A test that requires the interpretation of ambiguous images is a(n) personality test.

Projective Tests

Projective tests are commonly used in the measurement of personality. In a projective test, respondents must interpret or describe an ambiguous stimulus (as in a Rorschach inkblot or a Thematic Apperception Test photo), or come up with a drawing in response to a minimal prompt (“Draw a person”), or say a word in response to a stimulus word (as in Jung's Word Association Test). Because of the substantial interpretation required on the part of the scorer, this type of test tends to be fairly low in reliability.

Projective techniques

Projective tests, such as the Rorschach inkblot method, the thematic apperception test (TAT), the draw-a-person or draw-a-family test, and some sentence completion tests, are characterized by ambiguity in the test stimuli or test instructions. The test administrator assures the person that there are no correct or incorrect responses; the person taking the test is encouraged to just say whatever comes to mind in response to the stimulus. An assumption of these tests is that they tap aspects of psychological characteristics and personality that are not fully conscious. In responding to the stimuli, the person reveals their feelings attitudes, impulses, conflicts, and wishes. The term “projective” is a direct link to the psychoanalytic view that the unconscious is operating to influence behavior. Unconscious content is projected onto the stimulus. Interpretation of the responses includes information about the content of the person’s reaction to the stimulus, the parts of the stimulus that are salient in the person’s responses, and the person’s approach to the task (e.g., are they resistant to offering any story or are they elaborate in their reply). When used in a battery of tests, themes that appear across tests such as preoccupation with angry feelings or rejection or abuse can help inform the clinical diagnosis. Projective tests have been used effectively with adolescents especially when the administrator is sensitive to developmental norms as he or she approaches interpretation (Jain, Singh, Kar, Weiner, & Kuehnle, 2017; Silverman, 1990).

Summary

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MITT is a projective test where the suspect is asked to make up stories concerning five presented pictures.

MITT only takes a few minutes to administer and tends to reduce the anxiety of the innocent and increase the anxiety of the deceptive.

MITT allows for the identification of the deceptive by their reluctance to talk about the relevant issue, their downbeat stories, their inability to make up endings, and their illogical presentations.

MITT also gives the interviewer information that can be used during an interrogation to facilitate admissions and confessions.

Projective Tests

In contrast to the previously described tests, projective measures are not primarily based on norm-referenced empiric research, but rather on a hypothesis that an individual will “project” his or her feelings, thoughts, needs, attitudes, and conflicts onto an ambiguous stimulus. Some popular projective measures include Rorschach inkblot technique, in which individuals tell what they see in a standard inkblot; thematic apperception tests, in which children make up stories about standard pictures illustrating people interacting; incomplete sentences, in which children complete brief standard sentence fragments covering latent themes; and drawing techniques, in which children are asked to draw a person, family members, or a house, tree, and person together. These techniques all have the advantage of being less threatening than direct questioning and more likely to engage otherwise reticent children. These techniques include specific guidelines for administration and directives for coding data and comparing with responses from normative and clinical populations. They rely on the experience and interpretative skill of the clinician and do not meet the psychometric standards of other instruments. For these reasons, these approaches should not be used to make clinical decisions without other collaborating evidence from interviews and more objective measures.

4.01.5.4.1 Personality and Psychopathology

Although performance-based tests of personality and psychopathology are still referred to as “projective” tests by some, most now have moved away from the use of the term “projective” (Meyer and Kurtz, 2006). These techniques, such as the Rorschach Inkblot Method (Rorschach, 1942) and the Thematic Apperception Test (Murray, 1943), are unstructured, ambiguous, and reflect omnibus assessment of a range of psychological characteristics. Although certain administration and scoring systems allow for the quantification of response scoring, extensive training is typically required (Meyer and Mihura, 2020). There has been substantial research supporting the validity of reliably of numerous scored Rorschach indices (e.g., Mihura et al., 2013, 2018); however, some performance-based tests unfortunately still fail to meet conventional thresholds of empirically based assessments as outlined earlier (e.g., Lilienfeld et al., 2001). Possible obstacles to the clinical utility of these tests include low validity coefficients of the instruments, the influence of situational factors on client's responses, and clinician subjectivity in scoring and interpreting responses. Thus, the lack of objectivity in scoring and the paucity of representative normative data on many performance-based tests, in our opinion, limit their use with an adult clinical population. Their use is also limited because they may require more time to administer, score, and interpret than many self-report inventories, and the assessment procedure is usually under strict time constraints. However, we also note that experts on these methods, a group to whom we do not belong, are far more sanguine in their overall evaluations across methods (e.g., Meyer and Mihura, 2020). We encourage the reader to carefully consider Krishnamurthy et al. (2022) detailed review of (typical) performance-based techniques.

