EARLY EVENTS

A seminal event in the history of applied personality assessment was the 1917 entry of the United States into World War I and the concerns it generated about the susceptibility of front-line soldiers to traumatic stress reactions (known then as “shell shock”). For help in identifying psychologically fragile draftees, the War Department turned to Robert Woodworth, a prominent experimental psychologist who had studied with Cattell. In response, Woodworth started working on a checklist of probable symptoms of psychological disturbance, to be answered “Yes” or “No” (e.g., “Are you happy most of the time?”). The intent was to use this checklist as a screening device to deselect emotionally unstable draftees.

As matters turned out, the war ended before Woodworth finished constructing his measure, and it was never used for its original purpose. Following the war, however, Woodworth wrote about his checklist in a 1919 journal article and then published the list as the Personal Data Sheet (Woodworth, 1919, 1920). The Personal Data Sheet found civilian use as a measure of adjustment, and it was the first formal self-report personality assessment questionnaire to become generally available. Woodworth’s measure was limited in scope, providing only a single score for overall level of adjustment and no other information about personality characteristics. His Personal Data Sheet nevertheless served as a model for later generations of similar but more complex checklists.

The first noteworthy advance over Woodworth’s unidimensional measure was a multidimensional self-report personality inventory published by Robert Bernreuter in 1931. The Bernreuter Personality Inventory comprised scales for several different personality characteristics, including neurotic tendencies, ascendance-submission, and introversionextroversion. Highly respected and widely used in its day, Bernreuter’s measure was the forerunner of many currently prominent multidimensional personality inventories, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory—Adolescent (MMPI-A), the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI), the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), and the NEO-Personality Inventory (NEO-PI). The individual histories of these self-report inventories are discussed in Chapters 6 through 10.

A second significant event in the early history of formalized personality assessment was also contemporaneous with World War I, but unrelated to it. Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist working in a mental hospital, became interested in using reports of what patients saw in inkblots as indicators of their mental state and personal dispositions. Rorschach’s experimental testing of several hundred nonpatients and patients with various disorders resulted in the 1921 publication of Psychodiagnostics (Rorschach, 1921/1942). In this book, Rorschach presented guidelines for administering, scoring, and interpreting responses to a set of 10 inkblots that has subsequently become known as the Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM). Chapter 11 elaborates Rorschach’s personal history and the subsequent embellishment of his method by Rorschach practitioners who followed in his wake.

Although much more complex than Woodworth’s checklist, Rorschach’s inkblots were similarly intended more as a tool for identifying disorder than for describing personality. Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostics is subtitled “A Diagnostic Test Based on Perception,” and he explicitly stated about his measure: “It is to be understood that the test is primarily an aid to clinical diagnosis” (Rorschach, 1921/1942, p. 121). Nevertheless, Rorschach did posit numerous relationships between certain inkblot findings and particular personality characteristics, and later generations of Rorschach clinicians and scholars developed his method into a rich source of information about how people are likely to perceive events, experience emotion, manage stress, and relate to other people (see Chapter 11).

Rorschach’s approach to assessing people differed markedly from the methods used by Woodworth and by other developers of self-report inventories for measuring personality. The self-report method asks people to describe themselves (e.g., “I am a very sociable person” answered as “True” or “False”) and then infers fairly directly from this response some personality characteristic or behavioral tendency (e.g., being an outgoing person who enjoys being around other people, or a reclusive person who is more comfortable when alone than when in the company of others). Rorschach instead asked people to report what inkblots might be and then, from the manner in which they performed this task, inferred certain behavioral dispositions (e.g., taking their manner of responding to the color in the blots as a clue to whether they were likely to be reserved or excitable in expressing emotions).

