MINNESOTA MULTIPHASIC PERSONALITY
INVENTORY
The original Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI) was developed in the 1940s to assess mental
health problems in psychiatric and medical settings, and
it rapidly became a standard personality instrument
(Hathaway & McKinley, 1940). The popularity of this
true-false personality inventory was due in large part
to its easy-to-use format and to the fact that the scales
have well-established validity in assessing clinical
symptoms and syndromes (Butcher, 2005). The MMPI
underwent a major revision in the 1980s, resulting in
two forms of the test: an adult version, the MMPI-2
(Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer,
1989), and an adolescent form, MMPI-A (Butcher et al.,
1992). The MMPI-2 is a 567-item inventory comprised
of symptoms, beliefs, and attitudes in adults above age
18. The MMPI-A is a 478-item version that is used for
assessing young people, age 14–18. This article addresses
only the MMPI-2. Together, the MMPI-2 and MMPI-A
have become the most widely researched and used
clinical assessment instruments in the field of personality
assessment.
Assessing Protocol Validity
In some settings such as forensic applications or personnel
settings, people may be motivated to present themselves in
ways that do not disclose accurate information about them-
selves. For example, when an individual is being tested
to determine sanity in a pretrial criminal evaluation, the
person might be exaggerating symptoms. The initial step
in MMPI-2 profile interpretation is the important one of
determining whether the client has cooperated with the
testing to provide an accurate appraisal of his or her
personality functioning. Several scales on the MMPI-2 aid
clinicians in determining whether a client’s item responses
provide key personality information or are instead simply
reflecting response sets or deceptive motivational patterns
that disguise the client’s true feelings and motivations
(Baer, Wetter, Nichols, Greene, & Berry, 1995). Several
validity scales have been developed to evaluate a client’s
approach to the test. Four of these assessment strategies
are the following.
The L Scale
The L scale addresses the client’s willingness to acknowl-
edge faults or problems. Individuals who score high on L
are presenting an overly favorable picture of themselves.
High scorers are claiming virtue not found among people
in general. The L scale is particularly valuable in situa-
tions like personnel screening or some types of court cases,
because people in those settings try to put their best foot
The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, edited by Irving B. Weiner and W. Edward Craighead.
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
forward and present themselves as better adjusted than
they really are.
The K Scale
The K scale was developed to appraise test defensiveness
or the tendency that some people have to minimize prob-
lems. In addition, this measure also serves as a means of
correcting for defensiveness. That is, if clients are defen-
sive as assessed by this scale, their score on five of the
clinical scales are adjusted to compensate for their eva-
siveness.
The F Scale
The Infrequency scale or F scale was developed to assess
the tendency of some people to exaggerate their problems
or to fake the test by overresponding to extreme items.
The items on this scale are very rare or bizarre symptoms.
Individuals who endorse a lot of these items tend to
exaggerate symptoms on the MMPI-2, perhaps as a way of
trying to convince professionals that they need psycholog-
ical services. As noted earlier, this motivational pattern
is also found among individuals with a need to claim
problems in order to influence the court in forensic cases.
The F scale can be elevated for several possible rea-
sons. The profile could be invalid because the client
became confused or disoriented or responded in a random
manner. High F scores are also found among clients who
are malingering or producing exaggerated responses in
order to falsely claim mental illness (Graham, Watts, &
Timbrook, 1991).
TRIN and VRIN Scales
Two measures were developed to assess response incon-
sistency. These scales are based on the analysis of the
individual’s responding to the items in a consistent or
inconsistent manner. The scales are comprised of item
pairs that involve responses that are semantically incon-
sistent, for example, a pair of items that contain contra-
dictory content that cannot logically be answered in the
same direction if the subject is responding consistently to
the content.
Assessing Clinical Symptom Patterns
Several types of scales have been developed to evalu-
ate clinical problems. There are three types of scales
that address problems in somewhat different ways: the
traditional clinical scales and profile codes, the MMPI-2
content scales, and the specific problems or supplemental
scales. A scale is a group of items from the MMPI-2 item
pool that have been shown to measure certain symptom
patterns or personality traits. Each item cluster or scale
is normed on a population of normal individuals. This
2 MINNESOTA MULTIPHASIC PERSONALITY INVENTORY
normative group serves as the reference point to which all
profiles are compared.
