality.

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The subject is asked to describe whatever is happening in it just like forming a story.

The subject has to tell what is happening in the scene, what the antecedent conditions were, who the

characters are, what are their thoughts and wishes, and what is going to happen next.

In short the subject describes the past, present and future along with the description of characters and their

thinking and motivation.

Intelligence

Have you ever consciously considered these questions?

Am I an intelligent person?

How intelligent am I?

How do we judge if someone is intelligent or not?

How can we measure the intelligence of a person?

There can be other questions too:

What is intelligence?

Is intelligence how one deals with others? or

Is intelligence how precisely we learn a new task? or

Is it how good we are in our studies? or

Is intelligence how well we can solve problems? or

Is it how we accurately judge people? or

Is intelligence all of this, or even more than all this?

Different people may understand intelligence differently.

If you think intelligence is all of this or even more than all this, then you are right.

Intelligence

According to Feldman "intelligence is the capacity to understand the world, think rationally,

and use resources effectively when faced with challenges"

Intelligence is an all-encompassing concept.

It is not restricted to just one aspect of one's life, or to just one faculty or ability.

Part of intelligence is inherited and part of it is learned.

Intelligence refers to the ability to adapt, to reason, to solve problems, and think in an abstract manner; it

also includes learning and experiencing new things and understanding from the past experiences.

Intelligence or the intellectual ability of a person is based upon a constant and ongoing interaction between

environmental factors and inherited potentials in order to have better understanding of how to `use' and

`apply' the potentials in a meaningful manner.

·Modern psychology considers both environment and heredity and their interaction to be

influential.

Development of Intelligence

Psychologists have attempted to uncover the factors operative in the development of intelligence; through

studies, it is now evident that intellectual development does not take place in a smooth and straight fashion;

it comes in intermittent bursts, and the pattern is different from person to person.

The physiology of intelligence

In early times, Greeks believed that the soul dwelt in the brain of the person and intellect is somewhere in

the lungs.

This belief prevailed even till the 18th century.

Recent research has revealed that the flow of blood in the lateral prefrontal cortex of the brain is most when

an individual indulges in solving some kind of puzzles.

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·Another finding revealed that, in the elderly people, the flow of blood is much less in the areas that are

concerned with alertness and memory as compared to the other areas.

·Levy's research revealed, after studying the two hemispheres of the brain, that the left hemisphere is most

active and involved in analytical functioning and language.

·Whereas, the right hemisphere is more involved while doing visual and spatial skills and it

tends to work more holistically.

Theories of Intelligence

·Theories or viewpoints on the understanding, explanation, and measurement of intelligence.

·These include psychometric approaches that are used to measure intelligence qualitatively and

quantitatively.

Francis Galton

Cousin of Charles Darwin.

He was born in the family of geniuses and he himself was a genius having an IQ of more than 200.

He was a geographer, meteorologist, tropical explorer, "founder of differential psychology", inventor of

fingerprint identification, pioneer of statistical correlation and regression, convinced of hereditarianism,

eugenicist, proto-genetics and a best selling author.

He gave the concept of " hereditary genius".

According to Francis Galton ("Hereditary Genius, 1869)__ "gifted individuals" tended to come from

families, which had other, gifted individuals. He went on to analyze biographical dictionaries and

encyclopedias, and became convinced that talent in science, the professions, and the arts, ran in families.

His was the first systematic attempt to measure intelligence by investigating the role of heredity and its

impact on intellectual abilities.

He further attempted to measure human trait quantitatively in order to determine the distribution of

heredity in it.

For this he used "word association test", and "mental imagery".

Galton argued that it would be "quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious

marriages during several consecutive generations".

Eugenics: "The study of the agencies under social control that may improve or repair the racial qualities of

future generations, either physically or mentally."

For Galton:

"What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly"

"Intelligence must be bred, not trained".

Such arguments appealed many and some people took this approach to extremes; this way of thinking had

drastic social consequences and was used to support apartheid policies, sterilization programs, and other

acts of withholding basic human rights from minority groups.

James McKeen Cattell

American psychologist who gave more importance to the mental processes.

First ever to use the term " mental test" for devices used to measure intelligence.

Developed tasks that were aimed to measure reaction time, word association test, keenness of

vision and weight discrimination.

These tests were proved to be a failure as they were not comprehensive and complex enough to

measure intelligence.