Based on Rorschach’s approach, other personality assessment measures were developed in which the critical data similarly comprised not what people said about themselves, but how they performed on various tasks. Along with the inkblot method, three similar methods are commonly used today: (1) asking people to make up stories about pictures, as exemplified by the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) discussed in Chapter 12; (2) having people draw figures and tell stories about what they have drawn, as is done with the Draw-a-Person, House-Tree-Person, and Kinetic Family Drawing tests described in Chapter 13; and (3) asking people to extend words or phrases into complete sentences, as illustrated by the Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank (RISB) and the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT) presented in Chapter 14.

EMERGENCE OF PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY

Personality assessment received its next important impetus from the emergence in the 1930s of personality psychology as a discrete field of study. Prior to this time, as recounted by Barenbaum and Winter (2003; see also Winter & Barenbaum, 1999), numerous articles and books referring to “personality” had been published. However, just as the early methods of personality assessment stressed disorder and diagnosis rather than personality description, the early personality literature was more concerned with deviant traits and abnormal conditions than with the nature of people.

The psychoanalytic theory of personality formulated by Sigmund Freud (1916-1917/ 1963) and his followers during the first third of the twentieth century was a significant exception (see Bornstein, 2003; Westen & Gabbard, 1999). These psychoanalytic perspectives gained considerable popularity outside the academic community and greatly influenced psychological treatment methods, but they had little impact on what university faculty of the day believed or taught their students. When pre-1930 academic psychologists thought about personality processes, moreover, they tended to view them as subtopics within abnormal, social, or educational psychology, rather than as a separate field of study in their own right.

Personality psychology emerged from this restricted focus and subfield status with the contributions of two major figures in the history of psychology whose work emphasized the individual uniqueness of people. Gordon Allport (1937) and Henry Murray (1938) asserted in landmark books that people should be studied and understood not as an assemblage of unrelated traits, each to be examined separately, but instead with holistic attention to all the interactive facets of their unique life experiences that make people the distinctive individuals they are (see Hall, Lindzey, & Campbell, 1998, chaps. 6, 7). The Allport and Murray texts, together with a text by Stagner (1937), were the first three books devoted to broadly conceived personality theory, and the impact of these volumes was largely responsible for turning personality into a major field of psychology with its own literature, courses of study, and research programs.

Murray’s contribution to energizing personality psychology held special significance for personality assessment, by virtue of his developing the TAT as his favored measure for exploring the individual experiences and perspectives of people (see Chapter 12). Progress in personality psychology also created new opportunities for using personality assessment measures in research studies. With increasing awareness of the possible contribution of personality factors to variations in whatever phenomena they were studying, investigators after the 1930s became more likely to include measures of personality characteristics among their procedures.

WORLD WAR II AND THE EXPANSION OF CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Just as in World War I, the participation of the United States in World War II, beginning in December 1941, created urgent needs for psychological services. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), asked Murray to help them select people who could function effectively in secret missions overseas. Murray brought his background in personality assessment to bear in creating and overseeing a selection process for this purpose. More than 5,000 candidates passed through Murray’s evaluation program, which was staffed by approximately 50 professional persons, mostly psychologists, and encompassed just under 100 different psychological tests and behavioral measures. Following declassification of their work after the war, the OSS staff published a detailed description of its methods and reviewed how the selection program had contributed to the war effort (Office of Strategic Services Assessment Staff, 1948; see also Handler, 2001).

On a much larger scale than the OSS selection program, psychologists were brought into the armed forces during World War II to assist in providing diagnostic and treatment services for military personnel. These services included personality assessment instruments in widespread screening of inductees for possible mental or emotional disorder, much as had been planned but never fully implemented during World War I. In contrast, before World War II ended, “Hardly a male adult of military potentiality within the United States escaped psychological testing” (Reisman, 1974, p. 271).

As the Second World War progressed, mounting psychological casualties required assigning an increasing number of psychologists to military hospitals. Continuing need for veterans’ mental and other health services following the war led the Veterans Administration (VA) to create a vast hospital system in which large numbers of staff positions for psychologists became available. Faced with a shortage of psychologists to fill these positions, the VA established a clinical psychology training program that provided paid supervised clerkships for graduate students. As an additional response to pressing needs for trained psychologists, the United States Public Health Service developed a training grant program of financial support for clinical doctoral students and their university departments.