Measuring implicit personality traits

There are several different forms of indirect measures (De Houwer, 2006), but projective tests (e.g., revised versions of the Rorschach test), affective priming tasks, and implicit association tasks (IATs; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz., 1998) are probably among the most prominent ones. The remainder of this chapter will focus on IATs because of their favorable psychometric properties (e.g., internal consistencies of 0.70–0.90; Hofmann, Gawronski, Gschwendner, Le, & Schmitt, 2005; Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007; Schmukle & Egloff, 2004; Schnabel, Asendorpf, & Greenwald, 2008b; Schnabel, Asendorpf, & Greenwald, 2008c) and good applications to personality constructs, such as anxiety, shyness, self-esteem, and the Big Five (Asendorpf, Banse, & Mücke, 2002; Back et al., 2009; Schmukle, Back, & Egloff, 2008). Nonetheless, it is not always easy to discern what exactly IATs tell us (for common misconceptions, see Gawronski, LeBel, & Peters, 2007), and there have also been critiques of persistent conceptual and methodological issues with IATs (e.g., Fiedler, Mess, & Bluemke, 2006). Regardless, IATs offer a good way of measuring more automatic aspects of personality (Back et al., 2009), and it has been argued that “implicit” is best understood in terms of “automatic” (De Houwer, 2006; De Houwer & Moors, 2007). De Houwer et al. (2009, p. 347) summarize the key idea behind IATs (for details on procedures and scoring methods, especially if self-concepts are concerned, see Schnabel et al. 2008a, 2008b, 2008c):

During a typical IAT, participants see stimuli that belong to one of four categories and are asked to categorize each stimulus by pressing one of two keys. Two of the four categories are assigned to the first key, and the two other categories are assigned to the second key. The core idea underlying the IAT is that categorization performance should be a function of the degree to which categories that are assigned to the same key are associated in memory. Hence, by examining which combinations of categories result in the best categorization performance, one should be able to infer which categories are more closely associated in memory.

To apply IATs to personality development, two questions become immediately important. First, to what extent do IAT measures and self-reports of supposedly the same construct tap the same latent space (convergent construct validity)? If implicit and explicit assessments of traits measure essentially “the same thing,” then examinations of the stability and change of implicit personality traits might yield similar findings to what we already know from self-reports. Second, how stable are IAT scores across time (retest reliability and stability)? If implicit assessments of traits do not show substantial retest correlations, then erroneous measurement error and/or a lack of stability of implicit traits may be the culprits. The next paragraphs review extant findings on convergent validity and retest associations of IAT scores.

Abstract

I started my career as a clinical psychologist with an interest in personality assessment. But a loss of faith in psychoanalytic theory, projective tests, and clinical case-studies in general, led to a shift in my interests to personality research. Subsequent jobs at research institutes and universities allowed me to indulge in science. I developed the trait-state concept and its application in tests for affect measurement. For 10 years I did experimental work in the field of sensory deprivation. The sensation seeking idea and tests evolved from this work but soon expanded to many other areas. Research in the biological basis of sensation seeking started with genetic and psychophysiological research, but research conducted in other laboratories also pointed to a psychopharmacological basis for the trait. Over the last several decades I have formulated a psychobiological model for personality. I have used factor analysis and the biosocial model to develop an “alternative-five” factorial trait structure for personality.

Clinical Ratings and Self-Report Approaches

Measuring language has been essential for understanding psychosis since the early conceptualisations of psychosis in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology. For example, disturbances in the ability to express logical and semantically coherent ideas (i.e. thought disorder, loose associations) and emotion through speech (i.e. blunted affect) were included in some of the first descriptions of schizophrenia (Bleuler, 1950; Kraepelin, 1919). Language remains central to the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, as components of language are included both in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems-11 (World Health Organization, 2018). Also, in standard medical note taking from clinical evaluations, it is important to describe patients’ language usage with a nomenclature that is as precise and objective as possible. Indeed, well-written clinical notes have been, and remain, a core method to document and communicate language aberrations in patients.

