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Can personality be measured?
Journal
of
Psychosomatic Research,
CAN
1964, Vol.
8, pp.
317 10 318.
Pergamon
PERSONALITY G.
Press
Ltd.
Printed
in Northern
BE MEASURED
Ireland
?
J. S. WILDE
THE THEME
of this discussion is “Can personality be measured ?” There is one short answer to this question. As personality theory is an empirical science like any other part of psychology, personality theorists give a definition of personality which implies the possibility of direct or indirect quantitative measurement. Any conception of personality which does not fulfill this requirement, will not be accepted by psychologists. If we accept this form of definition the next question is horrY can we measure personality or personality traits in order to assess the relationship for example between personality and somatotype, or psychosomatic disease, and so forth. During this conference it has become clear that personality questionnaires are widely used for this purpose. .4lthough questionnaires may seem to be the latest fashion in perprojective tests. sonality measurement they are much older than, for instance, However they have been criticized on several grounds. For example it is said that people do not know themselves well enough to give truthful answers because of defects of intelligence, memory, insight and so on. Other critics say that the questionnaire technique suffers from problems of communication, because the items are ambiguous. In attempting to reply to the question, “Do you often have headaches?” you might wonder “how often is often”. These two criticisms seem irrelevant to me because questionnaires are not constructed on the assumption that people give correct self-descriptions. The answers do not need to be true in order to make interpretations possible. On the contrary the validity of questionnaire scores is assessed by means of correlating those scores with external behaviour criteria. Dr. Shapiro criticized questionnaires because of their sensitivity to “response set”. I feel this is only a technical problem because there are several ways of correcting for “response set”, or of making the questionnaires free of “response set”. Another criticism is the ease of faking questionnaire responses; that is, the sensitivity of these responses to motivational factors. For instance a patient could try to make a very unhealthy impression upon his doctor in order to attract his attention and so obtain a high neuroticism score on, for example, the Maudsley Personality Inventory. I think that this ease of faking is a very relevant criticism, but nevertheless J think the following considerations should be taken into account. (1) People who want to make the impression of being unhappy, depressed, dependent and unstable are capable of attaining higher neuroticism scores than people who do not have this intention. But this intention by itself might be a neurotic sign, so that ease of faking in this situation might be considered an advantage as it records a valid variance. (2) When applying for jobs, subjects produce lower neuroticism scores than in less threatening situations. But this might mean that people truly behave in a less neurotic way in such a situation. Although neuroticism is considered not to be situation-specific, but rather to be a general personality trait, this does not mean that 317
318
G. J. s.
WILDE
neurotics should behave neurotically in every single situation. This would mean a negation of the importance of “r8le-playing” behaviour. Like Dr. Sainsbury did in Great Britain, I, in Amsterdam, tested hundreds of psychosomatic patients with an inventory that is comparable to the Maudsley Personality Inventory. Like Dr. Sainsbury I found systematically higher neuroticism score\ in these psychosomatic patients than in the Dutch population as a whole, suggesting that these patients are characterized by a more than average neurotic tendency. Thia finding seem5 to demonstrate that these patients give a wrbul expression of more than average psychological discomfort. Dr. Sainsbury tried to correct for chronicity of the disease from the correlation of test scores and duration of disease in non-psychosomatic chronic patients. In my psychosomatic patients, however, 1 have found several significant correlations between test scores and duration of the disease. The observation of high neuroticism scores in psychosomatic patients seems to be very general. This does not, however, prove that these diseases are psychosomatic in the sense that there is a strong psychological factor in the aetiology. The high scores could equally well mean that the disease is a neuroticising agent. The best proof of the presence of psychogenic factors will come from testing people before they fall ill. I feel that this type of investigation should bc widely extended so as to evade many of the methodological problems which are involved if we test the pateints only after the onset of their disease.
of
Psychosomatic Research,
CAN
1964, Vol.
8, pp.
317 10 318.
Pergamon
PERSONALITY G.
Press
Ltd.
Printed
in Northern
BE MEASURED
Ireland
?
J. S. WILDE
THE THEME
of this discussion is “Can personality be measured ?” There is one short answer to this question. As personality theory is an empirical science like any other part of psychology, personality theorists give a definition of personality which implies the possibility of direct or indirect quantitative measurement. Any conception of personality which does not fulfill this requirement, will not be accepted by psychologists. If we accept this form of definition the next question is horrY can we measure personality or personality traits in order to assess the relationship for example between personality and somatotype, or psychosomatic disease, and so forth. During this conference it has become clear that personality questionnaires are widely used for this purpose. .4lthough questionnaires may seem to be the latest fashion in perprojective tests. sonality measurement they are much older than, for instance, However they have been criticized on several grounds. For example it is said that people do not know themselves well enough to give truthful answers because of defects of intelligence, memory, insight and so on. Other critics say that the questionnaire technique suffers from problems of communication, because the items are ambiguous. In attempting to reply to the question, “Do you often have headaches?” you might wonder “how often is often”. These two criticisms seem irrelevant to me because questionnaires are not constructed on the assumption that people give correct self-descriptions. The answers do not need to be true in order to make interpretations possible. On the contrary the validity of questionnaire scores is assessed by means of correlating those scores with external behaviour criteria. Dr. Shapiro criticized questionnaires because of their sensitivity to “response set”. I feel this is only a technical problem because there are several ways of correcting for “response set”, or of making the questionnaires free of “response set”. Another criticism is the ease of faking questionnaire responses; that is, the sensitivity of these responses to motivational factors. For instance a patient could try to make a very unhealthy impression upon his doctor in order to attract his attention and so obtain a high neuroticism score on, for example, the Maudsley Personality Inventory. I think that this ease of faking is a very relevant criticism, but nevertheless J think the following considerations should be taken into account. (1) People who want to make the impression of being unhappy, depressed, dependent and unstable are capable of attaining higher neuroticism scores than people who do not have this intention. But this intention by itself might be a neurotic sign, so that ease of faking in this situation might be considered an advantage as it records a valid variance. (2) When applying for jobs, subjects produce lower neuroticism scores than in less threatening situations. But this might mean that people truly behave in a less neurotic way in such a situation. Although neuroticism is considered not to be situation-specific, but rather to be a general personality trait, this does not mean that 317
318
G. J. s.
WILDE
neurotics should behave neurotically in every single situation. This would mean a negation of the importance of “r8le-playing” behaviour. Like Dr. Sainsbury did in Great Britain, I, in Amsterdam, tested hundreds of psychosomatic patients with an inventory that is comparable to the Maudsley Personality Inventory. Like Dr. Sainsbury I found systematically higher neuroticism score\ in these psychosomatic patients than in the Dutch population as a whole, suggesting that these patients are characterized by a more than average neurotic tendency. Thia finding seem5 to demonstrate that these patients give a wrbul expression of more than average psychological discomfort. Dr. Sainsbury tried to correct for chronicity of the disease from the correlation of test scores and duration of disease in non-psychosomatic chronic patients. In my psychosomatic patients, however, 1 have found several significant correlations between test scores and duration of the disease. The observation of high neuroticism scores in psychosomatic patients seems to be very general. This does not, however, prove that these diseases are psychosomatic in the sense that there is a strong psychological factor in the aetiology. The high scores could equally well mean that the disease is a neuroticising agent. The best proof of the presence of psychogenic factors will come from testing people before they fall ill. I feel that this type of investigation should bc widely extended so as to evade many of the methodological problems which are involved if we test the pateints only after the onset of their disease.