Psychological testing and assessment (9th edition)
Cohen & Swerdlik (2018)
Chapter 11
Personality assessment: An overview

For laypeople: personality refers to components of an individual’s makeup that can elicit positive or negative reactions from others.

Personality and personality assessment

Personality

Dozens of different definitions of personality exist in the psychology literature.
Personality: an individual’s unique constellation of psychological traits that is relatively stable over time.

Personality assessment

Personality assessment: the measurement and evaluation of psychological traits, values, interests, attitudes, worldview, acculturation, sense of humour, cognitive and behavioural styles, and/or related individual characteristics.

Traits, types and states

Personality traits

There is no consensus regarding the definition of trait.
This book views psychological traits as attributions made in an effort to identify threads of consistency in behavioural patterns.
Personality trait: any distinguishable, relatively enduring way in which one individual varies from another.
The context is important in applying trait terms to behaviour.

• A behaviour present in one context may be labelled with one trait term, but the same behaviour exhibited in another context with another trait term.

A measure of behaviour in a particular context may be obtained using varied tools of psychological assessment.
Exactly how a particular trait manifests itself is, at least to some extent, dependent on the situation.

Personality types

Personality type: a constellation of traits that is similar in pattern to one identified category of personality within a taxonomy of personalities.
Whereas traits are frequently discussed as if they were characteristics possessed by an individual, types are more clearly descriptions of people.
It is more far-reaching.

The personality typology that has attracted the most attention from researchers and practitioners is associated with scores on a test called the MMPI.
Data from the administration of these tests are frequently discussed in terms of the patterns of scores that emerge on the sub-tests.
This pattern is referred to as a profile.
Profile: 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 assessement.
Personality profile: profile of which the typical the targeted characteristics are traits, states, or types.

Personality states

The word state has been used in at least two distinctly different ways in the personality assessment literature

• An inferred psychodynamic disposition designed to convey the dynamic quality of id, ego and superego in perpetual conflict
• The transitory exhibition of some personality trait.
  A relatively temporary predisposition.

Measuring personality states amounts, in essence, to a search for and an assessment of the strenght of traits that are