Prior to the 1970s, the primary means of evaluating language in clinical settings mainly involved clinician impression, linguistic analysis of language procured from projective tests, and some clinician-based rating scales (Cancro, 1969; Harrow & Quinlan, 1985). Beginning in the 1970s, clinical rating scales and semi-structured clinical interviews became more commonplace. Psychometric evaluation of these scales revealed that with appropriate training and monitoring, they demonstrate adequate interrater reliability and face, concurrent, and predictive validity for a number of critical clinical functions. Although it is unclear to what degree these ratings were and are actually employed in clinical practice, they have become the ‘gold standard’ for formally evaluating language within the context of psychosis. Examples include the Scale for the Assessment of Thought, Language, and Communication (TLC), a clinical rating system for operationalising and quantifying various aspects of speech (Andreasen, 1986), the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS; Andreasen, 1984), the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS; Andreasen, 1983), the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale for schizophrenia (PANSS; Kay, Fiszbein, & Opler, 1987), and the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS; Lukoff, Liberman, & Nuechterlein, 1986). These tools generally have a scope wider than language assessment and aim for a more general description of psychiatric state/status (e.g. the BPRS and PANSS). In these cases, the language component may comprise only part of a compound score. Even so, the inclusion of a language component in these assessments highlights the importance of language aberrations, and the importance of recording such findings in mental status and general psychiatric assessments.

Reliable and accurate documentation of language usage is a core skill for clinicians.

Generally speaking, clinical rating scales involve a clinician integrating information from various behavioural, self-report, historical, and collateral sources. An ordinal-based scoring rubric, generally comprised between four and seven points, is used to help quantify the level of language dysfunction. The time scale of these measures varies, as they can involve retrospective evaluation of language during an epoch of weeks or focus on evaluating language solely observed during a brief interview. A common feature, and often notable challenge, for these rating scale systems involves paring down the complex and dynamic information present in various aspects of language, to a single ordinal-based value. Clinical rating scales generally require considerable time and personnel resources to ensure reliable administration. The importance of clinical rating scales cannot be understated, as they have provided tools for defining, organising, and quantifying language dysfunctions in both clinical treatment and research settings (Andreasen, 1986; see McKenna & Oh, 2005 for a historical review). Beyond their use for diagnosis, clinical rating scales have allowed for tracking language functions over time. This function has been critical to a wide range of clinical and research applications, such as in forensic and clinical decision making, pharmaceutical, psychosocial development and efficacy studies, and for understanding neurodevelopmental trajectories of psychosis over time.

Self-report measures of language functions have also been employed to understand various aspects of the psychosis-spectrum. Although self-report scales are limited to one source of information, namely an individual's self-perception, this type of measure is attractive in that it can be administered to large populations and scored without the need for trained experts. They can also be administered repeatedly to individual patients, and hence, reflect a potentially efficient means of tracking them over time. An example of a self-report measure is the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ), which (amongst other things) asks individuals to extent to which they ‘wander off topic’ and ‘use words in unusual ways’ (Raine, 1991). Widely used and validated multidimensional psychopathology measures, such as the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) and the various versions of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventories (MMPI-2, MMPI-2-RF), contain subscales and items broadly measuring positive and disorganised symptoms (Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008; Morey, 1991; Tellegen & Ben-Porath, 2011). Even shorter self-report questionnaires, such as the Prodromal Questionnaire—Brief version (PQ-B), assess disorganised speech (Loewy, Pearson, Vinogradov, Bearden, & Cannon, 2011). While an important complement to language assessment in psychosis, the use of self-report measures should be balanced in light of the potential self-report based confounds and biases (see Cohen & Elvevåg, 2014; Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003).

Typical performance tests

Typical performance tests measure participants’ emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. These tests commonly incorporate interval scales and include personality tests, interests questionnaires, and attitude tests.

Personality tests are divided into two groups: personality questionnaires and projective tests (performance measures). Personality tests usually measure an individuals’ mood, emotions, and thoughts, as well as assessing more specific personality traits, such as aggression, anxiety, extroversion, and sensitivity, toward the environment.

Similar to the ability tests and aptitude tests, personality tests often incorporate various types of items or questions. The most distinctive difference between personality tests is that between items used in objective personality tests and items used in projective tests. In most projective tests (particularly tests containing images) the term “item” is substituted with the term “stimulus.”

In objective personality tests (commonly referred to as “self-report” questionnaires) each question is accompanied by a series of possible responses, as is the case with multiple-choice questions used in ability tests. Common types of items used in self-report questionnaires are displayed in Table 1.5.

Table 1.5. Possible Answers for Multiple-Choice Questions

Attitude tests are used to retrieve information regarding participants’ beliefs and opinions. Attitudes refer to the ways in which one may respond, whether it be positively or negatively, toward a certain subject, population, or situation. Similarly to other aspects of personality, attitudes cannot be measured with great precision. Additionally, as is the case with self-report questionnaires, attitude tests contain true-or-false items or interval-scaled responses.

Interests questionnaires, as the term itself indicates, provide a more systematic insight into individuals’ interests. These questionnaires can provide support for individuals’ professional ambitions, can be useful in providing information regarding career options, or can provide a framework for understanding career interests and the job market (Holland, 1986). Similarly to attitude tests, interests questionnaires contain true-or-false items or interval-scaled responses.