With a beckoning job market, paid training positions, and available financial aid for entering an interesting and challenging profession, a tidal wave of students sought admission to graduate training programs in clinical psychology in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Some universities had been awarding occasional doctorates in clinical psychology for many years, but few of them prior to 1946 had any prescribed educational program for becoming a doctoral level clinical psychologist. In 1944, recognizing the need for a structured curriculum and a set of educational requirements for the professional preparation of clinicians, the American Psychological Association (APA) appointed David Shakow to chair a committee charged with addressing the matter. Shakow’s committee and a later APA Committee on Training in Clinical Psychology that he also chaired formulated guidelines for a multiyear doctoral program of course work, clinical experience, and scholarly engagement. Commonly referred to as the Shakow Report and published in 1947, these guidelines have continued to shape graduate education requirements in clinical psychology since that time (APA, 1947; Shakow, 1965).

Evolving as a profession with eager students, ample financial support, a structured curriculum, and a good job market, clinical psychology expanded rapidly in the post-World War II era, and personality assessment flourished along with it. Although clinical students also received training in psychotherapy, the identity of clinical psychology in those days was vested largely in psychological assessment. Assessment formed the core of training in clinical psychology, and most doctoral programs included substantial course requirements in psychological testing. Diagnostic consultation was what clinical psychologists did for the most part, and their services were sought primarily as consultants who alone among mental health professionals could bring data from standardized tests to bear in facilitating differential diagnosis and treatment planning. These and other aspects of the emergence of clinical psychology as a profession are elaborated by Reisman (1974), Routh (1994), and Routh and Reisman (2003).

TRENDS OVER TIME: SHRINKAGE AND GROWTH

The heyday of personality assessment as a central focus of clinical psychology extended from the post-World War II era to the late 1960s. The approximately 40 years since that time are usually regarded, with good reason, as an era of shrinkage in the field. Ironically, the post-1970 years were also a time of considerable growth in both scientific and professional aspects of personality assessment.

Years of Shrinkage

During the 1950s, when education in clinical psychology emphasized personality assessment and training programs usually included two or three required courses in testing, most graduate students were being trained in psychotherapy as well. In time, interest in conducting psychotherapy began to supplant diagnostic testing as a preferred career activity among clinical psychologists, and this development was hastened during the 1960s by the passage of certification and licensing laws that identified psychotherapy as a legitimate professional function of psychologists, independent of medical supervision (see Benjamin, DeLeon, Freedheim, & Vandenbos, 2003).

The 1960s was also a time when psychologists played leadership roles in advancing a wide variety of treatment modalities, including group and family therapy, behavioral methods, and community mental health approaches. With so much else for them to learn and do, clinical psychologists began to decrease the amount of time they devoted to mastering and practicing personality assessment. This shift in focus was spurred in part by the personal experience of many clinicians that newer roles offered more prestige, autonomy, and satisfaction than providing test results to be used by others in planning and providing treatment services.

Concurrently with these changes in the profession, the radical behavioral perspectives on psychology in the 1960s brought personality assessment under heavy scholarly attack. Leading social learning theorists like Mischel (1968/1996) and Peterson (1968) asserted in influential books that traditional personality assessment serves no useful purpose. There is no such thing as personality, according to these authors, and what people do is determined by the situations in which they find themselves, not by any abiding dispositions to behave in certain ways. Hence, they said, clinicians should stop trying to infer personality characteristics from test responses and concentrate instead on constructing test situations that provide representative samples of whatever behaviors are to be predicted.

