Colin Cooper - Individual Differences and Personality

Individual Differences
and Personality
Individual Differences and Personality provides a student-friendly introduction to both

classic and cutting-edge research into personality, mood, motivation and intelligence,
and their applications in psychology and in felds such as health, education and sporting
achievement.
Including a new chapter on ‘toxic’ personality traits, and an additional chapter on
applications in real-life settings, this fourth edition has been thoroughly updated and
uniquely covers the necessary psychometric methodology needed to understand
modern theories. It also develops deep processing and effective learning by encouraging
a critical evaluation of both older and modern theories and methodologies, including
the Dark Triad, emotional intelligence and psychopathy. Gardner’s and hierarchical
theories of intelligence, and modern theories of mood and motivation are discussed
and evaluated, and the processes which cause people to differ in personality and
intelligence are explored in detail. Six chapters provide a non-mathematical grounding
in psychometric principles, such as factor analysis, reliability, validity, bias, test-construction
and test-use.
With self-assessment questions, further reading and a companion website including
student and instructor resources, this is the ideal resource for anyone taking modules
on personality and individual differences.
Colin Cooper lectured in Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast for 20 years before
emigrating to Canada. He is the author of several books on personality, intelligence
and psychological measurement and of numerous research articles. He was elected
president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences from
2021–2023.
Individual Differences
and Personality
Fourth Edition
Colin Cooper
Fourth edition published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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© 2021 Colin Cooper
The right of Colin Cooper to be identifed as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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to infringe.
First edition published by Hodder Education 2010

Third edition published by Routledge 2015
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Visit the companion website: http://www.routledge.com/cw/cooper

To Wesley
Contents
Preface ix
1 Introduction to individual differences 1

2 Personality by introspection 9
3 Measuring individual differences 33
4 Depth psychology 53
5 Factor analysis 75
6 Broad trait theories of personality 99
7 Emotional intelligence 125
8 Reliability and validity of psychological tests 147
9 Narrow personality traits 171
10 Sub-clinical and antisocial personality traits 191
11 Biological, cognitive and social bases of personality 223
12 Structure and measurement of abilities 253
13 Ability processes 277
14 Personality and ability over time 301
15 Environmental and genetic determinants of personality and abilities 325
16 Psychology of mood and motivation 351
17 Applications in health, clinical, counselling and forensic psychology 381
18 Applications to education, work and sport 403
19 Performing and interpreting factor analyses 431
20 Constructing a test 457
vii
Contents
21 Problems with tests 471

22 Integration and conclusions 491
Appendix A Correlations 499

Appendix B Code of fair testing practices in education 507
Author Index 515
Subject Index 525
viii
Preface
This book is all about personality, intelligence, mood and motivation – the branch of
psychology that considers how (and, equally importantly, why) people are psychologically
very different from one another. It also considers how such knowledge can be applied to real-
world problems (e.g., identifying psychopaths, discovering what leads children to perform
well in school) and considers how individual differences may be measured using psychological
tests and other techniques. The book is written for students in psychology departments who
are taking courses such as individual differences, personality, intelligence and ability,
psychometrics or the assessment of individual differences. However, students in other
disciplines (such as education) and at other levels (e.g., postgraduate courses in occupational/
organisational psychology) are also likely to fnd much to interest them – as is anyone else
who is interested in the nature, causes and assessment of personality and intelligence, or who
uses or develops psychological tests.
It has fve distinguishing features.
l It is ‘student friendly’ and introduces material as simply as possible, keeping jargon and
mathematical detail to a minimum.
l It offers a critical evaluation of theories, methods and experiments. There are two reasons
for this. Many years ago I learned from a book which described many theories but gave
little indication about what their merits and problems were. This was unsatisfying, as it
did not show which theories were dead-ends (or why), and did not show how the feld was
developing. Secondly, in ‘leading by example’ I hope that my critiques will encourage
readers to learn actively – to get into the habit of thinking about what they read, and
relating it to what they already know, rather than just memorising facts. This ‘deep learning’
will make the material easier to remember, as well as developing important skills of
evidence-based evaluation.
l It takes readers on a journey – from older (though sometimes still relevant and infuential
theories) through to modern research and its applications in the real world.
l It covers abilities, mood, motivation, test development and psychometric methods (such as
factor analysis, reliability, validity, test bias) as well as personality theories. There are plenty
of other textbooks covering personality theory, but students graduating in psychology
should surely also know something about the psychology of abilities, mood, motivation
and so on – especially as many of these are important when using psychology to address
real-life problems. In addition, without a little psychometric knowledge it is impossible to
understand modern personality theories or identify and use appropriate questionnaires and
tests for research projects or other purposes.
ix
Preface
l It includes ‘self-assessment questions’ and exercises in each chapter to ensure that key
concepts have been grasped and to encourage active learning, together with a range of
resources on the companion website which also support learning and teaching.
The book consists of sixteen chapters of psychological content (theories, applications of

those theories, etc.) interspersed with six methodological chapters. The chapters are meant to
be read in order, as that way a methodological chapter is encountered before the psychological
chapter which relies on it. Thus although ordering of chapters may seem unusual, I believe it
is necessary to link them in this way. Rest assured though, as this is not a psychometrics
textbook, so readers will search in vain for the mathematical formulae that are fundamental
to this branch of psychology. Given psychology students’ famous dislike of matters
mathematical, I have instead tried to provide a conceptual understanding of the measurement
issues.
This edition has been substantially revised and updated throughout in the light of recent
research. Two new chapters have been added – one on further applications of individual
differences research to real-life issues, and one on toxic personality traits, such as the ‘Dark
Triad’ of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.
My criteria for including theories and methodologies should be made explicit. I have
included theories if they are well supported by empirical evidence, important for historical
reasons, currently popular, or useful in applied psychology. I have not included much
information about the development of personality and ability, social learning theory or
constructivist models, since these are traditionally taught in developmental and social
psychology courses.
I must thank my editors Eleanor Taylor, Sarah Gore and Alison Macfarlane at Routledge,
together with Sarah Fish, as well as the panel of anonymous reviewers who gave excellent
feedback on draft chapters. The omissions and errors which remain are entirely my own fault.
Finally I must thank Wesley for his forbearance whenever I scuttled to the basement with a
distracted look on my face to continue writing . . . and our second generation of cats (Lucky
and PussPuss) for coming down to play with me.
Colin Cooper
London, Ontario
June 2020
x
Chapter 1
Introduction to individual
differences
Introduction
Most branches of psychology examine how people (or animals) behave in different settings
or under different experimental conditions: they assume that people are all much the same.
Thus when developmental psychologists talk about ‘stages of development’, the tacit
assumption is that all children develop in broadly similar ways. Likewise, social psychology
produces theories to explain why people in general may show obedience to authority, prejudice
and other group-related behaviours. Cognitive psychologists have shown that people recognise
the meaning of a word more quickly when it is preceded by a semantically related ‘prime’.
Physiological psychologists often assume that everyone’s nervous system has much the same
sort of structure and will operate in much the same way. So much of psychology involves
fnding rules that describe how people in general behave.
Yet this is only part of the story, for there is also signifcant variation between people. Some
of this variation is random; people will behave differently on different occasions for reasons
which are not clear. However some of the variations will be systematic. Some individuals are
more obedient to authority or more prejudiced than others. Some people will recognise all
types of words quickly while others will take far longer. Some will be more anxious than
others, whatever the situation. The psychology of individual differences seeks to understand
two things. It frst explores the ways in which people vary psychologically – using terms such
as ‘anxiety’ or ‘intelligence’. Second, it develops theories to explain how and why such
variations in behaviour come about. Do these individual differences in anxiety or intelligence
arise from the way in which children developed, their genetic makeup or the family environment
which they experienced during childhood? Or are variations in physiological makeup, such
as the extent and depth of the wrinkles on the surface of the brain or the amount of activity
in the autonomic nervous system, linked to any of these characteristics? The possibilities are
endless.
1
Introduction to individual differences
Given that the aim of psychology is to describe, explain and predict the behaviour of
organisms (people), it is clearly necessary to understand both the setting in which the behaviour
occurs, the general laws and relevant individual differences. For example, in order to predict
whether a jailed psychopath will re-offend if released, it is necessary to understand both the
general law (the statistical probability that a jailed psychopath taken at random will re-offend),
and individual differences that are related to re-offending behaviour (for example, the extent
to which the person shows remorse or empathy for their victims). This book focuses on
individual differences.
Learning outcomes
Having read this chapter you should be able to:
l Discuss why it is important to study individual differences, and how it
differs from other areas of psychology.
l Outline how individual differences may be discovered.
l Appreciate why it is necessary to determine how people vary (‘structural
models’) and the lower-level processes which cause these variations to
occur (‘process models’) to have a proper understanding of individual
differences.
I believe that there are four main reasons for studying individual differences:
l It is of interest in its own right. Most of us believe that personality, intelligence and so on
are important characteristics of people when making friends and seeking partners – perhaps
enduring music which we dislike, boring parties and dating apps rather than simply
marrying the person next door. But how should we conceptualise their personality? What
characteristics of a person should we look for?
l Psychological tests are useful in applied psychology. The study of individual differences
almost invariably leads to the publication of psychological tests. These measure abilities,
knowledge, personality, mood and many other characteristics. They are of immense value
to educational, occupational and clinical psychologists, teachers, nurses, careers counsellors
and others who may want to diagnose learning diffculties, dyslexia or outstanding mental
ability or seek to assess an individual’s suitability for promotion, level of depression or
suitability for a post that requires enormous attention to detail. The proper use of
psychological tests can thus beneft both society and individuals.
l Tests are useful ‘dependent variables’ in other branches of psychology. Psychologists make
extensive use of psychological tests when conducting experiments. A clinical psychologist
may suspect that feelings of hopelessness often lead to suicide attempts. In order to test this
hypothesis, it is obviously necessary to have some way of measuring hopelessness and by
far the simplest way of doing so is to look for an appropriate psychological test. Cognitive
psychologists studying the link between mood and memory (‘state dependent memory’)
must be able to assess both mood and memory in order to be able to test whether
a particular theory is valid and so they need sound mood questionnaires and tests or
experimental tasks measuring memory.
2
l Other branches of psychology can predict behaviour better when they consider individual
differences. Other branches of psychology rely on broad laws to predict behaviour, for
example ‘behaviour therapy’, in which the principles of conditioning are used to break
some undesirable habit. The therapist may know that a certain percentage of his or her
patients may be ‘cured’ by this technique, but is unlikely to be able to predict whether any
one individual is more or less likely than average to beneft from the therapy. However, it
might well be found that the effectiveness of a particular type of treatment is affected by
the individual’s personality and/or ability – a treatment that is successful in some individuals
may be much less successful in others. By taking such individual differences into account,
statistical tests become more sensitive. Instead of using analysis of variance to determine
whether patients who are given behaviour therapy for a particular problem tend to show
fewer symptoms than those who are assigned to a control condition, it is far better also to
measure relevant personality and ability traits. One can then perform what is known as an
‘analysis of covariance’ instead. This shows whether the personality and ability traits are
related to the number of symptoms shown and whether the two groups differ in the number
of symptoms shown. It can show whether individual differences and/or the experimental
condition infuence behaviour.
Main questions
Any attempt to understand the nature of individual differences must really address two quite
separate questions. The frst concerns the nature of individual differences – how individual
differences should be conceptualised. There is a wide range of answers to this question, as will
be seen in the following chapters. Indeed, it has been suggested that personality does not exist
and that how we behave may be determined entirely by the situations in which we fnd
ourselves rather than by anything ‘inside us’ and the evidence for such claims must be
scrutinised carefully.
The second important question concerns how and why individual differences in mood,
motivation, ability and personality arise. It should be clear that research into the ‘how’ of
individual differences can really only start once there is general agreement about their
structure. It would be a waste of time to perform experiments in order to try to understand
how ‘sociability’ (or ‘creativity’, ‘depression’, ‘the drive for achievement’, etc.) works if there
is no good evidence that sociability is an important dimension of personality in the frst place.
Thus studies of processes must logically follow on from studies of structure. Process models
of individual differences address questions such as the following. Why should some children
perform much better than others at school? Why should some people be shy and others
outgoing? Why do some individuals’ moods swing wildly from depression to elation and back
again? Why are some individuals apparently motivated by money to the exclusion of all else?
We cannot hope to answer all of these questions in the following chapters, but we shall
certainly explore what is known about the biological (and to some extent the social) processes
that underlie personality, mood, ability and motivation.
There is, however, one problem. Unless it is possible to measure individual differences
accurately, it will be completely impossible either to determine the structure of personality,
intelligence, etc. or to investigate its underlying processes. The development of good, accurate
measures of individual differences (a branch of psychology known as psychometrics) is an
absolutely vital step in developing and testing theories about the nature of individual
differences and their underlying processes. For this reason, this book contains several chapters
(3, 5, 8, 19–21) that focus on measurement issues.
3
How can we discover individual differences?

What sort of data should we use to discover individual differences? This is not an easy
question to answer, for there are several possibilities.
Clinical theories
Several theories have grown out of the experiences of clinical psychologists, who realised that
the ways in which they conceptualised ‘abnormal behaviour’ (particularly conditions such as
anxiety, depression and perhaps
schizophrenia) might also
prove useful in understanding
individual differences in the
‘normal’ population. Some
have probably been rather
quick to do this. Freud, for
example, saw rather small
samples of upper-middle-class
Viennese women (many of
whom showed symptoms that
are so unusual that they do not
appear in modern diagnostic
manuals), refused to believe
some of what they told him
(such as memories of sexual abuse) and built up an enormous and complex theory about the
personality structure and functions of humankind in general. Some clinically based theories
are discussed in Chapter 2, and Freud’s contribution is covered in Chapter 4.
Studying individuals in detail

Many people claim to have a rather good understanding of ‘what makes others tick’ – for
members of their families and close friends, at any rate. For example, we may believe that we
know through experience how to calm down (or annoy) others to whom we are close and
may feel that we have a good, intuitive understanding of the types of issue that are important
to them, thereby allowing us to
‘see the world from their point
of view’ and predict their
behaviour. For example, we all
have some intuitive feeling
about when to mention diffcult
issues to those close to us.
Perhaps getting to understand
individuals in this way should
be the mainstay of individual
difference research?
There are several diffculties
with this approach, even if it
can be proved that it leads
to accurate prediction of
4
behaviour. First, it will (presumably) take a long period of time to know anyone well enough
to be able to make good predictions about their behaviour. Second, it is not particularly
scientifc, as it will be diffcult to quantify anything, or say precisely how one intuits that the
other person will behave. Third, the vagaries of language will make it very diffcult to
determine whether different people operate in different ways. Two people could describe the
same characteristic in an individual in two quite different ways and it would be impossible to
be sure that they were referring to precisely the same characteristic. However, the greatest
problem of all is self-deception. It is very easy to overestimate how well one can predict
someone else’s behaviour and there is good evidence that most observers will see and remember
the 1% of behaviours that were correctly predicted and ignore or explain away the 99% of
predictions that were incorrect – a phenomenon called ‘confrmatory bias’. Davies (2003)
discusses this in the context of personality assessment.
Armchair speculation
If one has made good, unbiased observations of how individuals behave in many situations,
it might be reasonable to generate and test some hypotheses about behaviour. For example,
you may notice that some individuals tend to be anxious and jumpy, worry, lose their temper
more easily than most and so on. That is, the observer may notice that a whole bundle of
characteristics seem to vary together and suggest that ‘anxiety’ (or something similar) might
be an interesting aspect of personality. Of course, there are likely to be all sorts of problems
associated with such casual observations. The observations may simply be wrong, or they may
fail to take account of situations. For example, the people who were perceived as being
anxious might all have been in some stressful situation – it may be that the situation (rather
than the person) determines how they react. Moreover, the ideas may be expressed so vaguely
that they are impossible to test, as in Plato’s observation that the mind is like a chariot drawn
by four horses. Literature contains several testable hypotheses about personality, for example
when Shakespeare speaks through Julius Caesar:
Let me have men about me that are fat, Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights,
Yond’ Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
(Shakespeare: Julius Caesar I:ii)
This quotation suggests some rather interesting (and potentially empirically testable) process
models of ‘dangerousness’.
Scientifc assessment of individuals using

mental tests
Because of the problems inherent in other approaches discussed already, many psychologists
opt for a more scientifc approach to the study of personality and other forms of individual
difference. One popular approach involves the use of statistical techniques to discover
consistencies in behaviours across situations and to determine which behaviours tend to occur
together in individuals. The raw data of such methods are either behaviours (such as
performance on test items that require certain skills or knowledge), ratings of behaviour
(obtained by trained raters who note well-defned behaviours and so very different from the
clinical approach just mentioned) or self-ratings on questionnaires that are constructed using
sound statistical techniques. Much care is taken to ensure that the measurements are both
accurate and replicable.
5
A major problem with this