The MMPI-2 Clinical Scales
Hathaway and McKinley developed the original MMPI
clinical scales by determining empirically the items
that separated clinical patients with clear diagnoses
from a sample of nonpatients, or normals. For example,
they developed scales to assess hypochondriasis (the Hs
scale), depression (the D scale), hysteria (the Hy scale),
psychopathic deviation (the Pd scale), paranoid thinking
(the Pa scale), psychasthenia (the Pt scale), schizophre-
nia (the Sc scale), and mania (the Ma scale). In addition,
two other scales were included on the clinical profile
to address problems of sex role identification (the
Mf scale) and social introversion and extraversion
(the SI scale). Besides interpretation of single clinical
scales, elevations on certain scale patterns or configu-
rations of scores (referred to as profile or code types)
are interpreted. These profile types result from clients
endorsing two or more of the clinical scales.
Content-Based Scales
In the development of MMPI-2, a number of scales
that assess the content themes an individual endorses
were developed. The content scales are homogeneous
item clusters that assess unitary themes and represent
clear communication about problems to the practitioner.
There are 15 content scales measuring different symp-
tom areas and problems; examples include Antisocial
Practices (ASP), Bizarre Mentation (BIZ), and Family
Problems (FAM).
Special Scales
Several additional scales have been developed to address
specific problems, such as the potential to develop sub-
stance abuse problems (the MacAndrew Addiction scale,
or MAC-R, and the Addiction Potential scale, or APS) and
whether the individual acknowledges having problems
with drugs or alcohol (the (Addiction Acknowledgment
scale, or AAS). The Marital Distress scale assesses clients’
attitudes toward their marital relationship. These special
scales allow the practitioner to assess specific problems
that are not addressed in the clinical or content scales.
Development of New Scales for the MMPI-2
Since its original publication, psychologists have been
developing new scales for the test. In fact, there have
actually been more MMPI scales published than there
are items on the test. A scale is simply a combination
of items that have been thought to measure a personal-
ity construct or symptom pattern. Researchers interested
in developing MMPI-2-based measures typically provide
substantial information about the novel measure’s psy-
chometric functioning, validity, and reliability (Butcher,
Graham, Kamphuis, & Rouse, 2006). In some instances,
new scales have been developed without sufficient empir-
ical research or clear rationale. For example the Restruc-
tured Clinical scales (Tellegen et al., 2003) were released
for public use, even though the release elicited contro-
versy with respect to these scales having been shown
to be highly redundant with existing measures (Rouse,
Greene, Butcher, Nichols, & Williams, in press), or having
drifted too far from the scales of origin (Butcher, Hamil-
ton, Rouse, & Cumella, 2006), or having been shown to
lack sensitivity to assessment of clinical problems (Rogers
& Sewell, 2006; Wallace & Liljequist, 2005). Caution in
interpreting these measures in assessing clients is needed
until sufficient research has delineated their meanings
and uses.
How the MMPI-2 Is Used
There are currently many diverse applications for the
MMPI-2 for evaluating individuals across a wide vari-
ety of settings. Contemporary uses include evaluating
clients who are being admitted to an inpatient psychiatric
facility, understanding problems and possible treatment
resistance of clients entering psychotherapy, providing
personality information for therapists to employ in giving
the client feedback in psychotherapy, assessing possible
personality problems of students applying for a graduate
clinical psychology program, measuring behavior prob-
lems and symptoms in neuropsychological evaluation of
a client with severe head injury, appraising personality
factors and psychological adjustment in applicants for an
airline pilot position, examining persons who are being
tried for murder and are claiming to be not guilty by
reason of insanity, and using the test as a research instru-
ment to evaluate the psychological changes in a drug
trial. There have been more than 32 translations and
adaptations of the MMPI-2 for use in other countries.
The items and scales have shown remarkable robust-
ness when used in other languages and cultures (Butcher,
1996).
In summary, the MMPI-2 is a self-report personal-
ity inventory that provides the test user with scores on
a number of scales. These scales assess response atti-
tudes, mental health symptoms, personality traits, and
special problems that the client might be experiencing.
The MMPI-2 has been widely validated and is used in
numerous settings around the world.
REFERENCES
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 MINNESOTA MULTIPHASIC PERSONALITY INVENTORY
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SUGGESTED READING
Butcher, J. N. (Ed.). (2006). MMPI-2: A practitioner’s guide. Wash-
ington, DC: American Psychological Association.
JAMES N. BUTCHER
University of Minnesota