From a much different theoretical perspective, humanistic psychologists around this time began to question the morality of using personality assessment instruments to classify people. These early humanistic perspectives on assessment derived mainly from the writings of Maslow (1962) and Rogers (1961), who contended that people can be understood only by learning how they experience themselves, and not by any external observations of what they say and do. From this humanistic perspective, moreover, classifying people according to personality traits or behavioral characteristics they share with other people was not only a waste of time, but also a dehumanizing procedure that strips people of their individual dignity and wrongfully presumes the right of one person to pass judgment on another.

Behaviorism and humanism challenged the pursuit of personality assessment in the 1960s not only directly, but also indirectly by derogating the entire field of personality psychology. As described by Carlson (1975), the negative perspectives that emerged from these sources contributed to a dark age for personality psychology, such that personality as an area of inquiry “virtually disappeared during the 1960s,” largely due to “the burgeoning technology of behavior modification, and the celebrations of humanistic ideology” (p. 393).

This period of generally decreased interest in personality as an explanatory concept, combined with the expanded roles available to clinical psychologists and the behaviorist and humanistic labeling of personality assessment as irrelevant or improper, led many academic faculties to question the value of acquiring assessment skills. As a consequence, the utility of personality assessment was often neglected in doctoral programs, along with the unique significance of assessment in the professional identity of clinical psychologists. Frequently typifying this neglect were reduced course offerings in personality assessment, minimal requirements for assessment competency, and limited opportunities or encouragement for students to become involved in assessment-related research (see Butcher, 2006; Childs & Eyde, 2002; Exner & Erdberg, 2002; Weiner, 2003).

As the twentieth century drew to a close, personality assessment was attacked from a third direction—this time not for being behaviorally irrelevant or humanistically improper—but for being unnecessary and financially uneconomical. This line of attack emanated mainly from health care managers who alleged that the cost of personality assessment outweighs its benefits in planning and implementing appropriate interventions. These allegations were used as a basis for limiting or disallowing financial reimbursement for personality assessments, an action that caused assessment psychologists considerable concern about losing income and having either to curtail their practice or find referral sources outside the health care industry (see Acklin, 1996; Stout, 1997).

Years of Growth

Fortunately for the field of personality assessment, the aforementioned challenges to its relevance, propriety, and utility did not prove fatal. The behavioral emphasis exclusively on environmental contingencies ran out of steam in time, as did disavowal of persistent personality characteristics and limiting explanations of behavior to situational factors. Thoughtful theorists commented on the shallowness of denying that people are disposed to think, feel, and act in certain ways (see Epstein, 1979; Millon, 1984), and research findings documented broad consistencies in individual differences and the longitudinal stability of many personality characteristics (see Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000).

In the face of these developments, many prominent proponents of radical situationism, including Mischel, eventually modified their position in favor of an interactive perspective that allowed for “dispositional constructs” to influence the likelihood that a particular action will be evoked by particular external circumstances (e.g., Mischel, 1973; see also Wright & Mischel, 1987). Mischel has continued to allow a place for personality assessment in determining why people behave as they do, by acknowledging the stable individual differences among people and “the psychological invariance that distinctively characterizes an individual and that underlies the variations in the thoughts, feelings, and actions that occur across contexts and over time” (Mischel, 2004, p. 1).

This reversal in the earlier behaviorist view that traditional personality assessment serves no useful purpose was accompanied by a corresponding shift in the focus of behavioral assessment. Instead of being limited to situational observations of representative samples of behavior, recommended procedures for behavioral assessment began to include interviews and self-report inventories as well. Moreover, specialists in behavioral assessment turned some of their attention from environmental contingencies to aspects of cognitive style and the kinds of feelings, fantasies, expectations, and beliefs that people bring with them into situations (e.g., Ciminero, Calhoun, & Adams, 1977; Kendall & Hollon, 1981).