approach was fagged by Michell
(1997). The problem is that most
research in individual differences
uses questionnaires or tests, as is
discussed in Chapter 3 – and Michell
argues that the numbers which these
tests produce do not constitute
proper scientific measurement.
A typical questionnaire item might
be ‘do you suffer from “nerves”?’
and respondents are asked whether
they strongly agree, agree, are
neutral, disagree or strongly disagree
with the statement. This item might
be scored by awarding fve points
for ‘strongly agree’, down to one
point for ‘strongly disagree’; the
higher the score on this item, the
more neurotic the individual is
thought to be. The problem is that
these numbers do not behave the
same way as measurements of
length, weight, etc. For example,
you should be concerned about
whether someone who agrees with
the item (scoring 4) is twice as
neurotic as someone who disagrees
(scoring 2). If you think that they
are, remember that using numbers between 1 and 5 to represent the various responses was
arbitrary; I could have chosen the numbers 0 to 4, in which case someone who agreed with
the item (scoring 3) would have a score which is three times as large as someone who disagreed
with it (scoring 1) . . . It is good to worry about such issues, because most psychologists – even
professionals and learned researchers – do not, and tend to ignore Michell’s work in the hope
that it will somehow go away. We return to these issues in Chapter 3.
Summary
This brief chapter has introduced the general area of individual differences and has suggested
that the topic is worth studying because of its inherent interest, the many practical applications
of tests designed to measure individual differences, the need to measure individual differences
in order to test theories in other branches of psychology and the ability to make more accurate
predictions from theories that consider both individual differences and the impact of
experimental interventions on behaviour. We have also considered some methods for studying
individual differences, each with its own advantages and drawbacks, and have introduced the
distinction between structural models (‘how do people differ?’) and process models which try
to explain how these individual differences arise and operate.
6
References
Davies, M. F. (2003). Confrmatory Bias in the Evaluation of Personality Descriptions: Positive
Test Strategies and Output Interference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
85(4), 736–744.
Michell, J. (1997). Quantitative Science and the Defnition of Measurement in Psychology.
British Journal of Psychology, 88, 355–383.
7
Chapter 2
Personality by introspection
Introduction
We start by looking at the simplest possible way of measuring personality – asking people
about themselves and others, in the hope that they will be honest enough (and insightful
enough!) to provide useful data. The theories of George Kelly and Carl Rogers are included
in this book because they are both simple and highly infuential in counselling psychology.
They suggest that we should understand personality by asking how people view themselves
and others. Rogers preferred to use clinical interviews and questionnaires to explore this
whilst Kelly developed a technique known as the ‘repertory grid’ to understand how each
individual sees other important people (or things) in their life. This technique has recently
been used to understand how experts classify objects and develop computer programs (‘expert
systems’) to help machines make such decisions – e.g., identify tumours from diagnostic scans.
It is therefore of considerable practical use. However we identify several problems which
suggest that asking people to introspect may not be the best way of advancing our understanding
of individual differences.
Learning outcomes
l Outline what is meant by a phenomenological theory.
l Administer and interpret a repertory grid to discover an individual’s
personal constructs.
l Start to critically evaluate Kelly’s theory, identifying its strengths and
limitations.
9
l Describe and discuss the contribution of Carl Rogers and client-centred

therapy.
l Consider the strengths and weaknesses of Rogers’ theory, and the
problems of measuring personality by exploring individuals’
self-concepts.
The theories of George Kelly and Carl Rogers are both phenomenological in nature – they
focus on understanding each person as an individual, rather than classifying people into
groups (‘she is an extravert’) or comparing people with others (‘she is considerably more
sociable than the average person’). More specifcally, these theories suggest that a person’s
personality can be understood by knowing how they understand and experience the world,
both emotionally and cognitively. Thus both Kelly and Rogers focus on how the individual
perceives him- or herself and other people. The aim is to understand each individual’s unique
view of the world, through exploring his or her thoughts, feelings and beliefs. This is perhaps
the most obvious and simple way of investigating personality, which is why we consider these
theories frst.
Both Rogers and Kelly maintain that our subjective view of ourselves, other people and
events is of paramount importance. Since we can all choose to view events from a variety of
standpoints (losing one’s job may be viewed as a personal rejection, a minor inconvenience
or a great opportunity to change one’s lifestyle), any such theory of personality must focus on
how we view and interpret events. Kelly suggested that understanding how a person views
themselves and other people is the key to understanding their personality.
Because of this belief in the ability of the individual to communicate his or her thoughts,
feelings and experiences and potentially to alter ‘unhelpful’ views of the world, the theories
described in this chapter have had a substantial impact on counselling and clinical psychology.
Rogers’ theory, in particular, is almost indistinguishable from the practice of ‘client-centred
therapy’ that is the cornerstone of counselling techniques; we return to this in Chapter 17.
Self-assessment question 2.1

What is meant by the phenomenological approach to personality study?
An introduction to George Kelly’s personal

construct theory
George Kelly trained as a clinical psychologist and ran a mobile psychological service in
Kansas in the 1920s. He had a background in psychoanalytical theory, but gradually became
convinced that his clients were ‘paralyzed by prolonged drought, dust-storms and economic
concerns, not by overfowing libidinal forces’ (Rykman, 1992). He felt that what was lacking
from traditional theories of personality was any account of the way in which individuals
conceptualised, or tried to make sense of, the world. Indeed, such theories appeared to ignore
10
what seemed obvious to Kelly – that people strive to understand what is happening in their
lives and to predict what will happen next. He noted that:
A typical afternoon might fnd me talking to a graduate student at one o’clock, doing
all those familiar things that thesis directors have to do – encouraging the student to
pinpoint issues, to observe, to become intimate with the problem, to form hypotheses
either inductively or deductively, to make some preliminary test runs, to relate his data
to his predictions, to control his experiments so that he will know what led to what, to
generalize cautiously and revise his thinking in the light of experience.
At two o’clock I might have an appointment with a client. During that interview
I would not be taking the role of scientist but rather helping the distressed person work
out some solutions to his life’s problems. So what would I do? Why, I would try to get
him to pinpoint issues, to observe, to become intimate with the problem, to form
hypotheses either inductively or deductively, to make some preliminary test runs, to
relate outcomes to anticipations, to control his ventures so that he will know what led
to what, to generalize cautiously and to revise his dogma in the light of experience.
(Kelly, 1955)
Kelly’s cognitive theory thus suggests that each person operates rather like a scientist –
making observations (of people), using these observations to formulate rules that explain how
the world works, then applying those rules to new people and observing whether they behave
as expected. If the rules do indeed seem to explain behaviour, the ‘model’ thus created is
useful. If not, it needs to be refned or discarded in favour of an alternative. Different
individuals will develop quite different models to predict how others will behave – a principle
that Kelly termed ‘constructive alternativism’. The theory therefore how focuses on our
perception of others and not (necessarily) how they really are. As a result of this we each
develop our own informal theories about how others behave – ‘people who laugh a lot are
probably sad and unhappy inside’, ‘bigoted people are not in touch with their own feelings’
and so on. Each of these theories may be useful in helping us to understand how certain
individuals will react in certain situations and we are constantly trying to determine the types
of person for whom these theories make accurate predictions and the settings in which the
predictions work. For example, we test our theory of bigotry when we meet new people by
trying to gauge how bigoted and how in touch with their feelings each person is and estimating
whether there is a negative correlation between these two characteristics.
I am unashamedly enthusiastic about Kelly’s work, which is in danger of being forgotten.
It offers an excellent way of understanding how we each try to make sense of the world in
idiosyncratic ways – something which the trait theories discussed in Chapters 6, 7, 9 and 10
are not designed to do. Understanding people as individuals, rather than comparing them to
other people, seems to be hugely important for clinical work, and it will become apparent that
some of the techniques developed by Kelly have applications in many branches of psychology
and other disciplines. Hence Kelly’s theory is covered in more depth than is currently
fashionable.
Why different people develop different

systems of constructs
There are several possible reasons why different individuals develop and use different
constructs – why we view the world in different ways. First, not everyone is interested in
predicting the same set of outcomes. A salesperson will have a fnancial interest in distinguishing
11
those who will make a purchase from those who are browsing and will therefore probably
notice features of people’s behaviour that are not at all obvious to the rest of us.
Second, people differ in the way in which they use language – by ‘antisocial’ I may mean
‘quiet and reserved’, but someone else may mean ‘aggressive or destructive’. So it is possible
that two people who use two different words to describe a characteristic might be referring
to precisely the same thing – one person’s ‘aloof’ might refer to exactly the same psychological
characteristics as another person’s ‘shy’.
Third, people’s own experiences, backgrounds and values will infuence the way in which
they construe behaviours. Suppose two individuals witness a third placing a traffc cone on
top of a lamppost. One might construe the person as ‘criminal’ (as opposed to law abiding)
and another might construe them as ‘high spirited’ (as opposed to boring).

Why do people generally use different constructs to describe the same
element(s)?
When construct systems fail

Our predictions about people’s behaviour are not always accurate. Suppose we believe that
the three ideal ingredients for a pleasant night’s socialising involve other people whom we
construe as talkative, relaxed and generous. We would expect a stranger whom we construed
in this manner to be good company. Suppose that the prediction is completely wrong, and the
night turns out to be a disaster. Faced with a discrepancy between their mental model of what
should happen and the actual behaviour and feelings of all concerned, the individual doing
the construing has several courses of action open to them:
l They can re-evaluate the person with regard to each of the characteristics. Perhaps the
stranger was not quite as generous/talkative/relaxed as was frst thought. This implies that
the model for the kind of person who makes good company may still be correct, as it was
the initial construing of the stranger’s character that was faulty.
l Perhaps the whole ghastly evening shows that some other characteristics (such as extreme
political views or a penchant for practical joking) can also infuence whether a person
makes good company. The model can be extended to take these constructs into account.
The stranger would not have performed well against some of these new criteria and so this
accounts for the terrible experience.
l They may conclude that the model is a failure and that they need to consider quite different
characteristics of people in order to predict their behaviour. Abandoning one’s mental
model of how people work and having to construct a new one is thought to be associated
with feelings of threat and anxiety, as we shall see.
Discovering personal constructs: the repertory grid

Kelly suggests that we each classify objects and people (‘elements’) by means of ‘personal
constructs’. These can be represented by two terms that have opposite meanings for that
individual, e.g., good/bad, lively/boring, closed-minded/exciting. He argues that we assess
people by estimating their position on each of these constructs. You will notice from the third
12
example (closed-minded/exciting) that constructs do not have to be opposites in the sense of

dictionary defnitions. Four interesting questions immediately arise:
l What constructs does an individual use? In other words, what aspects of other people seem
to matter most to this individual? What characteristics does he or she fnd useful in
attempting to predict how others will behave? Are there any obvious features that simply
do not seem to be considered? Are there any very idiosyncratic constructs?
l How does the individual construe certain key ‘elements’ in his or her life? In particular,
how does the person construe him- or herself, as well as their family and their friends? The
technique offers an important way of discovering how the person views themself.
l What are the relationships between the constructs? It is quite possible that the constructs
will be correlated. For example, we may fnd that a patient views ‘lively’ (rather than ‘dull’)
people as ‘untrustworthy’ (rather than ‘honest’) – which may open up all kinds of fruitful
avenues for clinical enquiry.
l What are the relationships between the elements? For example, do heterosexual men
choose partners who they construe in much the same way as they do their mothers? What
if a woman construes her husband in much the same way as she construes sex criminals?
The repertory grid

The repertory grid technique can help to address all of these issues. The basic idea is very
simple and you will fnd it useful if you try the technique on yourself or a friend, using a grid
similar to that shown in Figure 2.1, only with about 12–14 columns and rows.
The participant is given a ‘role title’ (e.g., ‘brother’) and is asked to write down the name
of one real person (‘element’) who occupies this role in their life – e.g., ‘Aaron’. This is then
repeated for about a dozen role titles. They would typically include the participant, their
mother, father, partner, a particular brother, a particular sister, someone whom the participant
dislikes, someone for whom they feel sorry, their boss at work, a close friend of the same sex,
a well-liked teacher, etc. and are chosen so as to cover the main relationships in the participant’s
life, with disliked as well as liked individuals featuring on the list. All that matters is that the
person knows each of the elements well enough to have formed an opinion about them. It is
important to appreciate that the elements are real individuals – not stereotypes – and each
person should appear only once.
The participant taking the grid shown in Figure 2.1 has flled in the names of fve appropriate
individuals under their ‘role titles’ in the frst row of the grid. They are then given just three of
these names (‘triads’), which are chosen more or less at random, and are asked to think of one
important psychological way in which any one of these individuals differs from the other two.
For example, they might see one characteristic as being ‘mean’ – this is the ‘emergent pole’ of
the frst construct. They would then be asked to describe the opposite of ‘mean’. It could be
‘generous’, ‘helpful’ or many other possibilities; it does not have to be a logical opposite in the
sense of a dictionary defnition. However, let us suppose that our participant decides that the
opposite of ‘mean’ is ‘generous’ – this is the ‘contrast pole’ of the construct. The words
describing the emergent and contrast poles of the construct are entered into the frst row of the
repertory grid, as shown in Figure 2.1. The process is then repeated using another three
elements, until suffcient constructs have been generated or until the participant is unable to
produce any new constructs. Few people can produce more than a dozen or so different
constructs. If someone fnds it diffcult to think of a new construct, it is useful to encourage
them to group the elements differently. Rather than looking for a construct which differentiates
one’s boss from oneself and one’s brother, one could refect on how one differs from one’s
brother and one’s boss, how one’s brother differs from one’s boss and oneself and so on.
13
Figure 2.1 Example of a repertory grid
Two points need to be borne in mind when encouraging someone to reveal their constructs.
First, they should be encouraged to produce constructs that are psychological characteristics
and not (for example) physical features (e.g., tall vs short, male vs female) or anything to do
with an individual’s background or habits (e.g., poor vs wealthy, drinker vs teetotaller). The
second important principle is that each construct should be different from those given previously.
Gentle questioning is necessary to ensure that the participant feels that this is the case.
Once the participant’s constructs have been discovered, it is necessary to fnd out how they
view (‘construe’) each of the elements. There are several ways of doing this. The simplest is
to ask the participant to rate each element on a fve-point scale. A rating of 1 indicates that
the phrase in the left-hand column (the ‘emergent pole’) of the construct describes the element
very accurately – for the frst construct in Figure 2.1 this is ‘mean’. A rating of 5 indicates that
the phrase in the right-hand column (the ‘contrast pole’ of the construct) describes the element
very accurately – ‘generous’ in this case. A rating of 2 would show that the element was fairly
mean, a rating of 4 that they were fairly generous, and a rating of 3 that they were of average
generosity. Each person or ‘element’ is rated in this way and one then moves on to the next
construct. The repertory grid eventually looks something like that shown in Figure 2.2.

What is meant by:
1. a construct
2. a role title
3. an element
4. a triad?
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Figure 2.2 Completed repertory grid
Kelly argued that the development and elaboration of a construct system is a vitally
important aspect of mental health. If an individual employs few constructs, then they will
simply not have the cognitive apparatus for perceiving the fne distinctions between people
that are necessary to predict their actions. Because of this they may feel anxious; they simply
cannot understand how people behave. At the other extreme, an individual could have a vast
and unwieldy system of constructs that are not well organised and that can provide conficting
suggestions as to how the other person should behave. Instead, Kelly considered that a system
of constructs should be relatively small, but constantly refned.
Analysis of repertory grids

Whole books have been written about how to analyse these grids and the possibilities are
virtually endless. Simply looking at the grids can help one to obtain a general impression of
how an individual construes him- or herself, and some clinical work relies on this approach.
However, most analyses explore two main areas – patterns of similarities between the
constructs and similarities between the elements.
Similarities between the constructs are interesting because they reveal the ‘stereotypes’,
which are discussed later. You can see this for yourself from the grid shown in Figure 2.2.
If an element has a rating of 1 or 2 on the ‘happy vs miserable’ construct, then they also tend
to have a rating of 1 or 2 on the ‘lively vs quiet’ construct. The same is true for ratings of
4 and 5. This shows that the individual perceives happy people as being lively and miserable
15
individuals as being quiet, which is really rather an interesting fnding. The obvious way to
analyse these relationships is to correlate the rows of the matrix together.
The second way of analysing grids is to look for similarities between its columns. This
shows whether the participant sees two elements as being similar. For example, look at the
columns representing the participant’s father (Peter) and their boss (Mark) in Figure 2.2. You
can see that this participant tends to place these two individuals in similar positions on each
of the constructs. When one has a rating of 1 or 2 the other is likely to have a similar rating.
This shows that the participant regards these two individuals as having much the same type
of personality. However, there is a problem when correlating elements. A large positive
correlation indicates that two columns are almost directly proportional, not that they are the
same. For example, if two elements are given ratings of 1, 2, 2, 1 and 2, 5, 5, 2 on four
constructs, these elements will correlate perfectly, although it is clear that the ratings given to
the elements are very different. A statistic called the ‘congruence coeffcient’ gets round this
problem.
Some psychologists perform much more complex analyses on the data from repertory grids.
One popular technique, called ‘factor analysis’, will be discussed in Chapter 5. Other
researchers use a similar technique called cluster analysis. My view is that most such analyses
should be avoided unless they are based on elements and constructs which are supplied to
people, as discussed below. Otherwise the small amount of data produced by a single person’s
repertory grid means that each of the correlations between the elements (or constructs) has a
large amount of error associated with it – so that a small change to one of the numbers in a
grid will have quite a dramatic effect on the size of the correlations and thus on the results
from the factor or cluster analysis. If one supplies the elements and constructs which each
person must use, the responses of several people may be combined. This means that the
correlations between elements (or correlations between constructs) can be based on the
responses of several people, so that the correlations will be more accurate than if they were
based on just one person’s data (see Chapter 8).
Applications of repertory grids

Repertory grids are useful in several branches of psychology. An occupational psychologist
might invite a worker to identify people who flled the roles of ‘productive colleague’, ‘lazy
colleague’, ‘someone who works hard but ineffectively’, ‘good manager’, etc. They can thus
discover how workers construe colleagues who perform well – something that may be fed into
the personnel selection system. It is possible to specify some or all of the elements for a
repertory grid, rather than letting a person choose their own. For example, a therapist who
wanted to understand a person’s self-concept might include ‘myself as I would like to be’,
‘myself as I am now’, ‘myself as my family see me’, ‘myself fve years ago’ amongst the
elements. One who wanted to understand a client’s addiction might include ‘me before
drinking’, ‘me after drinking’, ‘how I will be after quitting drink’. Supplying elements also
means that the technique has many applications outside personality study. For example, the
elements might be paintings, and a psychologist with an interest in experimental aesthetics
might present a person with three paintings and ask how one differs from the other two to
understand how people classify works of art. Or the same thing could be done with political
attitudes, by choosing well-known politicians as elements.
It is also possible to supply people with the constructs so that the grid merely involves
them rating each element on each (supplied) construct. It seems to me that this detracts from
the main advantage of personal construct psychology – its ability to reveal each person’s
unique way of construing their world. However it has some merits when grids are used by
16
researchers (not clinicians) who seek to explore the relationships between elements and/or
constructs, as described below.
The technique may be used to elicit experts’ knowledge which forms the basis of ‘expert
system’ computer programs (e.g., Chao et al., 1999). Stephens and Gammack (1994) wanted
to design a system to help insurance underwriters (risk assessors who are not medical experts)
to assess the severity of an illness. How should they categorise illnesses in order to do so?
What do they need to fnd out to construct the ‘knowledge base’? Experienced underwriters
were given a repertory grid in which the various medical conditions were the elements; after
being given the names of three illnesses at random, one expert’s frst construct was ‘terminal
vs treatable’, the next construct was ‘indicative of something more serious vs limited risk’ and
the third ‘chronic vs acute’. Other experts gave similar constructs, and so representing these
illnesses in terms of these three constructs provides the information which underwriters need
to know in order to assess risk. Of course different categorisations would be used by other
types of experts, such as physiotherapists or physicians; the whole point of using repertory
grids is that they represent how information can be usefully structured for different purposes
rather than (for example) classifying diseases in terms of their biological origins or the
similarity of their symptoms.