Psychometric Approaches: Spearman's Theory of Intelligence

British psychologist, Charles Spearman gave his theory in the early 1900s

His theory laid the foundations for the later theories.

He observed that people who scored high on one mental test also tend to score on the other as

well. The same applies to the low scorers.

He developed a statistical technique known as " factor analysis" on the basis of which he proposed

two factors that can account for the individual differences

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The first one he named as "g" factor or " general intelligence" and the other as "s" factor or " specific

intelligence"

According to Spearman, `g' factor can account for the general ability that is common in all people: as

observed from the mental tests.

Whereas `s' factor can account for the specific abilities that are different in different people; and also

different tests required particular abilities from people

Spearman and his followers gave more importance to the `g' factors and suggested that `g' measured the

`mental power' or ` mental energy'Thorndike's Theory: Social Intelligence

According to Thorndike:

" Intelligence and abilities are in the series".

He criticized Spearman on the fact that correlation, which he studied, was not enough to define and explain

intelligence.

He disagreed with Spearman on this, arguing that instead of only one `g' factor, there are a number of

factors that make and influence intelligence; factors that cannot generally be found out but that are

expressed in human actions.

He divided intelligence into three main divisions

i. Social intelligence; one's ability to understand and manage relationships

ii. Abstract intelligence; one's ability to understand and manage ideas e.g. Mathematics, algebra or abstract

concepts

iii. Concrete intelligence; one's ability to manage concrete and mechanical concepts and ideas e.g.

Economics, architecture, banking etc.

Thurstone's Theory of Intelligence: Primary Mental Abilities

American psychologist Louis L. Thurstone, believed that intelligence is not a general factor, but it is

composed of small independent factors or elements, which he named as " primary mental abilities".

For the identification and verification of these abilities, Thurstone and his wife, prepared a set of 56

tests, which they administered to 240 college students and analyzed the results through factor

analysis.

From the analysis, he identified seven primary mental abilities:

i. Verbal comprehension: An ability to understand and define words

ii. Word fluency: An ability or speed of thinking of verbal material such as rhyming, or naming

words in a given category

iii. Spatial visualization: Ability to recognize and manipulate objects or things in three dimensions

such as drafting and blue print reading

iv. Perceptual speed: An ability to quickly perceive and detect the visual details and differentiate

between the similarities and differences between designs

v. Reasoning/ inductive reasoning: A logical ability of deriving general ideas from specific

information

vi. Numbers/ Arithmetic ability: Capability of doing work easily on numbers such as doing

simple arithmetic tasks fast and rapidly

vii. Memory: An ability or capacity of remembering and retaining the material such as words,

letters and ability to recall and associate different words

R.B Cattell and J.L Horn's Theory; Crystalline and Fluid Intelligence

The theory was given by American psychologists Raymond Cattell and John Horn in 1960s, in which they

applied different forms of factor analysis and came up with two kinds of intelligence:

I. Crystalline intelligence ( gc )

II. Fluid intelligence (gf)

Although these forms of intelligence are conceptually different, these are correlated forms of intelligence

i. Crystalline intelligence is the capability of using information that has been learnt: this type of

intelligence is largely influenced by education and culture. It keeps on increasing with the learning

experiences of a person; such as vocabulary or knowledge.

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ii. Fluid intelligence is largely influenced by biological factors; it is the capability of solving novel

problems which depends more on the neurological development of a person such as reasoning and

memory, which decline with age

Guilford's theory of the Structure of Intellect (SOI)It is a model of intelligence according to which

intelligence is the result of the interaction of operations, contents and products

He believed that intelligence is a much more complex phenomenon than one thinks of it; it is difficult to

define it as a `g' factor or in terms of `primary mental abilities'

Developed a cube- shape model of intelligence, which is made up of 120 separate factors, known as "the

structure of intellect". Guilford recently expanded his model and it now includes 180 factors.

The different components of intelligence are:

Operations: it is the potential of different ways of thinking including:

· Evaluation

· Convergent thinkingDivergent thinking

· Memory retention

· Memory recording

· Cognition

Contents: A potential of what we think about something. It includes;

· Visual

· Symbolic

· Semantic

· BehavioralProducts: The results obtained by applying certain operations to certain contents, or the

ability of thinking in a certain manner about a certain thing.

It includes:

· Units

· ClassesRelations

· SystemsTransformation

· Implication

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