Psychological Tests - Information About Psychological Tests

Written by Dr. Sam Vaknin

"What you are like when you are your usual self ... Behaviors. cognitions, and feelings that have predominated for most of the last five years are considered to be representative of your long-term personality functioning ..."

The scoring is again simple. Items are either present, subthreshold, present, or strongly present.

VII. Disorder-specific Tests

There are dozens of psychological tests that are disorder-specific: they aim to diagnose specific personality disorders or relationship problems. Example: the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) which is used to diagnose the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

The Borderline Personality Organization Scale (BPO), designed in 1985, sorts the subject's responses into 30 relevant scales. These indicates the existence of identity diffusion, primitive defenses, and deficient reality testing.

Other much-used tests include the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire-IV, the Coolidge Axis II Inventory, the Personality Assessment Inventory (1992), the excellent, literature-based, Dimensional assessment of Personality Pathology, and the comprehensive Schedule of Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality and Wisconsin Personality Disorders Inventory.

Having established the existence of a personality disorder, most diagnosticians proceed to administer other tests intended to reveal how the patient functions in relationships, copes with intimacy, and responds to triggers and life stresses.

The Relationship Styles Questionnaire (RSQ) (1994) contains 30 self-reported items and identifies distinct attachment styles (secure, fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing). The Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) (1979) is a standardized scale of the frequency and intensity of conflict resolution tactics and stratagems (both legitimate and abusive) used by the subject in various settings (usually in a couple).

The Multidimensional Anger Inventory (MAI) (1986) assesses the frequency of angry responses, their duration, magnitude, mode of expression, hostile outlook, and anger-provoking triggers.

Yet, even a complete battery of tests, administered by experienced professionals sometimes fails to identify abusers with personality disorders. Offenders are uncanny in their ability to deceive their evaluators.

APPENDIX: Common Problems with Psychological Laboratory Tests

Psychological laboratory tests suffer from a series of common philosophical, methodological, and design problems.

A. Philosophical and Design Aspects

1. Ethical - Experiments involve the patient and others. To achieve results, the subjects have to be ignorant of the reasons for the experiments and their aims. Sometimes even the very performance of an experiment has to remain a secret (double blind experiments). Some experiments may involve unpleasant or even traumatic experiences. This is ethically unacceptable.
2. The Psychological Uncertainty Principle - The initial state of a human subject in an experiment is usually fully established. But both treatment and experimentation influence the subject and render this knowledge irrelevant. The very processes of measurement and observation influence the human subject and transform him or her - as do life's circumstances and vicissitudes.
3. Uniqueness - Psychological experiments are, therefore, bound to be unique, unrepeatable, cannot be replicated elsewhere and at other times even when they are conducted with the SAME subjects. This is because the subjects are never the same due to the aforementioned psychological uncertainty principle. Repeating the experiments with other subjects adversely affects the scientific value of the results.
4. The undergeneration of testable hypotheses - Psychology does not generate a sufficient number of hypotheses, which can be subjected to scientific testing. This has to do with the fabulous (=storytelling) nature of psychology. In a way, psychology has affinity with some private languages. It is a form of art and, as such, is self-sufficient and self-contained. If structural, internal constraints are met - a statement is deemed true even if it does not satisfy external scientific requirements.