A theatre manager wants to attract more students to performances, and so
wants to fnd out how students generally classify the 12 plays and shows
which will be staged next year so that they can write promotional literature
which resonates with the students. You have access to a random sample of
50 students. How might you explore how students typically categorise these
plays and shows?
Emotion
Core constructs are those which describe our selves, and since it is important that we should
be able to understand and predict our own behaviour, any disruption of these constructs is
associated with several unpleasant emotional experiences. Guilt is experienced when we
construe ourselves as behaving in ways that are inconsistent with our previous self-construction.
Suppose someone who rates themselves as ‘honest’ on the core construct ‘honest/dishonest’
steals from a shop in order to keep in with their peer group. They will need to re-evaluate
their position along the ‘honest/dishonest’ construct, and will consequently experience guilt.
Feelings of threat may arise when one realises that one’s core constructs are about to change
radically. For example, anyone would feel threatened when diagnosed with some terrible
illness (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease) which affects one’s lifestyle, as this means that ‘self’ would
have to be radically reconstrued. Fear is similar, but involves things about which we know
less. I know something about the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, but relatively little about
the effects of being bitten by a rattlesnake – I feel threatened by the former and fear the latter.
Children feel threatened if they feel that their parents may separate, but they fear ghosts.
Hostility arises when one continues to try to use a construct that is manifestly not working –
our hostile actions attempt to coerce others into giving us evidence that our construing is,
17
after all, correct. Some football supporters whose team has tumbled to the bottom of the
league will want to continue to construe their team as ‘excellent’ (as opposed to useless) and
will react with hostility whenever they realise this is inappropriate.
As mentioned above, anxiety is felt whenever it is realised that one’s construct system is
unable to deal with events – that is, that the events which occur fall outside the range of
convenience of the construct system. Feelings of anxiety may well then be followed by attempts
to extend the construct system in order to understand the novel situation. For example, if a
person has few constructs that are useful in helping them to predict how people will behave
in groups, it should follow that they experience anxiety in group situations which will prompt
them to develop more constructs to cover group behaviour.
Kelly’s view of aggression is, surprisingly, diametrically opposed to his view of hostility.
Whereas hostility is seen to be the result of clinging to constructs that simply fail to predict
events, aggression accompanies experiments that are performed to check the validity of one’s
construct system. We may literally ‘play games’ with people to see if they react as expected,
or test out our construct system in new settings, by performing new activities or by assuming
some other persona. This constant testing of the construct system is a vitally important aspect
of personal growth, since it is only through fnding the weaknesses of one’s construct system
that one can usefully develop it. Chiari (2013) gives a useful account of the place of emotion
within personal construct theory.
Critical thinking about Kelly’s theory

Kelly’s theory is not currently popular in psychology, although it is excellent for understanding
how an individual person views their world. It is also useful in many other areas of psychology
which need to explore how an individual (or group of people) discriminates between several
different objects or people. Although I am enthusiastic about this approach, I shall briefy
mention some possible problems.
l Kelly’s theory relies on language to describe the constructs and this can be problematical.
It would be a brave therapist who claimed she could view her world through the construct
system of another person, whose subtle nuances of meaning may elude her.
l The technique is not useful for comparing individuals. If a company wants to recruit
salespeople, then sociability is one obvious requirement – the organisation wants a
salesperson who will go and talk to potential customers. While it would be possible to
attempt to understand the phenomenal (personal) world of each applicant and to fnd out
from the self-rating on the repertory grid how outgoing each person perceives him- or
herself to be, there is absolutely no guarantee that the self-reports will be accurate. I can
think of several rather dull individuals who are frmly convinced that they have a frst-rate
sense of humour! There is no guarantee whatsoever that people’s views of how they (and
others) behave are accurate.
l Third, if a person lacks a particular construct, we cannot tell whether they have a ‘blind
spot’ for that characteristic, or whether they are simply bad at judging people on the
characteristic. A person’s construct system develops to help them predict the behaviour of
themselves and others. Thus a construct will only appear in their repertoire if (a) it is useful
in predicting behaviour, and (b) the individual is able to assess people’s position on the
construct with accuracy. If the person doing the construing makes extremely bad judgements
when attempting to assess others’ levels of ‘trustworthy vs deviousness’, then the construct
will clearly be useless for helping them to predict behaviour. If they could only learn how
to evaluate people better it might be extremely helpful. Finding that a person lacks a
18
particular commonly used construct could either mean that they have a ‘blind spot’ for
that characteristic or that they are unable to accurately assess people on it.
l There are also several areas that are not covered by Kelly’s theory. There is no good theory
of personality development apart from the belief that we all seek to expand and extend our
construct systems. How, when and why we learn to construe is something of a mystery.
l Some may also feel that it is all rather mechanistic – classifying individuals and making
coldly logical decisions about how they may behave (with emotions popping up as a sort
of by-product) does not sound like a very warm, human activity. And given that personal
experience plays such an important part in this theory, it is slightly odd that we rarely seem
to perceive ourselves using constructs consciously.
l What are the criteria that an individual uses to decide that their construct system requires
revision? Do different people use different criteria?
l What determines how this is done (e.g., the introduction of new constructs or the
re-evaluation of certain elements)?
l How could one determine whether Kelly’s view of ‘man-the-scientist’ is correct? The key
thing about any scientifc theory is that it should be capable of being shown to be incorrect.
For example, Newton’s laws may be tested by dropping objects of different masses and
timing how long they take to hit the ground, or noting what happens when billiard balls
collide. If objects fail to behave as expected, then the theory needs modifcation. It is
diffcult to see how Kelly’s theory could be tested like this. How could one ever show that
people do not use personal constructs? The theory may ‘feel right’ to individuals, but, as
we argue in Chapter 3, subjective reactions are really a rather poor way of establishing the
worth of a theory.
l It is diffcult to make specifc predictions on the basis of the theory. If a person construes
himself as being tough, hostile and determined to get his own way, then it seems reasonable
to suspect that he may be somewhat aggressive – but how? Engaging in heated debate,
partner beating, playing sport? The theory cannot tell us.
It should be clear if you have tried administering and interpreting another person’s repertory
grid that phenomenology is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Kelly’s
theory. What we need in order to evaluate this theory are hard, empirical studies of precisely
how ordinary people decide that their construct systems are failing and then revise them – that
is, we need to check whether our construct systems are indeed used and revised as Kelly
suggested.
The person-centred theory of Carl Rogers

Whereas Kelly believed that people form hypotheses and behave analytically in forging a
useful construct system, Carl Rogers focused closely on the meanings of the feelings experienced
by each individual. As we shall see in Chapter 4, a Freudian would dismiss emotional
experiences as mere by-products of some more fundamental unconscious confict and a
personal construct psychologist would regard them as interesting indicators of how well the
construct system was working. For Rogers, the subjective experience of reality was by far the
most interesting source of data. According to Rogers’ view, a psychologically healthy individual
is one who is in touch with their own emotional experiences, who ‘listens’ to their emotions
and can express their true feelings openly and without distortion.
Rogers was a clinical psychologist by training. His theories developed gradually from the
1940s to the 1980s and the basic principles of his approach have been adopted enthusiastically
19
by counsellors and clinical

psychologists who believe that
a careful, empathic study of
what a person thinks and feels
is the most valuable way of
gaining an insight into their
nature. He believed that open,
honest communication between
individuals is an exceptionally
rewarding experience for both
parties, and his method of
therapy is primarily concerned
with creating a safe, supportive
environment in which the client
feels comfortable enough to
remove any barriers and to explore his or her true feelings about him- or herself and others.
For Rogers, therapy is not about a therapist ‘doing things to’ a client but instead about giving
the client the space and support to verbalise their thoughts and feelings and eventually to work
out their own solutions.
The most important concept in Rogers’ personality theory is the ‘self’. This concept sprang
from his clinical work, in which clients would use expressions such as ‘I’m not my usual self
today’, implying that they had a unifed mental picture of themselves which could be
consciously examined and evaluated. This is known as the ‘self-concept’. Rogers’ clinical work
further led him to believe that his clients basically wanted to get to know their true self – to
stop behaving as they felt they ought to behave and just fulflling the demands of others:
As I follow the experience of many clients in the therapeutic relationship which we

endeavour to create for them, it seems to me that each one is raising the same question.
Below the level of the problem situation about which the individual is complaining –
behind the trouble with studies or wife or employer, or with his own uncontrollable or
bizarre behavior, or with his frightening feelings – lies one central search. It seems to me
that at the bottom each person is asking ‘Who am I, really? How can I get in touch with
this real self, underlying all my surface behavior? How can I become myself?’
(Rogers, 1967)
Having done so, individuals become less defensive and more open to their own attitudes
and feelings and can see other people and events as they truly are, without using stereotypes.
The individual also gets to like him- or herself, and to stop fearing their emotions:
Consciousness, instead of being the watchman over a dangerous and unpredictable lot
of impulses, of which few can be permitted to see the light of day, becomes the
comfortable inhabitant of a society of impulses and feelings and thoughts, which are
discovered to be very satisfactorily self-governing when not fearfully guarded.
(Rogers, 1967)
When he or she becomes aware of the self, the individual becomes much less dependent on
the views and opinions of others. What matters now is to do what seems right for them, rather
than looking to others for approval. ‘Unconditional positive regard’ is thought to be of
paramount importance in allowing the individual to explore him- or herself. By this is meant
20
a relationship with another person in which the individual feels that it is they themselves who
is valued and loved. This love would hold whatever terrible thing they were to do (or admit
to in the course of exploring their self-concept) – it is not conditional on how they behave.
In addition to the self-image, we can all envisage several other types of ‘self’, e.g., ‘self as
I was when I left school’ and ‘self as I would like to be’, and it can sometimes be useful to
consider the ways in which these memories and ideals differ from the current view of the self.

What is the self-concept? How can it be discovered?
The suggestions just discussed have implications for therapy and Rogers (1959) listed
several conditions that should be met if the therapist is to be able to help the client to explore
their self-concept. These requirements are as follows:
l that the client and therapist are in psychological contact – that is, that they are ‘on the same
wavelength’ and are honest with themselves and with each other.
l that the client’s behaviour is not at odds with his or her self-image (a situation known as
‘a state of incongruence’ which results in feelings of anxiety). They are not trying to be
something which they are not. This seems to resemble Kelly’s notion of guilt, discussed
above.
l that the therapist is congruent – that is, that the therapist’s self-image accurately refects the
way in which he or she behaves. They are not ‘role-playing being a therapist’.
l that the therapist shows unconditional positive regard for the client. The client must
feel that the therapist values them as a person whatever they choose to do; their liking and
respect for the client is not conditional on the client behaving in a particular way (e.g.,
giving up drinking, or achieving any other therapeutic goal).
l that the therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s internal frame of
reference – that is, that he or she can sense the person’s feelings, and view things from the
client’s perspective.
l that the client perceives the therapist’s unconditional positive regard and empathic
understanding – the therapist successfully communicates his or her unconditional regard
and empathy to the client.
Thus, in Rogerian (or ‘client-centred’) therapy, the therapist may at times disclose his or
her own feelings towards the client, even if these may sometimes be negative; not doing so
would mean that the client–therapist relationship lacked honesty. However, care will be taken
to ensure that the client realises that this is just the therapist’s impression of the client and
does not indicate that there is anything wrong with the client.
Rogers believed that the self-concept developed as a result of the child’s interaction with
their parents (particularly whether they were perceived to love the child unconditionally, or
whether their love was conditional on the child behaving in a certain way), and as a result of
feedback from other people in childhood and later life. He further suggested that people
behave in a manner that is consistent with their self-concept. For example, someone who
views him- or herself as shy and retiring will try to behave in a manner consistent with this
view. It is almost as if the individual uses the ‘self-concept’ as a kind of Delphic oracle – a
21
source to be consulted in times of uncertainty that will tell the individual how they should
behave. We try to ensure that our behaviour is congruent with our self-image. Whenever an
incongruence does arise (for example, when someone who views himself as mild mannered
loses their temper), feelings of tension and anxiety are experienced that are most unpleasant.
In fact, these feelings are so unpleasant that the person may try to distort reality (e.g., by telling
himself that he was an innocent victim of someone else’s aggression), thereby denying any
incongruence between his self-image and his behaviour. The problem is that such distortions
make it diffcult for the person to perceive his true self: it is much better, in the long run, for
an individual to recognise and accept the behaviour than to use ‘defences’ such as this.
More recent work suggests that the self-image may not be as consistent as Rogers imagined,
and this interacts with culture, so that (for example) in Japan people’s self-image is more
variable than in the West (Kanagawa et al., 2001). Understanding how the self-concept
develops (for example, as a consequence of feedback from others) is a core aspect of social
psychology; as such it will not be considered here.
Rogers suggests that each individual ‘has one basic tendency and striving – to actualize,
maintain and enhance the experiencing organism’ (Rogers, 1951). Self-actualisation is a term
that basically describes how we each fulfl our human potential – we learn to know, accept
and like our true selves, we can form deep relationships with others, we can be sensitive to
others’ needs and view others as individuals (rather than in terms of stereotypes) and we can
learn to break free from the demands of conformity. The term (coined by Abraham Maslow)
is highly abstract and it is not at all obvious how it can be assessed. However, the idea that
we become wiser, more sensitive, more in touch with our true selves and less concerned with
convention as we get older does have some intuitive appeal. What is less obvious is that this
is a ‘basic tendency and striving’ – it could, arguably, be a mere by-product of having had
more experience of other people as one ages.
The acid question is whether Rogerian therapy is effective – and if so, for which types of
problem. There is a substantial literature which typically shows that Rogerian (or ‘person-
centred’) therapy is effective for many conditions – but so too are other techniques (Stiles
et al., 2008; Laska et al., 2014) but such issues are beyond the scope of this book.
Measuring self-concept by the Q-sort

Measuring attitudes to the self by clinical interview can be a long, diffcult process. However,
there are other techniques for measuring attitudes towards the self, ideal self, etc. The Q-sort
is a measure designed by Stephenson (1953) to do just this. The client is given a pile of
approximately 100 cards, on each of which is a self-descriptive statement such as ‘I usually
like people’, ‘I don’t trust my emotions’, ‘I am afraid of what other people may think of me’
and so on. The client is asked to sort these into about fve piles, ranging from statements that
are most characteristic of them to those that are least characteristic. The number of cards to
be placed in each pile is usually specifed.
The placement of each card is recorded and the exercise is repeated under other conditions,
e.g., after several sessions of therapy or after asking the client to sort the cards according to
his or her ‘ideal self’ rather than actual self. It is a simple matter to track changes in the way
in which the cards are sorted and thus to build up a picture of how the self-concept is evolving
or the precise ways in which the self is seen to be rather different from the ideal self and these
can be usefully explored during the therapeutic interview.
A clinician could make up their own cards and this might be useful for exploring particular
issues that may have been raised or hinted at, but not fully explored. There also seems to be
no reason why the items in any standard personality questionnaire could not be transferred
22
on to cards and administered in this way, but the tendency is to use a standard set of items
(the California Q-set) to cover most of the standard feelings about the self. Block (1961) gives
full details on the use of the Q-sort technique in various settings. This measure provides a
quick method of allowing individuals to express their feelings about themselves in a quantifable
manner.
Measuring self-concept by the Twenty Statements Test

