Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

Clinical scales 
FIGURE 2 
A MMPI-2 profi le of a person 
who suff ers from obsessional anxiety, 
social withdrawal, and delusional thinking. 
test standardization 
A technique 
used to validate questions in personal-
ity tests by studying the responses of 
people with known diagnoses.
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 Module 
42 
Assessing Personality: Determining What Makes Us Distinctive 
465
When the MMPI-2 is used for the purpose for which it was devised—identifi -
cation of personality disorders—it does a good job. However, like other personality 
tests, it presents an opportunity for abuse. For instance, employers who use it as 
a screening tool for job applicants may interpret the results improperly by relying 
too heavily on the results of individual scales instead of taking into account the 
overall patterns of results, which require skilled interpretation. Furthermore, critics 
point out that the individual scales overlap, which makes their interpretation dif-
fi cult. In sum, although the MMPI-2 remains the most widely used personality test 
and has been translated into more than 100 different languages, it must be used 
with caution (Valsiner, Diriwächter, & Sauck, 2005; Forbey & Ben-Porath, 2007; 
Ben-Porath & Archer, 2008).
Projective Methods 
If you were shown the shape presented in Figure 3 and asked what it represented 
to you, you might not think that your impressions would mean very much. But to 
a psychodynamic theoretician, your responses to such an ambiguous fi gure would 
provide valuable clues to the state of your unconscious and ultimately to your gen-
eral personality characteristics. 
The shape in the fi gure is representative of inkblots used in projective personal-
ity tests,
in which a person is shown an ambiguous stimulus and asked to describe 
it or tell a story about it. The responses are considered to be “projections” of the 
individual’s personality.