As for humanistic concerns about neglecting individuality, this criticism of personality assessment gradually gave way to recognizing that there is nothing inherently prejudicial in conducting psychological evaluations. Accurate assessment of a person’s assets and limitations does not inevitably prove damaging to that individual, nor is there any necessary obstacle to psychological examiners paying just as much attention to how people differ from as well as resemble each other. To the contrary, great strides have been made by humanistic psychologists in developing assessment procedures that enhance rather than restrict attention to the unique needs of individuals. Notable among these enhancements are procedures for evaluating the implications of people’s test responses and for molding the feedback of test findings into a therapeutic encounter for the person who has been examined (see Finn, 1996; Finn & Tonsager, 2002; Fischer, 1994, 2000).

Personality psychology as a field of study was rejuvenated along with personality assessment by the softening of the radical behaviorist position and the emergence of cognitive perspectives in psychology. No longer persuaded that psychological science should attend only to observable situational determinants of behavior and give no credence to inferred cross-situational characteristics of people, many researchers resumed studying individual consistencies in attitudes, motives, self-perceptions, and personality traits. As testimony to this renaissance in personality psychology, McAdams and Pals (2006) wrote, “Once an endangered scientific species, the concept of the personality trait now enjoys a privileged status among personality researchers and an increasingly prominent role in studies done in social, developmental, cultural, and clinical psychology” (p. 204).

With regard to the managed care allegations that personality assessment is neither useful nor economical, empirical evidence has indicated otherwise. An extensive literature documents the utility of properly conducted personality assessment in planning therapeutic interventions, monitoring their course, and enhancing their effectiveness. Moreover, follow-up findings have shown that appropriate applications of personality assessments in health care are likely to have the long-term effect of decreasing costs rather than adding to them (Butcher, 1997; Finn & Kamphuis, 2006; Kubiszyn et al., 2000; Maruish, 2004; Weiner, 2004).

Finally, of note, survey findings suggest that managed care has had less of a negative impact on personality assessment than was originally feared. A slight majority of survey respondents report a negative impact, but only small reductions in the percentage of cases in which they use personality assessment instruments, and less than a third report that managed care had a negative impact on their ability to diagnose clients accurately (Cashel, 2002). Other survey data indicate that managed care has been accompanied by only a slightly decreased frequency of comprehensive, multimethod personality assessments using fulllength measures and that fewer than one-third (29%) of training directors of APA-approved doctoral programs believe that their training in psychological testing had been significantly affected by managed care (Belter & Piotrowski, 2001; Piotrowski, Belter, & Keller, 1998).

In describing the reversal of fortunes for personality assessment that began during the early 1980s, some authors noted that the bloom had never gone entirely off the psychodiagnostic rose (Millon, 1984; Weiner, 1983). Even with the expanding roles available to clinical psychologists, and despite challenges to the relevance and propriety of personality assessment, many personality assessors continued to find professional autonomy, respect, and satisfaction in functioning as expert consultants whose specialized skills could help resolve diagnostic dilemmas and point the way to effective interventions. As these expert diagnostic consultants discovered, there are many circumstances in which determining the kind of health care intervention likely to prove beneficial is a more challenging and prestigious activity than providing the intervention.

Having survived earlier challenges, personality assessment practice and research began to grow in the 1980s. A smaller percentage of clinical psychologists than before were involved in personality assessment and were devoting less of their time to it (i.e., the shrinkage). These percentage decreases were more than offset during the latter part of the twentieth century by sharply increasing numbers of doctoral level clinicians. Among these increased numbers of clinical psychologists, assessment remained the second most frequent service they provided in various settings, after psychotherapy, and survey respondents working in independent practice or in health care or government settings reported spending 15% to 23% of their time doing assessment (Phelps, Eisman, & Kohout, 1998).

In addition to growing along with the increasing numbers of clinical psychologists, personality assessment benefited from a post-1980 expansion of clinical psychology into diverse new settings that welcomed and appreciated psychological consultants. In health care, psychology’s traditional focus on the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders broadened to encompass assessment of personality characteristics associated with the origins and course of physical illness, adjustment to chronic disability, tolerance for medical and surgical procedures, and maintenance of a healthy lifestyle (see Boyer & Paharia, 2007; Friedman & Silver, 2007; James & Folen, 2005; Nezu, Nezu, & Geller, 2003; Sweet, Tovian, & Suchy, 2003). Psychologists became increasingly active in forensic, educational, and organizational settings in which personality evaluations could contribute to administrative decisions.