Another simple way of discovering someone’s self-concept is to ask them – and this is what
the Twenty Statements Test (the TST; Rees and Nicholson, 1994) achieves. It simply asks
people to say what sort of person they are, by answering the question ‘I am . . .’ in 20 different
ways, to fnd out how the person views themselves; ‘I am a socialist’, ‘I am an activist’,
‘I am a rebel’, for example, shows a rather different set of priorities from someone who puts
‘I am a person who enjoys learning’, ‘I am a deep thinker’, ‘I am smart’ at the top of their list.
Like the Q-sort it provides data which are qualitative (rather than numbers with which one
can perform exciting statistical analyses), and like the Q-sort there are few ways of checking
whether what the person says is correct. Are they perhaps ‘putting on a front’ to try to impress
the person who asks them to complete the test, for example?
There is some tension between social psychologists and individual difference psychologists
over such issues. Those who study individual differences focus on discovering whether
personality, abilities, etc. infuence behaviour. Social psychologists are generally more
interested in how people view themselves and others (prejudice, etc.) and how people’s
perceptions of situations affect their behaviour. A social psychologist would thus explore the
formative experiences and cultural factors which led our student to view themself as a left-of-
centre activist in certain settings; a personality psychologist would be more interested in
discovering which personality characteristics lead certain individuals to behave in a rebellious
way in most situations. Here the person’s view of themselves is thought to be a consequence
of their personality rather than the reason for their behaving in a particular way. For example,
a personality trait of rebelliousness might cause someone to view themselves as a socialist,
rebel and activist, whilst intelligence might cause someone to view themselves as a smart
intellectual who enjoys learning.
There are a number of problems with this argument as stated here; it makes little sense to
observe behaviour and explain behaviour using the same term, for example. You may have
noticed that I said that someone was a rebel because they were rebellious, which makes little
sense. We address these issues in Chapter 6, and show that they are not a major issue for
personality theory. Dunlop (2015) gives a good overview of some of these issues from the
point of view of a social psychologist.
A little integration
Thus far we have looked at how people view themselves (and other people, in the case of
Kelly) by:
l seeing where they position themselves along various personal constructs

l noting how they describe themselves when writing their ‘self characterisation’
l exploring the self-concept through clinical interview
l using the Q-sort to discover which characteristics a person feels describes them well, and
which are unlike them
l using the Twenty Statements Test to discover how people view themselves.
23
In each case the aim is to try to understand the person’s self-concept which may be very
useful if the person is undergoing therapy or counselling, the idea being that the therapist can
understand how the individual views themselves and (perhaps) explore some inconsistencies,
important areas which are not mentioned, or (in fxed role therapy) discovering how it feels
to act as though one was at the opposite end of one or more constructs – for example when
a timid person tries to be confdent.
The problem is that this sort of data relies on introspection and self-insight, and it is
diffcult to know how accurate a person’s insights are.
Accuracy of self-reports
It is not hard to fnd instances where people have unrealistic views of themselves – even when
they are trying to be honest. For example, men tend to overestimate their intelligence whereas
women underestimate theirs (Beloff, 1992) and we probably all know people who think they
are the life and soul of the party whilst everyone else views them as just being loud and
obnoxious. Vazire and Carlson (2011) discuss such blind-spots, and suggest that self-reports
alone are unlikely to reveal the truth about an individual’s personality.
During therapy, the therapist will explore any discrepancies between the way the person
views themselves and their behaviour, and they will give the client feedback about how they
appear to others, which may help them alter their self-concept. But if we try to use self-reports
as a basis for understanding personality, then inaccuracies in self-reports become a major
problem. It is always possible that people will be deluded when describing their selves, and
so it is unwise to rely solely on how they describe themselves when studying personality.
This is not so much of a problem for social psychologists who tend to be interested in
attitudes, of which attitudes towards the self is one. They explore how perceptions, social
interactions and other environmental variables infuence people’s views of themselves (e.g.,
Pilarska and Suchanska, 2015), and frequently suggest that how a person views themselves
determines their behaviour. Their focus of interest tends to be why a person believes something
about themselves (for example, what causes them to feel that they are anxious), rather than
establishing whether they really are more anxious than other people. Whilst it may be very
useful to understand what leads to certain perceptions of oneself (for example, exploring
whether someone feels that being bullied in childhood has made them anxious) because these
analyses are performed on individuals, it is diffcult to know whether the attributions made
by one person will generalise to other people. The same objective experience may be interpreted
by different people in different ways.
For this reason most psychologists who study individual differences focus on how people
actually do behave, rather than how they see themselves. So rather than noting that a person
describes themselves as ‘anxious’ and trying to identify environmental events which caused
this, a psychologist with an interest in individual differences would try to discover what
(if anything) is meant by ‘anxiety’, whether it really exists, and (if so) how it should be
measured. They will then try to measure it and determine empirically if a particular person is
more or less anxious than average. The phenomenological approach, trying to understand
each individual’s view of themselves, simply cannot provide such information.
Qualitative rather than quantitative data

The methods described above tend to give qualitative data: descriptive words, rather than
anything which can be represented by numbers. If one person says that they are ‘anxious’,
another that they are ‘nervy’ and a third that they are ‘twitchy’, do they all mean exactly the
24
same thing? It is hard to tell for sure. Some would argue that this is a disadvantage of these
methods, for this makes it diffcult to compare people numerically. Even if people use the same
word, and we are prepared to accept that they feel that it means the same thing to both of
them, we cannot quantify the extent to which they feel the characteristic. Without being able
to quantify the extent to which each person is anxious, eccentric, intelligent, etc. it is diffcult
to test hypotheses using quantitative methods.
Rightly or wrongly, psychologists and other professionals often attempt to quantify
personality – for example to say that ‘this person is more anxious than 80% of the population’ –
and this involves comparing people on the same characteristic (e.g., anxiety) rather than
exploring how each individual views themselves or construes the world. The theories discussed
in Chapter 6 onwards therefore attempt to compare people, rather than focusing on them as
individuals.
Attitudes and self-esteem

Attitudes are really just evaluations of people, objects or concepts – and so we can develop as
many attitudes as there are nouns in the dictionary. We may have attitudes to things which
we have not encountered (Martians or dragons, for example), and so it is hardly surprising
that you have formed some sort of opinion – attitude – about what sort of person you are.
This is what we discussed earlier as the ‘self-concept’. We can also develop attitudes to our
‘ideal self’, ‘future self’ and suchlike, and it is tempting to suggest that the study of personality
should just involve identifying all of the important objects in our lives and measuring the
strengths of these attitudes.
There may be some problems with doing so.
l The frst is that attitudes are, by defnition, subjective. My attitude to broccoli is almost
certainly different to yours, even though we are both evaluating exactly the same thing.
So we are not explaining any real property of broccoli when we explore our attitudes to
it, but just giving a subjective opinion of it which is neither correct nor incorrect. Likewise,
my evaluation of my ‘self’ may not tell us anything useful about what I am really like. It is
a subjective opinion, rather than necessarily being based on reality. It could be argued that
this is a problem, as scientifc theories should try to measure how people are, not how they
think they are.
l The second diffculty is that this approach is not very parsimonious. Given that there are
potentially billions of objects, concepts and people in the world, and we might have an
attitude about each one, understanding personality by measuring the strengths of our
attitudes to each of them would be a truly massive undertaking.
l The third problem is that attitudes change – although some change more than others
(Krosnick et al., 1993) – and social psychology has explored factors leading to the
development and change of attitudes in considerable detail; see for example Olson and
Maio (2003) or virtually any other social psychology textbook. Describing personality by
means of a vast list of subjective attitudes which constantly shift would thus be a
formidable task.
However we do not abandon attitudes entirely. Chapter 10 identifes some attitudes which
vary together from person to person. For example, some people tend to value organised
religion, believe in capital punishment, prefer not to be spontaneous, dislike the idea of
legalised drugs and so on. Clusters of attitudes which tend to vary together from person to
person can be viewed as a personality trait (‘conservatism’ in this example).
25
Notwithstanding the problems outlined above, several questionnaires have been developed
to measure self-esteem – the extent to which a person likes their self. These may allow self-
esteem to be quantifed, and are widely used in social psychology and one test, the ‘Self-Esteem
Scale’ (Rosenberg, 1965, 1989), is cited well over 4000 times in the literature. The items in
this ten-item scale are very similar to each other and basically just ask ‘do you like yourself?’
in ten different ways. We argue in Chapter 6 that this may be a problem.
It is important to determine whether self-esteem causes people to behave in a certain way
or experience particular emotions, or whether some other things (e.g., personality, or having
a job or relationship) tends to boost self-esteem and also infuence a person’s behaviour/
feelings. Social psychologists tend to assume that self-esteem drives feelings and behaviour,
but it is important to establish this empirically. This work is important because although self-
esteem is a subjective variable, scores on self-esteem scales might be able to predict more
objective characteristics, such as how depressed a person is. Sowislo and Orth (2013) show
that low self-esteem seems to predict levels of depression later in life; it is not the case that
depression causes someone’s self-esteem to become eroded. It seems that self-esteem does seem
to have some predictive power, much as Rogers suggested – although it takes some fairly
sophisticated analyses to demonstrate this.

How might you test whether the Q-sort gives an accurate assessment of
self-concept?
Evaluation
It is diffcult to evaluate Rogers’ theory, since it is more of a philosophical view of the person
than a formal, concrete psychological theory. It evolved from Rogers’ own experiences as both
therapist and man, rather than from any formal empirical data that can be independently
scrutinised. In addition, it may not be a scientifc theory in that it would be diffcult to show
that the self-concept does not exist. We all think about work colleagues, family members, mass
murderers and heads of state from time to time and make some attempts to understand why
they act in the various bizarre ways in which they do: it would be amazing if we never thought
about ourselves at all. Likewise, perhaps I have an ‘integrated self-concept’ (see myself as a
single individual) since this is what I am. Thus it could be argued that we are all bound to
have an integrated self-concept, much as Rogers described.
A great deal of what Rogers says about the development of self-concept and the search for
the true self certainly feels true to many people. However, as we discuss in Chapter 3, this
does not necessarily mean that it is correct. Many people presumably feel convinced that they
have a good chance of winning a fortune whenever they buy a lottery ticket or back a horse.
More empirical evidence is needed to back up these claims.
The next problem is the source of data. In Rogers’ theory (along with that of Kelly) there
is a total reliance on self-report; the clients’ self-insights are assumed to be correct. What if
the client is unwilling or unable to introspect in detail, perhaps because they do not want to
take part in the assessment or they have poor verbal skills or problems dealing with abstract
concepts?
26
That said, the theory has many strengths. Like Kelly’s personal construct theory, it attempts
to explain how the whole person functions, rather than concentrating on just one or two
aspects of personality. It has also made some very specifc suggestions about the necessary
conditions for therapeutic change and some old empirical studies have shown that the client’s
experience of warmth, unconditional positive regard and empathy are indeed crucial factors
in determining the success of some forms of psychotherapy (Truax and Mitchell, 1971).
However, the problem is that many of the concepts are rather vaguely defned – the accurate
assessment of ‘empathy’ and ‘genuineness’ is a nontrivial problem and patients cannot agree
as to what the terms mean (Bachelor, 1988). Nonetheless, some aspects of the theory can be
tested, e.g., the assumption that psychological health is marked by congruence between self
and experience.
Rogers and Kelly’s theories are similar in many respects. They are both phenomenological;
they focus on a person’s subjective view of the world and themselves. Both are weak on
developmental theory. Both theories are based on clinical experience and try to help people
understand how they view their world. However, they differ drastically in terms of therapy.
While Rogers focuses on helping the client grow, mature, discover and accept their true self,
Kelly’s method of fxed role therapy encourages people to try out new selves (e.g., becoming
spontaneous rather than cautious) to see whether this improves their ability to predict
behaviour.
Suggested additional reading

Walker and Winter (2007) and Winter (2013) provide useful overviews of Kelly’s work,
although many readers will want to consult some of the original sources that they cite.
Benjafeld (2008) gives a historical and philosophical view of Kelly’s theories and places them
in context. Personal construct theory is developed in the two volumes of Kelly (1955) the frst
three chapters of which are reprinted as Kelly (1963). http://kellysociety.org contains some
useful resources, as does the old site http://www.pcp-net.org/encyclopaedia/main.html. Other
sources include Fransella and Thomas (1988) and the work of Neimeyer and Neimeyer (1990,
1992) together with papers in the Journal of Constructivist Psychology and the International
Journal of Personal Construct Psychology. Chiari (2013) gives a good account of the links
between personal construct theory and emotion. Those who are interested in the application
of repertory grid techniques to software engineering might like to consult Edwards et al.
(2009) or Tan and Hunter (2002). Caputi and Viney (2012) give another good account of grid
methodology.
Rogers (1967) provides a humble and very personal account of his theory and clinical
methods that makes compelling reading. Other useful sources include Rogers et al. (1989)
and the chapter by Raskin and Rogers (1989). Papers by Bozarth and Brodley (1991), and
two reprints of Rogers’ early papers (Rogers, 1992a, 1992b) together with Anderson (2001)
will appeal to those who are interested in the therapeutic implications of these theories,
whilst the Journal of Humanistic Psychology covers all aspects of Rogers’ theories and
therapies. The obvious source of information on Q-sort methodology is Block’s (1961) old
book The Q-Sort Method in Personality Assessment and Psychiatric Research which is
available online, and also his account of a large longitudinal study which used Q-sort
methodology to tame an unruly mass of qualitative data (Block, 1971). There are also plenty
of papers demonstrating the utility of the Q-sort methodology in different felds (e.g., van
Ijzendoorn et al., 2004).
27
Answers to self-assessment questions
SAQ 2.1
This involves trying to discover and understand each person’s unique view
and interpretation of the world in which they live. For example, when
examining family dynamics, a phenomenologist would be interested in the
implications of a child’s belief that her mother was cruel and unkind and not
particularly interested in whether the mother really was unkind.
SAQ 2.2
I suggest three main reasons. First, different observers may be trying to
predict different outcomes and so may pay attention to rather different
aspects of people’s behaviour. Second, the vagueness of language makes it
possible that two observers might use two different phrases when they are
actually referring to precisely the same characteristic in another person.
Third, all kinds of social values are likely to colour the way in which we
interpret behaviour.
SAQ 2.3
1. A construct is a psychological dimension that an individual fnds useful
when classifying a certain set of elements (usually people).
2. A role title is a type of person with whom the individual is likely to be
well acquainted (e.g., a brother). A wide range of role titles is used to
ensure that the individual considers a wide range of elements (people)
when completing the grid.
3. An element is a particular individual who flls one of the role titles (e.g.,
John, who is ‘a brother’).
4. A triad is a group of three elements used to elicit constructs by asking the
individual to name one psychological way in which any one of the
elements in the triad is very different to the other two.
SAQ 2.4
Using the names of the 12 plays as elements, elicit personal constructs from
each student in turn by choosing three plays at random and asking each
28
person how one differs from the other two. Repeat until no new constructs
can be found; the number of constructs will probably be different for each
person. Look at the constructs and try to identify which ones are most
common; these are the terms which the theatre manager might be well
advised to stress in their promotional material. Examining the average
rating given to each element (play) on each of these constructs will show
which constructs best describe each play. (Of course the canny manager will
choose not to mention a negatively toned construct such as ‘boring’, even
if everyone agrees that it describes a particular play wonderfully well.) As
each student rates the same set of elements, it would also be possible for
an enthusiastic researcher to learn to perform a cluster analysis or factor
analysis in order to identify groups of plays which the students view as
being similar.
SAQ 2.5
The self-concept is our view of our personality, abilities, background, etc., as
it really is, and not as it is modifed by the demands of society or our own
aspirations. It is a coherent mental image of the type of person that we really
are, deep down. It can best be explored in the context of a supportive
relationship with another person.
SAQ 2.6
There is no simple way of testing this. After all, the individual is the only
person who can really comment on some of his or her deepest, most personal
feelings. However, it might be possible to attempt some experiments. One
approach could involve giving the Q-sort twice, after a gap of a week or
two, and checking that the person produces roughly the same arrangement
of cards. If there is a marked discrepancy (and the client cannot think of any
reason why their self-image may have altered), then it may be unwise to
proceed with the technique. Alternatively, the cards (and particularly those
towards the extremes of the distribution, which best and least describe the
individual) could be put into a questionnaire and other people (e.g., partner,
parents, close friends) could be asked to rate the client on each quality,
thereby showing whether the client’s self-image was consistent with other
people’s impressions. Or the therapist could be asked to describe the
person’s self-concept, and this could be compared with the results of
the Q-sort.
29
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Bachelor, A. 1988. How Clients Perceive Therapist Empathy: A Content Analysis of ‘Received’
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Beloff, H. 1992. Mother, Father and Me: Our IQ. The Psychologist, 5, 309–311.
Benjafeld, J. G. 2008. George Kelly: Cognitive Psychologist, Humanistic Psychologist, or
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Chapter 3
Measuring individual differences
Introduction
The previous chapter mentioned the use of a questionnaire to measure self-esteem, but it did
not go into any detail about how questionnaires and tests are constructed, used and evaluated.
If we are unable to actually measure people’s levels of self-esteem, anxiety, intelligence or
other characteristics accurately, then the study of individual differences can never be scientifc
or quantitative; it will be diffcult to test theories, or to assess these characteristics for the
purpose of diagnosis, individual guidance or personnel selection. So before studying other
theories it seems sensible to pause and to discuss how we can go about measuring individual
differences; more detail about designing and using tests and questionnaires is given in
Chapters 20 and 21.
This chapter thus provides an introduction to psychometrics, the branch of psychology
that deals with the measurement of individual differences. It introduces the concepts of trait
and state. Various types of psychological test are outlined and the interpretation of individual
scores through the use of norms is discussed. Finally, some guidance is given as to how to
select a test and use it ethically.
Learning outcomes
l Discuss what is meant by psychometrics.
l Show an understanding of what an ‘operational defnition’ is, and the
distinction between operational defnitions and theoretical constructs.
33
l Explain the differences between ability traits, personality traits and

attainments.
l Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of measuring personality
using Q-data, Q’-data, L-data and T-data, and projective tests.
l Explain how and why scores on psychological tests behave differently
from physical measurements, and how norms may give meaning to test
scores
l Outline Michell’s objections to treating responses to test items as if they
were real numbers.
l Show that you can locate a test.
One of the most important distinctions between psychology and other disciplines that also
claim to give insight into the ‘human condition’ is that of measurement. Students of literature
are happy to make suggestions about the personality, motives and moods of fgures such as
Hamlet, Hannibal or Hagar and although these contributions may be scholarly, they are not
scientifc in that they cannot ever be shown to be wrong. This is where psychology differs
radically from other methods of understanding how humans function. While great literature,
religious doctrines, therapists’ explanations, old wives’ tales, psychoanalytical interpretations
of the causes of neurosis, armchair speculation and ‘common sense’ may provide some
accurate and useful insights, it is perfectly possible that some or all of these are simply
incorrect.
We certainly cannot tell what is true just by our emotional reactions. A favourite trick of
academics is to ask students to complete personality questionnaires that are then taken away
for computerised scoring. The next week, the students are given a talk about the ethics of
testing, are handed sealed envelopes each holding a computer-generated analysis of their
personality and asked to rate how accurate they fnd it. In my experience, most students are
amazed by how insightful and accurate the results are and astounded by the depth of these
insights. Asking members of the class to compare their descriptions is the kindest way of
showing that everyone in the class has received precisely the same personality assessment! The
point is that one simply cannot trust one’s emotional judgements to sort out fact from fction.
The fact that the results obtained from some personality test ‘feel right’ to an individual is not
an adequate criterion. This, of course, is unsurprising – given that we are all human beings,
it will be possible to make some broad descriptions about how human beings in general
behave or feel, which is a far cry from the scientifc assessment of individual differences.
Instead, we need to develop more rigorous techniques.
Psychometrics
Psychometrics is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientifc measurement of
individual differences and six chapters of this book are devoted to psychometric principles.
This is because the accurate assessment of individual differences, using proper psychological
tests or other techniques, is vital for a proper, scientifc study of the discipline. It involves
fnding an ‘operational defnition’ for each theoretical term: a score on some questionnaire,
test or some other instrument which is thought to refect the level of some theoretical concept.
34
It is vital to appreciate that a person’s level of some theoretical concept is not the same as their
score on a test – because making any operational defnition involves a lot of arbitrary decisions.
In the nineteenth century, Francis Galton surmised that ‘intelligent’ people might be able
to react faster than less intelligent people – a theory that has some value in so far as it suggests
that intelligence may be linked to the speed with which our nervous systems can process
information, as discussed in Chapter 13. To test this hypothesis, it is necessary to measure
some individuals’ reaction times and also their intelligence; the analysis involves correlating
these two scores together. Without effective measures (operational defnitions) of both
intelligence and reaction time, the hypothesis is untestable.
An operational defnition of reaction time

