Examination Three Personality Assessment 1 Name three informal methods that ordinary people often use to assess personality Which one seems to be most popular 4 points 1 Ask people to describe their own personalities 2 Collect secondhand personality information 3 Observe people and draw our own conclusions about their personalities Observing people and drawing our own conclusions seem to be most popular 2 When people describe themselves they often focus on their positive qualities and ignore their negative ones What is this behavior called and what motive causes it to occur When people try to deceive us in this way we are unlikely to catch them at it Why 4 points This behavior is called impression management The motive is social desirability We pay too much attention to trivial cues and ignore the cues that really matter 3 What is the transparency effect Is it consistent or inconsistent with the fact that our efforts to deceive others are usually successful 2 points 4 According to Kelley causal attributions for the behavior of others are based on three kinds of information Name them Select one of them and describe it briefly 4 points Consensus other people in the same situation either behave similarly high consensus or behave differently low consensus Distinctiveness Consistency 5 People sometimes make misattributions Which one occurs most often Describe it briefly Name another type of misattribution that many people make 3 points The fundamental attribution error occurs most often because people make too many internal attributions instead of external attributions Another misattribution is the defensive attribution 6 Reliability can be assessed in three ways Name them then describe one of them briefly In general how large should the reliability coefficient be for a good test 5 points Reliability can be assessed through stability over time internal consistency and inter rater agreement Stability over time means that there is a consistency of results over a period of time through retesting Reliability coefficients above 0 80 are acceptable as a good test 7 Personality tests can have face content criterion and construct validity One way to ensure that a test has criterion validity is to use criterion keying during test construction Describe criterion keying Name a famous personality test that was constructed in this way 4 points Criterion keying is when two groups of people one high and the other low on the key construct are compared The two groups of people are asked to respond to a large number of potential test items The items that discriminate between two groups are kept Rorschach Inkblot Test is a famous personality test that was constructed in this way 8 Construct validity is the best kind to have but the hardest to prove What is construct validity Proof of construct validity can be obtained through convergent and discriminant validation research For each type of research describe a what data are needed and b what pattern of results is desired 5 points Construct validity means does the test measure what it should be measuring and nothing else Convergent validation needs data from your test and other tests that measure the same thing as yours They should be positively correlated among test scores Divergent validation needs data from your test and other tests that measure things different than yours measures There should be correlations near zero among test scores 9 Some psychoanalytic psychologists try to assess personality by analyzing a person s dreams One barrier to such analyses is dreamwork What is dreamwork Why does it occur Name two other barriers to dream analysis 4 points Dreamwork is what the ego does to disguise the latent content of dreams into a manifest content that is less disturbing It occurs to guard sleep Repress forget dreams and secondary elaboration 10 Dreams are associated with REM sleep What is REM sleep What percentage of people are dreamers according to sleep researchers 2 points REM sleep stands for rapid eye movement and it is a stage of sleep characterized by rapid and random movement of the eyes 100 of people are dreamers 11 When people take the Rorschach Inkblot test how many times do they look through the cards and what question s are they asked each time Aside from the content of a person s responses name three other elements that a psychologist might consider while scoring the test 5 points People look through the cards twice and they are asked First What do you see Second where are those objects and how did you find them Location determinants and originality 12 When someone begins to reveal sensitive thoughts and feelings to another person the listener s reactions to those revelations are very important List those reactions in order starting with the one most likely to encourage further self disclosure and ending with the one most likely to discourage further self disclosure 6 points Reflection Reassurance Probing Interpretation Evaluation 13 Describe briefly the Q sort test What materials are used in the test How is the test administered and scored How are test scores computed and interpreted 6 points People are asked to read through 100 cards each containing a self descriptive statement Each card is placed into one of eleven stacks with limits on how many cards can go into each stack Cards are sorted first for how well they describe the real self and then again for how well they describe the ideal self Each card thus has two scores one is the real self and the other for the ideal self sort The two sets of scores are correlated with one another more positive correlations mean greater levels of congruence 14 Response sets can produce invalid scores on personality tests Name and describe a common response set What three tactics have dispositional psychologists developed for coping with the problem of response sets 5 points Social desirability is answering questions in a way that would make yourself look better than you actually are Measure the impact of response sets and then adjust test scores accordingly Makes response sets irrelevant by disguising a test s true purpose Study response sets as interesting dispositions in their own right 15 The MMPI contains several clinical scales but just four validity scales Name those scales then select one of them and explain a how it works and b which response set it measures 6 points Cannot Say Scale measures how often I can t say was chosen compared to the average person it measures social desirability