In the forensic area, personality test indications that a criminal defendant is out of touch with reality can be relevant to the court’s determination of the person’s competence or sanity, and personality characteristics that suggest psychic injury or that have implications for parental effectiveness can prove relevant in personal injury and child custody litigations (see Archer, 2006; Craig, 2005; Heilbrun, Marczyk, DeMatteo, & Mack-Allen, 2007; Ogloff & Douglas, 2003). In educational settings, personality assessment can help cast light on the needs and concerns of students showing conduct or learning problems (Braden, 2003). In organizational settings, personnel decisions related to fitness for duty or employee selection and promotion often hinge on personality characteristics that can be measured with psychological tests (see Borum, Super, & Rand, 2003; Hough & Furnham, 2003; Klimoski & Zukin, 2003). Whenever personality characteristics are relevant to decisions facing courts, schools, employers, or agencies of any kind, experts in assessing personality can make a valuable sometimes critical contribution. These practical applications of personality assessment are discussed further with respect to specific assessment instruments in Chapters 6 through 14 of this Handbook.

To summarize, a shrinkage in the prominence of personality assessment among the activities of clinical psychologists since the post-World War II era was accompanied by a substantial increase in the number of clinical psychologists. These increasing numbers, combined with expanded applications of personality assessment in diverse settings, generated consistent growth in the field beginning in the 1980s. As reflections of this growth, the membership of the Society for Personality Assessment doubled in size between 1980 and 2000, and a stable cadre of persons in both academic and practice positions identify themselves as assessment psychologists.

The growth and current vigor of assessment psychology is reflected as well in a burgeoning literature. In a review of published research articles on personality assessment measures over a 20-year period from 1974 to 1994, Butcher and Rouse (1996) found a higher annual rate of publication in the 1980s and 1990s than in the 1970s and concluded, “Research in clinical personality assessment continues to be carried out at a high rate” (p. 103). In 1980, just one major journal was devoted to personality assessment—the Journal of Personality Assessment (JPA)—with occasional articles on assessment topics appearing in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, the Journal of Clinical Psychology, and Professional Psychology. The JPA has since been joined by the European Journal of Psychological Assessment in 1984, Psychological Assessment in 1989, and Assessment in 1994; assessment-related articles also appear in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, begun in 1994. Each of these journals has expanded in size over the past 10 years, and numerous articles from them, together with dozens of texts and handbooks concerning personality assessment issues and instruments, are cited throughout the chapters of this Handbook.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

In concluding this brief history of personality assessment, some comments are in order concerning two matters that are relevant to the following chapters: (1) the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic approaches to personality assessment, and (2) choosing apt terminology for categorizing personality assessment measures.

Idiographic and Nomothetic Approaches to Personality Assessment

Psychologists have approached personality assessment from two different perspectives, commonly called the idiographic and the nomothetic. Idiographic perspectives reflect Cattell’s previously mentioned interest in individual differences, which laid the groundwork for the field of assessment psychology. As delineated in the recommendations of Allport and Murray for using individual case studies as a way of understanding personality, idiographic assessment emphasizes ways in which people differ from each other and is focused on identifying each person’s unique constellation of personality characteristics.

In contrast, nomothetic personality assessment emphasizes ways in which people resemble each other and is focused on personality characteristics and dimensions that are common to most people. Nomothetic perspectives can also be traced back to early twentieth-century research, when studies of traits and temperament were sufficiently numerous to warrant their being reviewed by Thurstone in 1916 and Allport in 1921. In short, then, nomothetic personality assessment is primarily process-focused, whereas idiographic personality assessment is primarily person-focused.