What might a task designed to measure reaction time look like? The important thing is to
design the task so that performance refects reaction time rather than anything else. One could
program a computer to present a shape somewhere on a screen and time how long it takes
the person to push the space bar on the keyboard when they see it. This sounds simple – but
a lot of decisions need to be made which will probably infuence the accuracy of the measure.
For example:
l Should we measure reaction time just once, or average a person’s responses from several
trials? (Many trials – this will reduce the infuence of random errors)
l Should we give practice trials at the start of the experiment? (Does the literature show that
performance improves over time? If so, we should, otherwise individual differences in rate
of learning to perform the task might be confused with reaction time. We need to ensure
that everyone is performing at their peak level.)
l Should the shape be presented in the same position each time? (Yes, for otherwise the task
will also measure the speed at which people can scan the area of the screen, which might
be different from reaction time.)
l Should the time between trials always be the same – for example, should the next shape
appear 1 second after the person makes a response? (Certainly not – they will anticipate
it. A random interval might be better. Perhaps between 1–3 seconds? If it is much longer,
people might get bored . . .)
l How can outside distractions (noises, etc.) be minimised?
There are many other issues to be considered, too. How many trials should be given? 10?
1000? Should there be rest breaks, and if so who should choose when they happen? Should we
assume that very long reaction times (several seconds) refect a lapse of attention and so should
be dropped from the analysis? If so, what should the ‘cut-off’ point be? Should we use a tone
instead of a shape? Does the size, colour or location of the shape on the screen matter? Should
the participant be warned by a tone a few seconds before each trial, so that they can focus their
attention? If so, should this warning interval be random (e.g., between 1 and 3 seconds) to
prevent people anticipating when the shape will appear? Is the context important – for example,
would it be better to measure reactions to brake lights in a driving simulator? It is clear that
plenty of arbitrary decisions are made even when developing a simple task like this.
The bottom line is that if two people develop tasks measuring ‘reaction time’ these tasks
are likely to be rather different – and whilst both are (hopefully) infuenced by reaction time
to some extent, neither of them will correspond perfectly to the theoretical concept. One of
the main aims of psychometrics is to develop tests which correlate substantially with the
theoretical concepts which they are designed to measure.
35
An operational defnition of intelligence

The same principles apply when developing a scale to measure intelligence. You may even like
to consider whether it is even appropriate to try to measure ‘intelligence’, as some authors
(Gardner, 1993; Guilford, 1967) have argued that there are many quite distinct (uncorrelated)
abilities, and so combining them to form a measure of ‘intelligence’ is meaningless. We return
to this issue below, and in Chapter 12. However assuming that it is appropriate to measure
intelligence, a test doing so will probably present people with a wide selection of different
puzzles to solve – perhaps measuring how many are solved correctly in a certain time. It would
be sensible to include a wide range of puzzles – perhaps measuring various forms of memory,
inductive and deductive reasoning, visualisation, and so on. Examples of such items are given
in Chapter 12.
Should any puzzles involve language, such as anagrams or measures of vocabulary? If so,
this may pose problems for those whose frst language is not English, or people with dyslexia.
How many puzzles should be used, for when do fatigue and boredom set in? Should the
person write the answer, or choose the correct answer from a list? It is also necessary to ensure
that the diffculty of the puzzles is appropriate for the age and ability of the people being
tested, the instructions need to specify whether or not people should guess if they are unable
to solve a puzzle, and whether it is permissible to skip an item if one is unable to solve it.
The importance of psychometrics

If there is no obvious relationship (correlation) between operational defnitions of intelligence
and reaction time (which is what Galton found) this could either be because there is no link
between intelligence and reaction time, or that in reality there is such a link, but this cannot
be detected because one or both of the concepts have inadequate operational defnitions. The
intelligence test and/or the method of measuring reaction times may be fawed. One aim of
psychometrics is to develop sound operational defnitions of theoretical concepts (‘intelligence’,
‘anxiety’, ‘self-concept’, etc.). (In fact, Galton’s means of measuring reaction time was
somewhat crude, as were his attempts at assessing intelligence; see Chapter 13 to discover
what we now know about this relationship.) The extent to which a test measures what it is
supposed to is known as its validity and we shall return to this concept in Chapter 8. The key
point is that we need highly accurate psychological tests in order to provide operational
defnitions of abstract terms. Without such tests to provide solid operational defnitions of
psychological concepts, theories degenerate into mere speculations of zero scientifc value.
The second main use of psychometrics is thus to discover how we should describe
personality, ability, mood and motivation using a psychometric technique called factor
analysis. Without understanding the basic principles of this (which will be covered in Chapter 5)
it is impossible to grasp how these theories have developed, their strengths and weaknesses
and whether a particular theory is based on sound empirical evidence.
These issues are important because psychological tests are very widely used. Researchers
in many branches of psychology use tests and questionnaires to measure concepts such as
‘working memory’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘prejudice’. Occupational psychologists and personnel
managers use tests to assess the potential of job applicants. Educational psychologists may
use tests to detect learning diffculties, diffculties in using language, etc. Medical psychologists
may use a questionnaire to identify individuals who may show early signs of dementia; there
are many other applications, too as described in Chapter 17 and 18. It is vitally important
that test users understand how these instruments are constructed, how to identify those which
36
will produce accurate scores for a particular application, how they should be administered,
scored and interpreted and the importance of assessing measurement error, bias and other
important and potentially litigious issues.

a. What is an operational defnition?
b. Try to think what you might use as operational defnitions of French-
speaking ability and meanness.
Most readers of this book will use psychological tests in some shape or form, either as
dependent variables for testing psychological theories or in applied psychology, and everyone
will need to understand some basic principles of psychological measurement in order to grasp
modern theories of ability and personality. Given the prevalence and importance of
psychological tests in academic and applied psychology, it is embarrassing to admit that many
are simply not worth the paper that they are printed on. Some patently useless tests are slickly
marketed and widely used by the unwary and so one aim of this book is to teach you enough
about the basics of psychological measurement to allow you to choose a test that is likely to
provide a suitable operational defnition for the concepts that you wish to assess.
Traits and states

Most psychological tests measure ‘traits’ of one kind or another. Traits are simply useful
descriptions of how individuals generally behave. For example, ‘sociability’ is generally
regarded as a trait, since few people are the life and soul of the party one day and a virtual
recluse the next. Since individuals tend to have a characteristic level of sociability we term it
a trait. There are plenty of others.

Try to decide which of the following are (probably) traits:
a. musical ability
b. hunger
c. liberality of attitudes
d. rage
e. good manners.
It is conventional to group traits into three classes, namely abilities, attainments, and
personality traits. Ability traits are concerned with a person’s level of cognitive performance
in some novel area, in which they have not been previously trained, and so where the emphasis
37
is on thinking rather than knowledge. Examples of ability traits might include reading maps,
solving mental arithmetic problems, solving crossword clues, visualising what shapes would
look like if they were rotated, understanding a passage of prose or coming up with creative
ideas. These refer to thinking skills (rather than knowledge) either in areas that are not
explicitly taught (e.g., visualisation of rotated shapes) or in areas in which everyone can be
presumed to have had the same training (e.g., being taught to read and write). Abilities are
related to future potential (i.e., thinking skill in a particular area) rather than to prior
achievement or knowledge.
Measures of attainment are of lesser interest to psychologists, other than educational
psychologists. They measure how well an individual performs in a certain area, following a
course of instruction. School examinations are an example of attainment tests. If students
attend lessons and read and memorise the textbooks, they should be able to achieve a perfect
mark in a knowledge-based attainment test. Levels of attainment are specifc to a particular
area. If a pupil has a frst-rate knowledge of British social history in the nineteenth century, it
is not possible to say whether or not she knows anything about modern economic theory,
seventeenth-century history or anything else. The scores on attainment tests cannot be assumed
to generalise to other areas of knowledge. The distinction between abilities and attainment
becomes a little more blurred at university level, where students are required to search out
references, and think about their implications and make a coherent argument when writing
an essay. Here abilities, personality traits and motivational factors will also play a part. The
essay mark will, in part, measure attainment, but will also be infuenced by motivation, the
student’s ability to express themself and so on.
Personality traits instead refect a person’s style of behaviour. Words such as ‘extraverted’,
‘punctual’, ‘shy’ or ‘anxious’ all describe how (rather than how well) a person usually behaves.
Each person is thought to have a particular characteristic level of extraversion, etc. and the
way they behave is thought to depend both on their level of this trait and the situations they
fnd themselves in; even the bubbliest extravert is unlikely to tell risqué jokes during a funeral
service. Nevertheless, like abilities, these traits may be useful in helping us to predict how
individuals will probably behave most of the time, and which people are likely to show a
greater degree of extraverted behaviour than others in a particular situation.
Cattell (e.g., 1957) also argues that it is necessary to consider two types of ‘state’. Unlike
traits, states are short-lived, lasting for minutes or hours rather than months or years. Moods
(or emotions, as the distinction is not clear) refer to transient feelings such as fright following
a near miss when driving, or joy or despair on learning one’s examination results. He also
identifes ‘motivational states’ – forces that direct our behaviour. For example, the basic
Table 3.1 Similarities and differences between abilities, attainments and

personality traits
Ability trait Attainment Personality trait
Measures how well a person   

can perform some task
Measures thinking skills   
May predict behaviour in   
other areas (e.g., at work)
38
biological drives (food, sex, etc.) and socially directed motives (such as caring for our family,
socialising) can direct our behaviour, but only for a short time. After we have eaten, or visited
our boring relatives we do not feel the urge to do so again for a while. So these, too, are states,
not traits.
How might we measure individual differences in practice? We consider the measurement
of states in Chapter 16 and so the following section will focus on personality and ability traits
using psychological tests. The key point about all psychological tests is that the individuals
taking them should have precisely the same experience, no matter who administers the test or
in which country it is given. Great care has to be taken to ensure that the testing situation is
standardised. Time limits must be strictly followed, the test instructions must be given precisely
in accordance with directions and no variation should be made to the format of the question
booklet or answer sheet lest performance be affected. The way in which the test is scored (and
interpreted) also has to be precisely explained and followed rigidly.
Measuring traits
Some tests are designed to be administered to just one person at a time – for instance, those
involving equipment and/or where there is a need to build up a good testing rapport. Using
the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children to diagnose dyslexia is an obvious example. Some
tests are administered to individuals online, which creates a whole set of problems. Is the
person taking the test who they say they are? Are they using a fast computer with a good
screen in a quiet environment? Who do they ask if they do not understand something?
Although personality tests can be easily assembled using sites such as SurveyMonkey, ability
tests are more problematical as they often involve pictures and diagrams. Thus it is still
reasonably common to administer tests and questionnaires to groups of people in computer
suites, or to use paper-and-pencil questionnaires.
Ability tests
Ability tests are simply samples of problems, all of which are thought to rely on a particular
mental ability. For example, a test designed to assess memory might consist of some puzzles
involving memory for lists of numbers or letters (e.g., ‘179384615’), memory for pairs of
words (e.g., ‘happy elephant’) or a myriad other things. But once again, plenty of arbitrary
decisions are being made. Should the numbers be recalled immediately or after a time interval
of minutes, hours or days? Should participants be told that they will be asked to recall them
later (in which case they will try to memorise them) or should the recall test come as a
surprise? And should the person be asked to recall the items, or recognise them (e.g., ‘were
you earlier shown the words “joyful elephant”?’). However, it is not possible merely to put
together a set of items and call it a test. For example, there is absolutely no guarantee that all
of these items do, in fact, measure the same underlying ability – it is possible that there are
several different types of memory, and that a person who is able to recall long strings of
numbers a few seconds after they are presented may not be particularly good at recognising
pairs of words after a long time interval.
It is important, therefore, to bear in mind that the thing that one wants to assess may not
exist. There may not be a single ‘memory ability’ which can be assessed using a test. Instead
it may be necessary to measure several different aspects of memory, each using a different type
of task. One of the most important aims of psychometrics is therefore to develop tests and
questionnaires whose items measure a single trait. In the above example, it would be easy to
39
perform a statistical analysis (‘factor analysis’, described in Chapters 5 and 19) in order to
discover whether all of these tasks measure a single ‘memory ability’.
Some ability and attainment tests involve participants choosing the correct answer from
a selection of several possibilities; these are known as multiple-choice tests. Some may ask
participants to do something to solve the problem. This could involve writing the answer,
solving a jigsaw, or listening to a string of numbers and repeating them backwards, for
example. These are known as free response tests. In addition, some tests (‘power tests’)
give participants almost unlimited time to solve a set of problems, whilst others (‘speeded
tests’) impose time limits, so that most participants will not fnish within the time
allocated.
Personality questionnaires: Q’-data and Q-data

Perhaps the most obvious way of measuring personality is through self-report questionnaires.
Most readers have probably encountered some already: they usually contain questions or
statements with several possible answers (see Table 3.2, for example).
More detailed examples are given in Chapter 6 and subsequent chapters. It is important to
bear in mind two points about such tests. First, it is not possible simply to devise a few
questions, decide how the responses should be scored and then administer the test. The
reasons for this will be covered in some detail in Chapters 8 and 21, but the basic issue is that
there is no guarantee that the questions that you ask will measure the trait that you expect.
Instead, it is necessary to perform some statistical analyses to check this.
The second important point is that, just because someone ticks a box in a questionnaire in
a certain way, this does not imply that we can accept their response at face value. To borrow
an example from Cattell (1973), suppose someone strongly agreed with an item in a
questionnaire that said ‘I am the smartest man in town’. One can treat this piece of information
in two ways. The frst would be to assume that what the person said is accurate and credit
them with high intelligence. Cattell terms this Q’-data. A response is treated as Q’-data if the
psychologist chooses to believe that the person has made a true, accurate observation about
themself. This is common practice in social psychology, and we have already encountered it
in the context of Rogers’ personality theory. It is however regarded as rather dangerous by
those who work in the feld of individual differences. Cattell argues that lack of self-insight,
deliberate attempts to distort responses and other variables considered in Chapter 21 make
Q’-data of little value for a scientifc model of personality.
Table 3.2 Typical items from four questionnaires measuring different

aspects of personality
1. How sociable are you? Very Fairly Average Not very Not at all
2. The courts are too Strongly Agree Neutral/unsure Disagree Strongly
lenient when passing agree disagree
sentence
3. I have some Yes No
undesirable habits
4. I enjoy the feeling of Very much Slightly Neutral Not very Not at all
silk against my skin much
40
The second approach pays no heed to the apparent meaning of the answer, but only to its
pattern of relation to other things. Responses to questionnaires are regarded as ‘box-ticking
behaviours’ for statistical analysis, rather than as true, insightful descriptions of how the
individual behaves. Cattell calls such responses Q-data. This is an important distinction that
is often misunderstood both by psychologists and those who are exposed to psychological
tests. Psychologists do not believe that people are making true statements about themselves
when they answer items in personality tests. They do not need to believe respondents when
the responses are analysed statistically.
Suppose that a frm wants to use some kind of test to identify those applicants who will
develop into highly successful sales staff. They may ask existing staff to complete a
questionnaire and discover that successful sales staff strongly agree that ‘they are the smartest
person in town’, while the less effective sales staff do not. Thus it would be reasonable just to
use this question as part of the selection procedure. No one is interested in whether the
applicants are all really the smartest individuals in town (logically they could not all be!), so
the response is treated as Q-data rather than as Q’-data. Techniques for developing tests along
similar lines are discussed in Chapters 5, 19 and 20.
This also highlights an important difference between ability/attainment traits and all other
questionnaire measures of personality, mood or motivation. People can only obtain a high
score on ability or attainment tests correct by knowing or working out the correct answers.
Items in personality, mood and motivation scales, however, do not actually measure
performance. Instead, they ask people to introspect about how they behave. This means that
the answers may not be accurate for several reasons. For example, if a person is asked to rate
themselves on a fve-point scale as to how nervous they feel in lifts (1 = totally relaxed,
5 = terrifed), they may misremember their true feelings, try to paint a favourable impression
of themselves or wrongly assume that, as everybody feels totally panic stricken in a lift, their
experience of only moderate terror shows they are much more relaxed than the norm and
should thus get a rating of 2 rather than 4.
It is possible to detect deliberate faking, and we discuss this in Chapter 21. Some
questionnaires include a ‘lie scale’ – a list of common but socially undesirable peccadilloes
embedded in the personality questionnaire, for example ‘Did you ever cheat at a test in
school?’ Someone who admits to few of these is either a saint, out of touch with how they
really behave or deliberately distorting their responses.
Ratings of behaviour: L-data

The third main way of assessing personality or ability comes from ratings of behaviour from
other people. Raters can be carefully trained how to classify behaviours according to a
particular checklist. This checklist should ideally relate to behaviour, rather than to general
impressions; ‘number of minutes spent per day using social media’ rather than ‘usage of social
media is low/average/high’. If they then follow individuals around for a long period (weeks,
rather than days) in a wide variety of situations, these ratings of how people behave in their
everyday life may give useful insights into their personality or abilities. Cattell terms this
‘L-data’ (for ‘life record’). Techniques such as the Child behaviour Checklist (Achenbach and
Rescorla, 2001) and similar measures designed for adults are useful in quantifying personality.
Those checklists which are designed for children in residential care are completed by care-
givers; examples are given at https://aseba.org/samples-of-forms/. They are designed to tap
variables such as anxiety and memory problems as well as various types of problem behaviour,
such as those discussed in Chapter 10.
41
Ratings of behaviour are often used to assess personality during interviews and other
selection exercises and there are probably some important characteristics (e.g., leadership
quality, social skills) that are diffcult to assess by other means. However, because behaviour
is observed only for a short time in such settings (and in situations which may not be typical),
such assessments are often not accurate (Cronbach, 1994).
Objective tests: T-data

