EVALUATION OF NORMALITY AND

INDIVIDUAL STRENGTH

CHAPTER 9
 OBJECTIVES

9.1 Review the qualities of several tests and discuss

their strengths and weaknesses

9.2 Explain positive psychological assessment

INTRODUCTION

• The focus of the instruments is on qualities pertinent to normal range of human functioning.
• Examples: locus of control, responsibility, attachment style and faith maturation.
BROAD BAND TESTS OF NORMAL SPECTRUM

• Beginning in the 1940s

• Measures of full range functioning
• There two approaches: Limited number of personality types
Multiple dimensions of personality
MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR (MBTI)

- Published in 1962
- Forced choice, self-report inventory
- Three kind of forms:

Form M- 93 items: paper-pencil-format or administered online

Form G-126 items : available online

Form Q-144 items: available online

MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR

• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) Step I is based on Carl Jung’s theory of psychological type. It
indicates your personality preferences in four dimensions:

• Where you focus your attention – Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I)

• The way you take in information – Sensing (S) or INtuition (N)
• How you make decisions – Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)
• How you deal with the world – Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)
MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR(MBTI)

• the opposite ends of each polarity are simple different modes of being that may have a variety of
implications for relationships, vocation, leadership and personal functioning
• possessing the qualities of one polarity or the other may be advantageous (or not) in different
situations
• not equally represented in the general population
• some types are more common in specific occupational groups
• Extraversion is important in education
CALIFORNIA PSYCHOLOGICAL INVENTORY (CPI)

• a true-false test
• measure normal personality
• available in two forms：CPI-434 vs CPI-260
• ease of administration and the immediacy of computer-generated
report
CALIFORNIA PSYCHOLOGICAL INVENTORY (CPI)

• In the two versions：

• identical：the component scales and the interpretive strategies
• different：the number of items—434 vs 260
CALIFORNIA PSYCHOLOGICAL INVENTORY (CPI)

• purpose：evaluate interpersonal behavior and social interaction

within normal individuals
• scores：20 folk measures of personality，7 work-related scales，
and 3 broad vectors
• population：ages 13 and over
CALIFORNIA PSYCHOLOGICAL INVENTORY (CPI)

• three of the basic personality scales：

• Good Impression (Gi)
• Communality (Cm)
• Well-being (Wb)
• They provide information on test-taking attitudes and therefore
function as validity scales.
CALIFORNIA PSYCHOLOGICAL INVENTORY (CPI)

• the four life styles：

• Implementers(extroverted and rule-favoring)
• Supporters(introverted and rule-favoring)
• Innovators(extroverted and rule-questioning)
• Visualizers
CALIFORNIA PSYCHOLOGICAL INVENTORY (CPI)

• The CPI is useful for helping predict the following：

• Psychological and physical health
• High school and college achievement
• Effectiveness of student-teachers
• Effectiveness of police and military personnel
• Leadership and management success
• The CPI is particularly effective at identifying adolescents or adults
who follow a delinquent or criminal lifestyle.
NEO PERSONALITY INVENTORY-REVISED (NEO PI-R)

• The NEO Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO PI-R) embodies

decades of factor-analytic research with clinical and normal
adult populations (Costa & McCrae, 1992)
NEO PERSONALITY INVENTORY-REVISED (NEO PI-R)

• The test is based upon the five factor model of personality

• It consists of 240 items (5 factor*6 facet*8 question) ,
• But in the beginning , the researchers focused on three items about
Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, so it used NEO to be
its title of this scale.
NEO PERSONALITY INVENTORY-REVISED (NEO PI-R)

• It can use with the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) (Costa & McCrae,
1992).
• Form S is for self-reports whereas Form R is for outside observers.
• The item format consist of five-point ratings : strongly disagree, disagree,
neutral, agree, strongly agree.
NEO PERSONALITY INVENTORY-REVISED (NEO PI-R)

• FUNCTIONS:
1. The items assess emotional interpersonal, experiential, attitudinal, and motivational variables.
2. Validity evidence for the NEO PI-R is substantial, and it is an excellent measure of
personality that is especially useful in research.
3. The test also shows promise as a measure of clinical Psychopathology.
4. It lacks substantial validity scales─ only three items access validity.
5. The administration of the NEO PI-R assumes that subjects are cooperative and reasonably
honest.
6. The five domain scales of the NEO PI-R are each based upon six facet (trait) scales
7. They are more definite quality or ingredients and composing more general factor of
content in Big Five.
NEO-PI-R VS NEO-PI-3

• consists of 240 items

NEO-PI-R • items rated on a 5-point Likert scale from

strongly agree to strongly disagree
• Suitable for adult

• NEO PI-3 retained the original five- factor

NEO-PI-3 structure
• Suited for students as young as 12 years of age
• Better internal consistency and readability
ASSESSMENT OF CREATIVITY

• Positive psychological assessment defined as the measurement of specific human strengths

• Some of the construct measured with psychological test include hope, emotional intelligence,
optimism, romantic love
• Psychologists have sought to understand creativity since at least the early 1900s