The fourth form of evidence stems from analyses of the behaviour of individuals (generally in
laboratory situations) who are either unaware of which aspect of their behaviour is being
measured or are physically unable to alter their response. These tests should therefore
overcome the principal objection to personality questionnaires, which is that responses can
easily be faked. For example, Cattell and Warburton (1967) suggested that highly anxious
people are likely to fdget more than others. In order to measure fdgeting (and hence anxiety),
they ftted a special chair with microswitches and left it in a waiting room outside the
laboratory. Volunteers arriving to take part in the experiment sat in the chair and were kept
waiting for some minutes – not realising that their behaviour was being measured, and that
sitting in the chair was the experiment.
These days it is possible that job applicants or those undergoing neurological evaluations
might be asked to play a computer game; however unlike conventional games various cognitive
processes such as reaction-time or decision-making processes may be recorded (Valladares-
Rodriguez et al., 2016). Or a text-based adventure game might perhaps assess personality –
for example by putting the player in situations where they are asked to choose between several
alternatives, each of which represents a different personality dimension – for example, seeking
help from others or running away (McCord et al., 2019). This ‘gamifcation’ of psychological
measures is a new development, but one which seems to show promise.
ExERCISE
You may wish to discuss the ethical problems of this sort of approach to
measuring personality. How different is measuring behaviour without the
person’s knowledge to observing their behaviour in the street, for example?
Is it ethical to ask questions where they are unaware of the implications of
answering a question in a certain way? If so, would this prevent all forms of
personality assessment? Is it ever ethical to draw inferences about a person’s
personality (e.g., via questionnaires) without their knowing what you are
assessing and how?
More recently social psychologists have tried to measure attitudes using ‘Implicit
Association Tests’ (Greenwald et al., 1998). These claim to show prejudice by revealing
attitudes which people do not realise they have, by measuring how long it takes people to
associate some words with some groups of people. Unfortunately evidence is accumulating to
show that although still incredibly popular, such objective tests have a number of unrecognised
problems (Singal, 2017; Forscher et al., 2019).
Cattell termed the data from all such experiments ‘T-data’ (since they arose from objective
tests) and argues that they should form an excellent basis for measuring personality and
42
ability, since they are entirely objective. Since individuals do not know which aspect of their
behaviour is being measured or are unable to manipulate their responses, such tests are
diffcult to fake. However, it is very diffcult to devise and develop suitable objective tests and
few objective personality tests have so far been found to be of much practical use.
Projective tests of personality

‘Projective tests’ provide a ffth source of evidence about personality. In these tests, individuals
are presented with some ambiguous, unclear or completely meaningless stimuli and are
assumed to reveal their personalities, experiences, wants, needs, hopes, fears, etc., when
describing these. The Rorschach inkblots are probably the most famous projective test. In this
test, participants are shown a series of inkblots, rather similar to that shown in Figure 3.1,
and are asked to describe in their own words what they ‘see’ in them. (Be warned – replying
‘an inkblot’ is classed as pathological!) Their responses are scored according to any one of
about three main scoring systems and are supposed to reveal hidden depths of personality.
The really odd thing about these scoring systems is that they have few compelling links to any
mainstream psychological theory. For example, they code whether the person pays attention
to the whole stimulus or just part of it, and whether they report movement. The problem is
that no theory of which I am aware specifes why movement or interpretation of only part of
the stimulus should refect personality. It rather looks as if these aspects of performance are
coded because they are easy to measure, rather than because they measure anything of
psychological value. Because of this and the Byzantine complexity of the scoring schemes,
such tests simply do not work and are now rarely used. However, ‘multiple-choice’ projective
tests (in which respondents choose responses from a list, rather than describing the pictures
in their own words) may perhaps be of some value (Holmstrom et al., 1994).
Figure 3.1 Example of an inkblot, similar to those used in Rorschach’s test
43

What is or are:
a. Q-data
b. L-data
c. Q’-data
d. T-data
e. projective tests?
Scoring tests
Every test must have some clearly defned technique for converting an individual’s responses
into some kind of score. Details of how to administer, score and interpret the test will
almost always be given in the test manual. This is generally a substantial booklet that
contains other information that may be useful in assessing the merit of the test, although
some tests rely on journal articles to provide this information. In the vast majority of cases
(projective tests being the only real exception), the score will be a number, since the test
tries to quantify each person’s level of the ability, state or personality trait which the scale
measures.
Multiple-choice ability tests are the easiest to score. In the vast majority of cases, one
point will be awarded for each correct answer. Sometimes, in an attempt to prevent guessing,
one point will be deducted for each incorrect answer. Items that have not been attempted
almost invariably score zero. These tests are generally scored either by computer, by entering
the responses into a spreadsheet (Cooper (2019) provides some sample spreadsheets which
can easily be edited to score specifc tests) or by using templates. These templates are acetate
sheets that are positioned over the top of the answer sheet and which clearly indicate the
correct answer for each item. The beauty of scoring multiple-choice tests is that it is almost
100% accurate and requires no subjective judgements. Cattell (never one to resist a
neologism) calls such scoring schemes highly ‘conspective’ (literally, ‘looking together’),
meaning that different scorers will arrive at the same conclusion, as opposed to essays, for
example.
Scoring free responses from ability tests can be problematic. Much depends on the quality
of the test manual and the skill of the person administering the test. For example, suppose
that in a comprehension test a child is asked to defne the meaning of the word ‘kitten’ and
they reply that it is ‘a type of cat’ – an answer that is neither completely correct nor totally
wrong. Good test manuals will provide detailed instructions, with examples, to show how
such answers should be scored; such directions are arbitrary, but at least ensure that scorers
behave consistently. Where actions are timed (e.g., the amount of time to solve a jigsaw is
recorded), the test manual will show how many points to award for a particular solution time;
a puzzle which is solved within one minute might earn fve points, the child is given four points
if it is solved within three minutes, etc.
Most personality mood and motivation scales require participants to say how well a
particular statement describes them or another person. Item 1 in Table 3.2 (‘How sociable are
you?’) measures the personality trait of Extraversion, and the test manual might specify that
answering ‘very’ is given a score of 5, ‘fairly’ gives 4 points, and so on – with ‘not at all’
44
earning 1 point. Such items are known as Likert scales. If another item in the scale was
phrased in the reverse direction, such as: ‘How much do you enjoy being alone’ strongly
agreeing with this item would result in a score of 1 point and strongly disagreeing would score
5 points.
To calculate a person’s total score on a scale, one simply adds up their points for the items
which measure the same trait. Most personality scales urge participants to answer all of the
questions and so there should be no missing data.
The scoring of most projective tests is very complex, which is another reason why they
are now rarely used. Features such as ‘degree of movement’, ‘originality’ (unusualness of
response) and ‘response latency [which] may reveal struggling social interactions’ are coded.
Some scoring systems do not even attempt to quantify responses, but instead produce
qualitative data which are not really amenable to statistical analysis. Those who wish to use
these tests professionally have to serve an apprenticeship under the guidance of an
experienced user of the test in order to appreciate fully the intricacies of the scoring system,
and learn how to apply it. Even so, the level of conspection of most projective tests is
lamentably low: two different people are likely to come to vastly different conclusions when
interpreting the same set of responses, a point that was made with some force by Eysenck
(1959). However, there seems to be no good reason why responses to projective tests cannot
be coded objectively, using some form of content analysis – that is, specifying a large list of
characteristics (e.g., ‘mentions any nonhuman animal’), each to be coded as present or
absent.
The problem of quantifcation

The scoring guidelines for ability and personality scales outlined in the previous section may
sound much like common sense. It may seem blindingly obvious that items should be scored
as described above, and that scores on a scale should be calculated by adding together people’s
scores on items which measure the same trait or state. We are all so accustomed to this
‘common sense’ procedure that it is easy to overlook its problems. It is easy to forget that
when numbers are assigned to responses to items, they do not behave in the same way as
numbers assigned to points on a ruler or thermometer. Someone who ‘agrees’ that they enjoy
parties (scoring 4 on this Extraversion item) is not twice as sociable as someone who says that
they ‘disagree’ with it (scoring 2). The numbers assigned to these answers do not behave in
the same way as numbers on a ruler, for example, where a line whose length is 4 is twice as
long as a line whose length is 2.
Indeed, the whole idea of awarding scores of 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 to the various answers is
arbitrary. Why not use 11, 9, 6, 2, 0 or any other arbitrary set of descending numbers? Will
treating the data as ordinal numbers solve the problem? That certainly forces the responses
to each item to produce the numbers 1–5, but it does not solve the problem that someone who
scores 4 is not necessarily twice as sociable as someone who scores 2. Michell (1997) identifes
a more fundamental problem, too. This is that we assume that a characteristic such as
Extraversion is quantitative – i.e., that it can be represented using numbers. This need not be
the case at all.
In conceptualizing an attribute as quantitative a scientifc hypothesis is proposed. There

is no logical necessity that any attribute should have this kind of structure. Hence,
accepting this hypothesis is speculative . . .
(Michell, 1997)
45
Determining whether an attribute (such as Extraversion) is quantitative is not

straightforward, but Michell’s point is that psychologists usually rush ahead and assume that
it is, without any evidence whatsoever; he calls psychometrics a ‘pathology of science’ (Michell,
2004) for that reason. Michell’s work is not easy to read unless one has a background in
philosophy and/or measurement theory, but it has broad implications. If Michell is correct
(and I have seen no convincing refutations of his position) then psychology will never to be
able to use tests to develop proper quantitative theories, akin to the gas laws in chemistry or
Newton’s laws of motion in physics. This is a very fundamental, far-reaching problem, which
is generally ignored by researchers. You should perhaps worry about it. The last few pages of
Barrett (2016) gives an excellent summary of the issues together with some useful references,
as does Cooper (2019).
Norms
ExERCISE
Suppose that Jane completes a 20-item test of musical ability and gives
correct responses to 15 items. What can be concluded about her musical
ability?
The answer is simple – nothing. You may possibly have thought that since there were 20
items in the test and Jane answered more than half of them correctly, this would indicate that
her score was above average, but, of course, it does not, for in almost all cases, a person’s
score on a test depends on the level of diffculty of the test items. The items may have been so
trivially easy that 99 out of 100 children might have obtained scores above 15 on this test, in
which case Jane would be markedly less musical than other children of her age. This once
again shows that the numbers representing test scores simply do not behave in the same way
as numbers used in the physical sciences. To interpret the meaning of an individual’s test score
it is usually necessary to use norms.
Tables of test norms simply show the scores of a large, carefully selected sample of
individuals. For example, the test might be given to 2035 children aged between 96 and 99
months, ensuring that the sample contains roughly equal numbers of males and females,
that they are sampled from different regions of the country (in case some regions are more
musical than others) and that the proportion of children from ethnic and other minorities
is consistent with that in the general population. A frequency distribution of these scores
can be drawn up in a similar way to that shown in Table 3.3. The frst column shows each
possible test score, the second column shows the number of children in the sample who
obtained each score, the third column shows the number of children who obtained each
score or less and the fourth column shows this fgure as a percentage – a fgure known as
the percentile.
Many test manuals show the percentile scores making it a simple matter to interpret an
individual’s test score. it is merely necessary to look across and discover that 62% the children
scored 15 or less on the test. Sometimes, however, percentiles are not shown. If these scores
follow a normal (bell-shaped) distribution whose mean and standard deviation are known, it
is still straightforward to estimate the percentage of the population having a score as low as
46
Table 3.3 Norms for a test of musical ability, based on a (hypothetical)

random sample of 2035 children aged 96 months
Score Number of children Number of children Percentile

with this score with this score or lower
0 3 3 100 x 3/2035 = 0.15

1 2 3+2=5 0.25
2 6 3 + 2 + 6 = 11 0.54
3 8 19 0.93
4 8 27 1.33
5 13 40 1.97
6 17 57 2.80
7 23 80 3.93
8 25 105 5.16
9 33 138 6.78
10 57 195 9.58
11 87 282 13.86
12 133 415 20.39
13 201 616 30.27
14 293 909 44.67
15 357 1266 62.21
16 270 1536 75.48
17 198 1734 85.21
18 126 1860 91.40
19 100 1960 96.31
any particular test score. For example, the average of the scores shown in Table 3.3 is 14.47
and the standard deviation is 4.978. Suppose that we want to estimate what percentage of the
population has a score of 15 or below. To do this, simply calculate:
15 − 14.47
z= = 0.106
4.978
A table of the standard normal distribution (found in almost any statistics book) will then
show the proportion of individuals having a score lower than this value, which is 54%. This
fgure is similar (but not quite identical) to the one that we read directly from Table 3.3. The
discrepancy arises because we assumed that the scores follow a normal distribution, whereas,
in fact, they do not quite do so. However, this approach can be useful if you know the mean
and standard deviation, but do not have access to the full table of norms.
Children’s performance on cognitive tasks increases with age, so when evaluating a child’s
score on a test it is essential to compare their scores to those of other children of the same age.
Norms for these tests are typically gathered for 3-month age intervals (e.g., 7 years 6 months,
7 years 9 months, etc.) to facilitate this.
47
Most test manuals contain several different tables of norms, for example those collected
in different countries, separate norms for each sex and (almost invariably in the case of ability
tests) at different ages. All that is necessary is to choose the table that is the most appropriate
for your needs, ensuring that it is based on a large sample (a minimum of several hundred)
and that care has been taken to sample individuals properly. It is also important to consider
legal issues. For example, it may be illegal to use different tables of norms for males and
females.

Why are different norms used for different ages in ability tests?
Finally, I ought to mention that tables of norms are only necessary for the interpretation
of one individual’s score on a test. Researchers will usually just want to correlate scores on a
test with scores on other variables (e.g., correlating intelligence with head size) or compare
the test scores of two groups (e.g., using a t-test to determine whether males and females are
equally musical). Then it is not only unnecessary to convert the norms to percentiles, but also
bad practice, for you will fnd that the original distribution of scores is much more bell-shaped
than that of the corresponding percentiles and this is an assumption of most statistical
techniques.
Obtaining and using tests

Commercial tests
Commercial psychological tests such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Wechsler
et al., 2016) and the NEO-Personality Inventory (NEO-PI(R)) are expensive to develop and
can only be bought and used by qualifed individuals. Imagine what would happen if a
photocopy of a commercial intelligence test reached student common rooms. Groups of
students would while away some time by trying to solve the items and (given that it is a group
effort with unlimited time) might well succeed in solving most items in the test. If some of
these people were then given the same test as part of a screening process for employment,
those who had had previous experience of the test might well be able to remember at least
some of the correct answers and so would score higher than they ‘should’ do, reducing the
effectiveness of the test in selecting the best applicants.
One way of fnding commercial tests such as these is to search test publishers’ catalogues
and websites. However these invariably describe tests in glowing terms and so will not
necessarily help you to identify a good (appropriate, and accurate) test. The best way to
identify a good commercially published test is to consult the Mental Measurements Yearbooks.
These weighty volumes were introduced by Oscar Buros in 1938 to provide a ‘consumer
guide’ to commercially published psychological tests – both in print and at http://buros.org/.
They contain indices listing tests by type, by name and by author, but the real value of these
volumes lies in the critical reviews of tests, which have been written by psychometric specialists.
These will sometimes state, quite bluntly, that a particular test is so severely fawed that it
should be avoided or only be considered for research purposes.
48
Even the best test is useless if it is not administered, scored and interpreted correctly. The
second reason for making these tests available to qualifed users is to ensure that they will be
administered and interpreted properly. It is important to adhere to the standard instructions,
practice examples and so on so that participants fully understand what they are expected to
do. Time limits must be carefully observed, and scoring instructions followed rigorously. It is
also necessary to ensure that ethical standards are maintained – that the test which is chosen
is appropriate for the particular application and sample of people, that any feedback given to
participants is accurate and that the test results are kept confdential. This is another reason
why test publishers will only sell tests to users who have demonstrated competence in test use –
normally by attending a course of instruction approved by the test publisher.
In the UK, the British Psychological Society oversees a three-tier system of licensing test
use in psychology. At the lowest level are test administrators, who are qualifed only to
administer certain group-administered tests under the direction of a more highly qualifed
psychologist. The next level involves training in the selection, scoring and interpretation of
certain ability tests. The highest level of certifcation involves demonstrable skill in choosing,
administering and interpreting the results from personality tests. Other countries have adopted
similar policies, and the International Test Commission’s ‘guidelines on test use’ are an
invaluable resource. They may be found at https://www.intestcom.org/ and provide broad
principles covering the selection of appropriate tests, guidance for their administration, their
scoring and the interpretation of results. They should be consulted in conjunction with
guidelines produced by one’s national psychological association.
Non-commercial tests
A great many tests are not published commercially but appear on the internet or as appendices
to journal articles. The beauty of these tests is that they are almost always free to use; the
disadvantage is that the responsibility for evaluating a test’s suitability and accuracy falls
frmly on the test user. Some such tests will be patent rubbish. Others may be inappropriate
for use in some cultures, ages-ranges or applications. Thus the suitability of any ‘free’ test for
any application should be determined by searching journal articles for evaluative studies,
reading the ITC and other guidelines and consulting Chapters 5, 8 and 19–21 of this book,
or alternatives. There are several ways of fnding free-to-use tests.
The Educational Testing Service has a database of commercial and non-commercial tests.
Its url at the time of writing is https://www.ets.org/test_link. It is possible to search for tests
measuring a particular trait (e.g., ‘visualization’; note that it requires American spellings of
search terms). It shows brief descriptions of tests with references to where they may be
obtained, but not the test items themselves.
The International Personality Item Pool at http://ipip.ori.org contains a huge range of
personality scales which are free to use for any purpose. Several of them are provided as free
alternatives to expensive commercial products. Unlike the ETS database, this website includes
the test items, scoring directions and (sometimes) links to norms and information about the
accuracy the scales in some contexts.
If the name of a test or its author is known, it is possible to search for a test using a database
such as PsychInfo or Web of Science (not a simple internet search). Search for the name of the
test or its author in the title or topic; very often the paper containing the test will be the
author’s most cited work. If the original paper cannot be found, papers by other authors which
report the ‘factor structure’ of the test will often reproduce the items. Beware copyright laws,
however. The reproduction and use of items published in journal articles is something of a
grey area.
49
Finding a test is easy; determining whether it is likely to be useful is far harder and more
time consuming, as there is nothing like a Mental Measurements Yearbook to guide you. It is
vital that you consider dispassionately whether a test is really going to suit your needs. It is
necessary to review the literature oneself to determine this. Issues of reliability, validity and
bias (discussed in Chapters 8 and 21) are of particular importance.
Summary
Having read this chapter, you should appreciate the need to develop operational defnitions
of psychological concepts in order to assess individuals or test hypotheses. You should be able
to describe what is meant by the terms ‘trait’ and ‘state’, describe the main types of mental
test, discuss how individual test scores may be interpreted through the use of norms, outline
the ethical principles associated with test use and show some appreciation of Michell’s
devastating criticisms of all forms of psychological assessment using tests and questionnaires.

If you have not already done so, you should consult the International Test Commission
guidelines on test use at https://www.intestcom.org (together with the guidelines produced by
your national psychological society or association) in order to learn about standards of testing
procedure. You may fnd it interesting to browse through the Mental Measurement Yearbooks
and search out some reviews, for example reviews of the Rorschach test, Sixteen-Personality-
Factor test, Lüscher Colour Test, Adjective Checklist and/or the Wechsler Adult Intelligence
Scale. You may also enjoy visiting http://ipip.ori.org to see what some typical test items look
like or to follow a link to test your own personality using the IPIP-NEO online.
SAQ 3.1
a. Any score from a psychological test or other device that is used as if it
measured some theoretical concept.
b. A person’s score on a test of appropriate diffculty consisting of whatever
items are thought to make up the concept of ‘French-speaking ability’,
for example items measuring knowledge of colloquialisms and vocabulary
and ratings of quality of accent and fuency. The measurement of
meanness is a much more diffcult proposition. Direct self-report questions
will probably not work – who would admit to this quality? Asking if any
regular payments to a charity are made from bank accounts may be more
useful. Ratings by friends may be a possibility, as may ‘objective tests’
(e.g., asking for a loan, or observing behaviour in the vicinity of a beggar).
However, most of these measures could indicate ‘poverty’ instead of
‘meanness’.
50
SAQ 3.2
a, c and e are probably traits, as they will be fairly stable over time and across
situations. Hunger and rage (b and d) are probably states, as one’s level of
hunger falls after feeding, and anger probably occurs in response to some
event and declines thereafter.
SAQ 3.3
a. Responses to questionnaire items that are analysed in ways that do not
assume the truth of what the respondent is saying.
b. Ratings of behaviour.
c. Responses to questionnaires that are analysed as if the respondents are
making some true comment about themselves. For example, if a person
strongly agrees that they are happy, the psychologist would conclude
that they are, indeed, happy.
d. Data from objective tests of personality – tests whose purpose is hidden
from the test participant or in which the test participant physically cannot
alter his or her response.
e. Personality tests in which an individual is asked to describe or interpret
an ambiguous stimulus (e.g., a picture, an inkblot or a sound). The
rationale for such tests is that the way in which the stimuli are interpreted
will provide some insight into the individual’s personality, needs and
experience. Scoring the responses to such tests is notoriously diffcult, as
Eysenck has shown.
SAQ 3.4
Because abilities tend to increase with age. In order to determine whether
a particular child is performing markedly better or worse than ‘the average
child’, it is important to compare them with other children of the same age.
Almost all abilities increase with age as a result of physiological maturation
and education. Suppose that a test had a table of norms that covered a fairly
broad range of ages (e.g., children aged 6–10). It would not be possible to
use these to interpret a child’s score, since an ‘average’ (or median) score
could indicate a 6 year old who was performing much better than most 6
year olds, an 8 year old of average ability or a 10 year old whose performance
was below average. The best ability tests give norms at 3-month intervals
(e.g., one table for children aged 74–76 months, another table for children
aged 77–79 months, etc.).
51
References
Achenbach, T. M. & Rescorla, L. A. 2001. Manual for the ASEBA School-Age Forms &
Profles. Burlington, VT: University of Vermont, Research Center for Children, Youth, &
Families.
Barrett, P. 2016. Electrophysiology, Chronometrics, and Cross-Cultural Psychometrics at the
Biosignal Lab: Why It Began, What We Learned, and Why It Ended. Personality and
Individual Differences, 103, 128–134.
Cattell, R. B. 1957. Personality and Motivation Structure and Measurement. Yonkers: New
World.
Cattell, R. B. 1973. Personality and Mood by Questionnaire. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Cattell, R. B. & Warburton, F. W. 1967. Objective Personality and Motivation Tests:
A Theoretical Foundation and Practical Compendium. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Cooper, C. 2019. Psychological Testing: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.
Cronbach, L. J. 1994. Essentials of Psychological Testing. New York: Harper-Collins.
Eysenck, H. J. 1959. Review of the Rorschach Inkblots. In O. K. Buros (ed.) Fifth Mental
Measurement Yearbook. New Jersey: Gryphon Press.
Forscher, P. S., Lai, C. K., Axt, J. R., Ebersole, C. R., Herman, M., Devine, P. G. & Nosek, B. A.
2019. A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 117, 522–559.
Gardner, H. 1993. Frames of Mind (2nd Edn). London: Harper-Collins.
Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E. & Schwartz, J. L. K. 1998. Measuring Individual Differences
in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 74, 1464–1480.
Guilford, J. P. 1967. The Nature of Human Intelligence. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Holmstrom, R. W., Karp, S. A. & Silber, D. E. 1994. Prediction of Depression with the
Apperceptive Personality Test. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 50, 234–237.
McCord, J.-L., Harman, J. L. & Purl, J. 2019. Game-Like Personality Testing: An Emerging
Mode of Personality Assessment. Personality and Individual Differences, 143, 95–102.
Michell, J. 1997. Quantitative Science and the Defnition of Measurement in Psychology.
Michell, J. 2004. Item Response Models, Pathological Science and the Shape of Error – Reply
to Borsboom and Mellenbergh. Theory & Psychology, 14, 121–129.
Singal, J. 2017. The Creators of the Implicit Association Test Should Get Their Story Straight.
New York Intelligencer. New York, NY.
Valladares-Rodriguez, S., Perez-Rodriguez, R., Anido-Rifon, L. & Fernandez-Iglesias, M.
2016. Trends on the Application of Serious Games to Neuropsychological Evaluation:
A Scoping Review. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 64, 296–319.
Wechsler, D., Pearson Education Inc. & Psychological Corporation 2016. WISC-V: Wechsler
Intelligence Scale for Children. London: NCS Pearson PsychCorp.
52
Chapter 4
Depth psychology
Introduction
This chapter discusses psychoanalysis and some other theories which emphasise unconscious
mental processes. Although they are a century old, and rarely feature in modern personality
textbooks, these theories are included here for several reasons.
When considering the work of Kelly and Rogers, and the use of personality questionnaires,
we have assumed that self-reports can tell us something useful about behaviour. This may not
be the case. Modern neuroscience (e.g., Dehaene et al., 2014) shows that brains respond to
stimuli of which we are unaware, and of which we cannot become aware by switching
attention. Conscious awareness comes fairly late in the process of perceiving and thinking. It
is possible that we are experts at deceiving ourselves, making self-reports of little use.
Psychoanalytic theories focus on unconscious determinants of behaviour, and so it might be
worthwhile scrutinising these theories in case they have something useful to offer.
These theories never quite go away. When they hear that you are studying psychology,
many readers’ friends and family will ask ‘are you psycho-analysing me now?’ – and so it
seems appropriate to outline what psychoanalysis is, and whether it is well thought of. In
addition these theories still hold sway in areas such as social work and literary criticism. Thus
although they have largely disappeared from psychology courses, readers may encounter them
in other contexts and so a little critical evaluation might be useful.
They are unusual in that they try to explain many aspects of human behaviour. As well as
outlining a theory for the development and functioning of personality, the theories can
(supposedly) also explain why we enjoy music, art and literature, and point to the origins of
religious belief, humour, warfare and aggression. They claim to show clinical syndromes such
as depression and schizophrenia develop and operate, and how such problems may be cured
through therapy. This is a far cry from the rather narrow views of personality outlined in
Chapter 2; if psychoanalytic theories can explain just some of these phenomena, then they
merit study.
53
Depth psychology
They also force us to think about what makes a ‘good’ theory of personality. For example,
what sort of data should a theory be based on? Are clinical insights suffcient to develop a
theory? Is it important that results should be replicable? How complex can a theory become
before it stops being useful? Is quantifcation desirable? Should we assume that fndings from
clinical patients generalise to the rest of us? Psychoanalytic theory showed that all these issues
are important, and therefore shaped the direction of future research in personality, mood and
motivation.
Learning outcomes
l Show an appreciation of how psychoanalytic theories were developed,
and how psychoanalysis supposedly cures neurosis.
l Explain terms such as ego, id, superego, defence mechanism, repression,
Oedipus complex, inferiority complex, mandala and Jung’s psychological
orientations.
l Develop an opinion about whether the models developed by Freud and
other analysts were actually correct.
l Discuss what makes a good personality theory, with reference to the
work of Rogers, Kelly, Freud, Adler and Jung.
Freud’s theories
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was the founder of psychoanalysis – a collection of theories
which evolved over his lifetime; his theory of aggression only developed in 1920, for example.
There is no substitute for reading translations of Freud’s original works, especially as several
of them were written to educate non-expert readers, and some suggestions are given at the
end of this chapter. They are remarkably easy to read. The theories assume that there is no
clear distinction between abnormal behaviour (e.g., those diagnosed with schizophrenia and
depression) and normal behaviour. People with such diagnoses just have more extreme levels
of the characteristics which ‘normal’ people show, and the mechanisms which cause them are
thought to be the same. This is now known as the ‘continuity hypothesis’, and there is good
support for the basic idea (Claridge, 1985).
Freud began studying medicine in Vienna in 1873. In the nineteenth century, psychiatric
disorders that had no obvious physiological basis were dismissed out of hand as being
impossible. Some patients who showed symptoms such as memory failure, paralysis, nervous
tics (twitching), tunnel vision, blindness, loss of speech and convulsions were diagnosed as
suffering from various forms of hysteria: that is, symptoms without a good physiological
cause. Freud’s interest in psychiatry began in the 1880s when he travelled to Paris to study
with Charcot, the celebrated neurologist. Charcot was researching how hypnotic suggestion
could be used to implant a suggestion in the mind of a normal volunteer who would then
perform some activity (or experience some feeling, such as a numb leg) even after being
released from the hypnotic trance.
54
Depth psychology
Freud saw some similarity between the behaviour of Charcot’s hypnotised subjects and
that of patients who suffered from hysteria. In both cases, the behaviour or symptom had
no physical cause – the numbing of the leg resulting from a hypnotic suggestion had a purely
psychological origin. In addition, subjects who were hypnotised were unaware of the source
of their behaviour or motivations to perform certain actions, in much the same way that
hysterical patients claimed to be completely ignorant of the origins of their symptoms. Thus
Freud speculated that some kind of mental event may explain the symptoms of hysterics.
As both the hypnotised volunteer and the hysterical patient seem to have no memory for
such an event, it must be located in an area of the mind that is not normally accessible to
consciousness, but from where it can nevertheless infuence behaviour and bodily and
mental symptoms.
Perhaps hysterical symptoms might be cured through appropriate psychological
manipulations in much the same way as a hypnotic suggestion can be cancelled through the
instructions of the hypnotist? On returning to Vienna, Freud set himself up as a specialist in
the treatment of ‘nervous diseases’ and collaborated with Josef Breuer to publish Studies in
Hysteria, which is the basis of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. They reported some
remarkable cures of hysterical symptoms through the use of hypnosis. Patients were hypnotised
and were then encouraged to believe that their symptoms would disappear. Freud then probed
for information about the causes of the symptoms, and considered that the careful probing
of the patients’ reminiscences (rather than hypnotic suggestion) was the ultimate cause of these
cures. He claimed that:
Each individual symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had

succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was produced,
and in arousing its accompanying affect [‘emotion’], and when the patient had described
that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words.
(Freud and Breuer, 1893/1964)
This is the frst description of the technique known as free association. It involved the
patient’s reclining on a couch, while the psychoanalyst asked her to say the very frst thing
that came to mind in response to occasional words spoken by the psychoanalyst. These
words would sometimes refect themes from the patient’s dreams, for reasons which
will become apparent below. The patient was particularly urged not to omit any detail,
no matter how trivial, unimportant, embarrassing or irrelevant it appeared to be.
The psychoanalyst paid careful
consideration to these reminiscences
and noted in particular those
occasions when the patient found it
diffcult to produce an association
in response to a word or phrase.
This might indicate that some
psychological mechanism, then
known as a repression, was
interfering with the patient’s ability
to respond. As the patient had
been urged to say whatever came to
mind, a failure to produce an
association was not due to self-
censorship. Instead, it suggested
55
Depth psychology
that there was some unpleasant, emotionally charged memory that had been pushed into an
unconscious part of the mind and that might be the cause of the hysterical symptom.
Freud claimed that his patients were eventually able to recall events (often from childhood)
that had been completely forgotten for many years and that had been associated with some
strong and unpleasant emotional experience. When they both recalled the painful event and
re-experienced the emotion that was felt at the time, the physical symptom simply disappeared.
Freud claimed to have cured symptoms such as an inability to drink, paralysis, blindness,
nervous tics and loss of memory using this technique, which he termed psychoanalysis. Here
is a description of one of Breuer’s early attempts to probe the unconscious mind using
hypnosis in an attempt to cure a young woman who used to enter trance-like states, similar
to some forms of epilepsy:
It was observed that, when the patient was in her states of ‘absence’ [altered personality
accompanied by confusion], she was in the habit of muttering a few words to herself
which seemed as if they arose from some train of thought that was occupying her
mind. The doctor, after getting report of these words, used to put her into a kind of
hypnosis and repeat them to her so as to induce her to use them as a starting point.
The patient . . . in this way reproduced in his presence the mental creations which had
been occupying her mind during the ‘absences’ and which had betrayed their existence
by the fragmentary words which she had uttered. They were profoundly melancholy
phantasies – ‘daydreams’ we should call them – sometimes characterised by poetic
beauty, and the starting point was as a rule the position of a girl at her father’s sick-
bed. When she had related a number of these phantasies, she was as if set free, and
she was brought back to normal mental life . . . It was impossible to escape the
conclusion that the alteration in her mental state which was expressed in the ‘absences’
was a result of the stimulus proceeding from these highly emotional phantasies.
(Freud, 1925/1959 section IV)

Try to explain the following terms:
a. free association
b. resistance
c. repression.
Analyses of dreams, ‘slips of the tongue’, wit and similar everyday experiences led him to
conclude that the mental structures that he deduced from the analysis of hysterical patients
were universal. Thus his theory sought to become a general theory of personality, rather than
an explanation for hysterical behaviour alone.
A psychoanalytic model of the mind

As memories and fantasies can be dragged reluctantly back into consciousness:
l It seems that there are two main areas of the mind – one that is susceptible to conscious
scrutiny through introspection and another whose contents are normally unconscious.
56
Depth psychology
l It is also important to discover how the contents of the unconscious region of mind
infuence behaviour, as in the case of hysterical symptoms.
l Finally, it is necessary to understand how memories pass from the conscious to the
unconscious regions of the mind and why memories that have been transferred into the
unconscious region usually stay there, except in the case of psychoanalytical treatment.
Freud thus suggested that the mind consists of the ego, which is conscious and capable
of logical, rational thought. The other, unconscious, area of mind he called the id. This
contains the basic instincts (sex and aggression), satisfaction of which leads to feelings of
pleasure and which therefore motivate behaviour – the ‘pleasure principle’. He also suggested
that memories and thoughts that have become associated with these instincts have also been
pushed into the id. The instincts, memories and fantasies in the Freudian id were thought
to infuence day-to-day behaviour and experience, without the individual’s being aware that
they even exist.
The analysis of hysterical patients led Freud to a conclusion that shocked Vienna. The
unconscious memories and fantasies of his proper, well-to-do female patients were almost
invariably sexual. Psychoanalysis revealed that the emotional content of a thought or
memory (or the emotion that became attached to it through association, a process now
known as classical conditioning) determined its destiny. Painful memories or unacceptable
thoughts (e.g., sexual fantasies) were banished to the unconscious mind (the id), where they
joined the seething lusts and aggressive drives that are found there and somehow strived to
force themselves back into consciousness. The id therefore contains two basic instincts,
namely eros, also known as the life instinct, which is satisfed through sexual activity, and
a self-destructive force known as thanatos or the death instinct, which can also be turned
outwards against the world, resulting in aggressive or sadistic behaviour. Freud believed
that we always seek to satisfy these deep-seated (but unconscious) instincts for sex and
aggression – the pleasure principle. The id demands their immediate and complete
satisfaction, no matter how inappropriate, impractical or unreasonable this may be and
without consideration of social conventions or other people. Freud called this primary
process thought, which is also characterised by its illogicality and tolerance of ambiguity.
For example, the id would have no diffculty in simultaneously desiring and wishing to
destroy a person. Melanie Klein claimed to have identifed terrifying destructive and
aggressive fantasies in very young infants, which are thought to be typical of the way in
which the id operates.
Freud believed that the ego splits off from the id as the child grows older, as a result of its
experiences of the outside world through sight, touch, hearing and the other senses. A part of
the mind becomes conscious, aware of the outside world, self-aware and capable of rational
thought. The basic aim is still the satisfaction of the drives from the id, but these can be
assuaged far more effectively through postponement and the use of social conventions.
Satisfying the sexual instinct immediately and completely with the frst person one encountered
(as the id would demand) would probably not be a good idea. It would result in a prison
sentence and so would fail to provide a long-term solution for most people. It would also run
counter to the moral standards of one’s conscience (the superego), which is the third main
area of the mind. It will be far more effective in the long term to act rationally under the
control of the ego and develop a relationship.
There are also other ways in which the drives can be satisfed, such as by reading or other
activities (e.g., art, humour, gastronomy), in which basic drives are being satisfed in socially
acceptable ways. These are sometimes known as derivatives of the original drives, that is,
ideas that are connected to the basic instincts of sex and aggression, but whose satisfaction
57
Depth psychology
is more acceptable to the ego. Fenichel (1946) claimed that most neurotic symptoms are
derivatives of the two basic instincts.
Childhood experiences are thought to be all important for adult development. According
to Freud, childhood is a battleground between the two major instincts and the attempts of
parents to ensure that they are satisfed in socially acceptable ways. Derivatives of the sexual
and aggressive instincts are formed and the ego develops defence mechanisms.
Defence mechanisms: battles in the unconscious