A creative idea is one
that is both original
and appropriate for
the situation in which
it occurs.
(Martindale, 1999)
What do we mean by
creative work? Like
definitions
most definitions of
creativity, ours
involves novelty and
value. The product
must be new and must
be given value
according to some
external criteria.
(Gruber & Wallace, 1999)
Creativity is the generation of
ideas that are both novel and
valuable. Creativity from a
(Boden, 1999) Western perspective
can be defined as the
ability to produce
work that is novel
and appropriate.
(Lubart, 1999)
Creativity is
imaginative activity
fashioned so as to
produce outcomes
that are both original
and of value.
Creativity constructs new tools and (Robinson, 1999)
new outcomes – new embodiments
of knowledge. It constructs new
relationships, rules, communities
of practice and new connections –
new social practices
(Knight, 2002)
CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT QUESTIONNAIRE

• The Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ; Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005)
measures creative accomplishments in 10 domains: Visual Arts, Music, Dance, Architectural
Design, Creative Writing, Humor, Inventions, Scientific Discovery, Theater and Film, and
Culinary Arts.
• it focuses on significant, observable accomplishments
• Each domain has eight items, numbered 0 through 7, that represent increasing levels of
creative achievement. For all domains, the first item indicates no training, experience, or
accomplishment. For the Creative Writing domain, for example, the first item is “I do not
have training or recognized talent in this area.”
• If people endorse the first item, they receive zero points for the domain and skip to the next
one. The remaining items ask about increasingly rare levels of accomplishment that are
logically connected, so endorsing a high item implies endorsing prior items.
• People receive more points for the items involving higher accomplishment.
THE BIOGRAPHICAL INVENTORY OF CREATIVE
BEHAVIORS (BICB)

• developed by Batey (2007), is a 34-item scale

• that assesses everyday creativity across a broad range of domains. The BICB presents people
with a range of behaviors and asks whether people have done them
• The items cover the common domains of everyday creativity, such as arts, crafts, and creative
writing, but they also cover social creativity, such as leadership, coaching, and mentorship
• e BICB uses a forced-choice yes/no response format.
• The scale's instructions ask people to indicate which activities they have been actively
involved in during the past 12 months
• .
CREATIVE BEHAVIOR INVENTORY

• Developed by Hocevar (1979), was one of the first self-report measures of

creative behavior and accomplishment to be widely used in research.
• a 90-item scale that measured creative behavior in several domains: fine arts,
crafts, literature, math-science, performing arts, and music.
• Recent research, however, has preferred a shortened form of Hocevar's scale
developed by Dollinger (2003).
• As a result, the short form should be considered a measure of everyday
creativity, whereas the long form covers both everyday creativity and eminent
creative achievement.
• .
DEFINITIONS OF OPTIMISM

• Optimism can be defined as a stable personality trait related to positive

expectations regarding future events.
• Optimists are people who expect that good things will happen to them, while
pessimists expect bad things to happen (Scheier & Carver, 1985).
• Thus, the definition of optimism is supported by positive expectations about
future outcomes. It presumes that when a goal is important, the person will
act to reach the desired goal, hoping for positive results
OPTIMISM VS PESSIMISM

• Epirical evidence shows that optimism and pessimism have significant

effects on physical and mental well-being (Carver, Scheier, & Segerstrom,
2010; Scheier, Carver, & Bridges, 2001).

• Optimism is associated to higher academic performance (Aspin-wall &

Taylor, 1992), better professional performance (Long, 1993), better recovery
from coronary surgeries (Fitzgerald, Tennen, Affleck, & Pransky, 1993) and
bone marrow transplants (Curbow, Somerfield, Baker, Wingard, & Legro,
1993), as well as better coping with diseases such as cancer (Carver et al,
1993) and AIDS (Taylor, Kemeny, Aspinwall, Schneider, Rodriguez, & Herbert,
1992).
 Optimists vs. Pessimists

Optimists

1. Expect positive outcomes

2. Expect to cope with adversity

Pessimists

1. Expect negative outcomes

2. Do not expect to cope with adversity
HE LIFE ORIENTATION TEST (LOT)

• Developed by Scheier and Carver (1985)

• Several studies performed with this instrument pointed to controversial results regarding the construct
unidimensionality and also for coincidences with neuroticism, trait anxiety, self-mastery and self-
esteem
• Due to such criticisms, Scheier, Carver and Bridges (1994) revised the instrument, removing items that
did not focus explicitly in expectations regarding the future.
• In the new version, the Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R), the items measuring positive and negative
expectations are more strongly linked.
REVISED LIFE ORIENTATION TEST (LOT-R)

• The test includes 10 items: three statements about optimism (items 1, 4 and 10), three on
pessimism (items 3, 7 and 9) and four distractor items (2, 5, 6, 8) whose scores are not
computed.
• Subjects answer the statements indicating their level of agreement on a five-point Likert
scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
• The negative scores on the test need to be inverted for the statistical analysis, so that values
close to five always indicate a higher degree of optimistic expectations of the individual.
EVIDENCE SUPPORTING LOT-R

• LOT-R has good internal consistency (alpha coefficient ranging from .70 to .80)
and their correlations test-retest are from .68 to .79 for intervals of four to 28
months (Scheier, Carver, & Bridges, 1994).

• LOT-R has strong relationships with predictive markers of results for life
orientation, which is consisting with the idea of being a good instrument to
measure optimism in relation to constructs such as self-esteem and
personality factors (Carver & Scheier, 1999, 2002).