It is necessary to understand why some painful memories are ‘forgotten’, why they result in
a physical symptom and why the symptom disappears when the memory is relived. Freud
noted with interest that the key forgotten memories tended to be mentioned but immediately
dismissed as unimportant by the patient. Only as a result of careful listening and prompting
by the analyst could they eventually be recalled. This suggested that there were some forces
(of which the patient was unaware) that tried to keep the painful memory out of
consciousness. They were called defence mechanisms and over a dozen of them have been
proposed by Freud and his followers. The most well known is called repression and this
term is used interchangeably with ‘defence mechanism’ in Freud’s early writings. It implies
a purposeful forgetting of an emotion-laden wish or memory. However, once it reaches
unconsciousness it constantly tries to re-enter consciousness with the result that there is a
perpetual battle taking place between the wish (which has been repressed into the id) and
the defence mechanisms. The more memories an individual banishes into the id, the stronger
the defence mechanisms that are required to keep them there. Thus everyone is to some
extent neurotic, because we have all dealt with painful memories by forcing them into
unconscious regions of the mind, from where they continue to try to infuence on our
feelings and behaviour. When a repressed wish or memory tries to re-enter consciousness,
anxiety levels supposedly rise and this triggers the defence mechanisms into operation.
Disguised and unrecognisable substitutes for the original wish may, however, sneak into
consciousness as daydreams, fantasies – or as neurotic symptoms. At night the defence
mechanisms relax and the contents of the id can infltrate the ego in a disguised form, often
as symbols in dreams. Many of these are sexual in nature – for example, Freud (1900)
claimed that the penis may be represented by sticks, daggers, telescopes, watering cans,
fshing rods, feet, etc.
Other defence mechanisms include isolation, in which an instinct or memory may be
allowed into consciousness because the all-important emotion associated with the drive is
stripped away: aggressive instincts may be neatly satisfed through becoming a surgeon.
Projection involves attributing one’s own unacceptable fantasies, impulses, etc. on to other
people. An aggressive person may see others as being aggressive. Displacement of object
involves the expression of a sexual or aggressive wish, but against a substitute person, animal
or object. Reaction formation occurs when one’s ego reacts as if a threat (from the id) is always
present. Thus someone who has strong sexual urges may show the extreme prudery which is
obvious in anti-pornography campaigners. If one decides that it is one’s duty to constantly
look for signs of flth and depravity, then one is (reluctantly, of course) exposed to rather
a lot of it – which conveniently satisfes the demands of the id, while keeping the ego in
ignorance of one’s true motives.
There are more defence mechanisms than those discussed here, several of which were
suggested by followers of Freud. Descriptions of some of the more popular ones may be found
in Kline (1984) or in any of the sources mentioned at the end of this chapter.
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a. What is a ‘defence mechanism’?
b. Suppose that a patient is able to remember some horrifc incidents from
her childhood, but is able to talk about the events in a detached,
unemotional manner. Which defence mechanism may she be using?
c. Suppose that a person uses two defence mechanisms to keep his sexual
instincts at bay, namely projection and reaction formation. Try to work
out how this may lead him to feel about someone of the same sex whom
they (unconsciously) love, remembering that in Freud’s day this feeling
would have been unacceptable to the ego.
The structure of the mind is rather as shown in Figure 4.1. This shows the conscious and
unconscious areas of the mind – and also a grey area known as the ‘pre-conscious’ which
contains information of which one is unaware that can potentially become conscious if one
attends to it, or thinks hard. Note that the id is entirely unconscious. The sexual and aggressive
Figure 4.1 Freud’s structure of mind
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drives and their derivatives try to bubble up into the ego. Anxiety is thought to be triggered
when they do so and this prompts the operation of defence mechanisms – though when we
sleep these mechanisms relax somewhat so that the ego may become aware of some of the id
content, albeit in disguised (sanitised) form, such as symbols, so as to not trigger the defence
mechanisms.
Perceptual defence: measuring repression

in the laboratory?
The defence mechanism of repression seems to be very similar to the phenomenon of perceptual
defence as studied by Bruner and Postman (1947). They claimed that individuals fnd it harder
to recognise emotionally threatening words than neutral or positively toned words in
laboratory studies. A typical experiment might involve the establishment of ‘recognition
thresholds’ for various words, which are basically the minimum duration for which a word
has to be exposed for it to be correctly recognised. The words would be displayed for a very
brief period using a piece of equipment called a tachistoscope. The person being tested would
guess what the word was. If they guessed incorrectly, the word would be shown again for a
slightly longer duration, this process being repeated until it was correctly identifed.
It was found that words with negative associations (e.g., ‘whore’, ‘rape’, ‘death’) had to be
shown for longer periods of time than other words in order to be correctly recognised; they
had longer recognition thresholds. This suggested that some type of psychological mechanism
monitored the emotional content of the words as they were being perceived and could in some
way affect the visibility of the words in an attempt to keep threatening words from being
consciously perceived. Such studies raised a stream of protests and alternative explanations,
ranging from philosophical objections to the idea of a homunculus – a ‘little man inside the
head’ who monitors what enters consciousness – to sound methodological criticisms of the
early experiments.
The old perceptual defence experiments were fawed because they failed to control for
word length and word frequency, both of which can affect the ease with which words are
recognised. Short, common words are recognised much more rapidly than long or unusual
words. Furthermore one would have to be very certain that the word ‘penis’ really was present
before calling it out to one’s lecturer, whereas one would guess neutral words quite freely. This
alone would result in the ‘taboo word’ appearing to have a higher recognition threshold than
the neutral word (‘response suppression’). There are other problems with perceptual defence
experiments, some of which are discussed by Brown (1961) and Dixon (1981).
Since the paradigms were developed by experimental psychologists, the emphasis has been
on proving that the perceptual defence effect exists, rather than on examining its correlates.
Thus while many studies claim to show (or not to show!) that the emotional meaning of a
stimulus is related to its detectability, hardly any of them examine individual differences. It
would be simple to calculate scores indicating how pronounced the perceptual defence effect
is for each individual, for example by subtracting the individual’s mean threshold for neutral
words from their threshold for threatening words. One could then test whether individuals
who show a massive difference are anxious, rated by their therapists as ‘repressors’, and in
other ways examine the correlates of perceptual defence. Such studies are rare, but see Watt
and Morris (1995). These days cognitive scientists are happy to accept that the emotional
words and pictures of which a person is apparently unaware can infuence both their
physiological reactions and their cognitions (e.g., Hendler et al., 2003; Gibbons, 2009). The
fnding that our nervous systems react to the emotional content of stimuli of which we are
unaware is less controversial than it has ever been.
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Neurotic symptoms and their cure

Freud identifed several different types of neurotic symptom in his patients. These include
anxiety hysteria, in which excessive anxiety is attached to certain people or situations, anxiety
neurosis, in which the feeling of anxiety is powerful but diffused and not linked to any
particular individuals or settings, and conversion hysteria, in which unconscious fantasies are
acted out as emotional outbursts. Freud believed that physical illnesses such as muscle pains,
breathing irregularities and even short-sightedness could sometimes be traced back to
psychological causes – the so-called organ neuroses. Depression, the choice of unusual sexual
objects, compulsive actions, addictions and compulsions (such as shoplifting) are also
perceived as having an underlying psychological cause.
Despite the highly varied nature of these symptoms, Freudians believe that they have
several features in common. First, as Fenichel (1946) reminds us, the patient experiences some
unusual symptom – a feeling of anxiety, a compulsion to steal, bodily pains or whatever – but
is unable to determine its cause through introspection. Second, Freudians believe that all these
symptoms have their roots in some confict between the id and the ego, which has activated
defence mechanisms. They therefore stem from the blocking of one of the powerful instincts
by the ego. The exact form that the symptom takes depends on childhood experiences and
the techniques the infant used to deal with threats from the id. Third, the symptom is always
thought to have some special sexual or aggressive signifcance to the individual.
Why might a man become sexually excited by viewing and touching women’s shoes? If he
is (unconsciously) afraid of being castrated, heterosexual intercourse may arouse anxiety
because it reminds him that women do not possess a penis. A foot may symbolise a penis, so
it may prove less threatening to obtain sexual excitement from a woman’s shoes than from
sexual relationships with real women. Foot fetishists endow women with a symbolic penis in
an attempt to reduce castration anxiety (Fenichel, 1946). Alternatively, castration fears may
emerge as a phobia, as in the case of ‘Little Hans’, who became anxious that a horse would
bite him. The ‘big horse’ was, of course, the boy’s father, and Hans’s unconscious fear was
that the father would cut off his penis. This is an example of Freud’s making an extraordinarily
large leap from what Hans said to its theoretical meaning.
According to Freud, all symptoms thus result from some powerful emotion, wish or
thought which is repressed or otherwise defended against. These are usually sexual and often
involve the memory of childhood sexual abuse. Freud took the conventional view of his time
that abuse was unlikely to have occurred and he proposed that the ‘memory’ of these events
instead revealed a fantasy about something for which the child longed:
Almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was
driven to recognise in the end that these reports were untrue, and so came to understand
that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences.
(Freud, 1932)
These ‘screen memories’ are really fantasies that are superimposed on to our early memories
and so become indistinguishable from them. This is why Freud formed the view that some
form of sexual instinct is present even in children and that the ‘blocking’ of this instinct could
result in neurotic symptoms later in life.
Psychoanalysis seeks to undo the defence mechanisms that lock a particular thought or
wish in the unconscious. It will release it into consciousness, which should also remove the
symptom that emerged as a derivative of the original impulse. Thus the therapist must frst
fnd a link between the symptom and some unconscious mental process, for example through
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noting ‘blockages’ in the free association process or free associating to dream contents. Once
the analyst has a clear picture of the source of the neurotic symptom, this underlying fear or
wish is explained to the patient, together with examples of the defence mechanisms used and
the nature of the derivative(s) of the original impulse. The patient will generally object that
what the analyst said never took place: their objections are brushed aside by the analyst
because they represent a feeble attempt to use defence mechanisms to avoid recognising the
truth. This is in stark contrast to the therapeutic techniques discussed in Chapter 2, which
assume the patient is able to articulate something of value.
When the ego eventually faces up to these childhood memories and fears and appreciates
the nature of the resistance that has been applied, there is no need to defend further, as the
ego is fully aware of the ‘threat’. Thus all of the derivatives of the threat should disappear,
including the troublesome symptoms.
Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality and

adult character traits
Freud believed that the newborn infant is essentially id – demanding total and immediate
satisfaction of all instinctual demands. Freud (1923/1955) postulated that, in the early years
of life, the sexual instinct was satisfed through oral contact with objects – exploring, sucking
and later biting the nipple and other objects. Following the oral phase, the focus of sexual
satisfaction shifts to the anus during potty training. Presenting the parents with ‘gifts’ (or,
alternatively, withholding the faeces) at this stage is the child’s frst real opportunity to exercise
control over the environment and faeces are thought to have strong symbolic links to money,
babies and the penis. Phrases such as ‘stinking rich’, ‘flthy lucre’, ‘rolling in it’ and ‘where
there’s muck there’s money’ do, after all, crave explanation.
The penis and clitoris become the focus of the libido during what is known as the ‘phallic’
phase, but at the age of about 5 years young boys suffer the ‘Oedipus complex’ and the
‘castration complex’ – supposedly the most important and traumatic event in any man’s life.
The Oedipus complex is named after the hero of Sophocles’ play who unknowingly kills his
father and then commits incest with his mother. It occurs when the young boy lusts after his
mother and so views his father as a sexual rival. He realises through observation that girls do
not possess a penis and will come to a terrible conclusion – that a girl’s penis has been cut off
by a jealous father. Anxious to avoid this catastrophe, the young boy will repress all sexual
feelings for his mother, and will ‘identify’ with his father. Identifcation is a form of defence
mechanism into which threatening objects are incorporated – in this instance, the father’s
moral values are adopted to form the ‘superego’ or moral conscience. As girls do not possess
a penis they blame their mother for this inadequacy and identify with their father in order to
have a penis at their disposal (the ‘Electra complex’). Following these traumas, both sexes
enter what is known as the ‘latency period’ in which there is no focus of sexual activity, then
puberty (the ‘genital phase’).
The degree of satisfaction or frustration that the infant encounters at each psychosexual
stage is thought to determine his or her adult personality type. Kline (1981) compiled some
lists of the adult characteristics that Freud and his followers have linked to overindulgence or
frustration at various stages of psychosexual development. Those fxated at the oral
incorporation phase are optimistic, dependent and curious and would love soft and milky
foods. Oral sadists would be bitter, hostile, argumentative and jealous. Those fxated at the
anal phase would become obstinate, excessively tidy and stingy, and would enjoy dealing with
money (symbolic faeces). Why else would anyone choose to become an accountant or a tax
offcial?
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What might go through a psychoanalyst’s mind if a male patient:
a. said that they loved their mother
b. hesitated when producing an association to the word ‘stick’
c. says that they woke up with a start, feeling anxious
d. seemed to be very dependent, optimistic and curious, and came to the
session drinking a milk shake
e. screamed and shouted at them, and said that the analyst was talking
rubbish when claiming that something happened in their childhood?
Later developments
Psychoanalysis has not stood still since the time of Freud and developments such as object
relations theory (Fairbairn, 1952) and Lacanian psychoanalysis (Lacan and Wilden, 1968) have
proved popular with some, even though their basic tenets seem even more abstract and less
open to scientifc scrutiny than does the work of Freud. For example, Lacan’s approach is
deeply philosophical and rooted in the meaning of language; discourses on ‘the real’ (in a lecture
Lacan gave in 1953) for example seem to produce few hard propositions that are amenable to
scientifc scrutiny. Fairbairn stresses the importance of relationships (either with other people
or one’s own thoughts and fantasies) in development. His view was that we are motivated not
by the drives from the id, but by relationships, and suggests that the unconscious mind develops
from the ego (rather than vice versa) when repression of intolerable guilty thoughts effectively
splits the ego into several parts. I know of no attempts to test such theories empirically and
suspect that their proponents would be generally unsympathetic to the idea of doing so.
Carl Jung
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, corresponded and worked with Freud between 1905 and 1913.
He developed an alternative approach to psychoanalysis, one which emphasised the role of
mysticism, fantasy, symbolism and spirituality in human behaviour and which played down
the role of sexual instincts as a motivating force. Jung believed that there were two, quite
different, aspects of the unconscious mind. The ‘personal unconscious’ held memories that had
been repressed or forgotten – but without the life and death instincts that so dominate the
Freudian id. The personal unconscious played a minor role in Jung’s theories. Pride of place
was given to the collective unconscious – a storehouse of collective memories that is (somehow)
passed down from generation to generation and which contains the wisdom and experiences
of humankind. Although Jung maintained that we are not aware of this region of our mind,
he maintained that it predisposes us all to be sensitive to certain images and themes in life. For
example, whereas Freud’s view of symbols was limited to a rather crude set of analogies
between sexual organs and various objects (guns and penises, for example), Jung was fascinated
by shapes called mandalas (see Figure 4.2). These are abstract shapes, representing wholeness
or completeness: they are circular, fairly symmetrical and have signifcance in both Buddhist
and Hindu religions where they signify wholeness or the universe: ‘It is the path to
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Depth psychology
Figure 4.2 An example of a mandala
the centre, to individuation . . . I knew that in fnding the mandala as an expression of the self
I had attained what was for me the ultimate’ (Jung, 1963).
As well as the mandala, Jung proposed that various types of character are represented in
this collective unconscious. They are known as archetypes. Thus he suggests that we are
predisposed to recognise characters such as the hero, wise old man, caring mother, the shadow
(the darker, evil side of the self), the anima (the feminine side of a man) or the animus (the
masculine side of a woman), the persona (the mask we present to the world, hiding our true
self behind it). This might explain why similar characters play a part in myths and legends
from around the world – although, of course, a simpler explanation is that mothers feature
large in myths and legends because we are drawing on the personal experiences of having had
a mother and not because of any inherited predisposition at all. It is very diffcult to see how
one could possibly tell whether this part of Jung’s theory is correct. Neither is there any
obvious physiological mechanism that would allow memories to be passed on directly from
generation to generation, thereby perpetuating the archetypes.
Jung paid much attention to apparent coincidences and believed that that visions and dreams
could be genuinely informative, rather than just representing some horrible sexual urge from
the id. For example, in 1913 and 1914 Jung experienced the following vision on two occasions:
I saw a monstrous food covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the
North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains
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grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe
was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the foating rubble of civilization,
and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to
blood.
(Jung, 1963)
The First World War began shortly afterwards. This is an example of synchronicity – the
idea that two events, one of which is external and the other internal (the war and the
vision), occur at the same time without there being any clear causal link between them.
Rather than treating the vision as a psychotic episode, Jung suggests that visions and
dreams carry important messages from the unconscious and should be interpreted using
symbolism.
According to Jung, some people were thought to focus more on events external to
themselves: other people, events in the world and so on. He coined the term ‘extraverts’ for
these individuals and contrasted them with ‘intraverts’, who are much closer to their own
inner self and who are far more interested in inner, spiritual and psychological experiences
than the outer world. This idea resurfaces in modern trait theories of personality (Chapter 6)
although it is important to note that Jung regarded introversion/extraversion as a type
(someone is either extraverted or introverted) whereas trait theories regard it as a continuum
(there are degrees of extraversion).
Neuroses, according to Jung, came about because a fawed relationship with another
person, adverse life events or some similar cause. For example, having a dominating mother
may affect one’s ability to form relationships with other women. They were not the result of
repressed sexual desires bubbling up from the id. Instead, such a relationship may affect the
individuation process – the period of psychological maturation during which the person learns
to embrace and understand their unconscious minds (e.g., through dream interpretation) –
they become aware of the archetypes such as the shadow and anima/animus and ultimately
understand themselves as whole people.
Jung likewise identifed four different types of thought: he called them ‘psychological
orientations’:
[W]e must have a function which ascertains that something is there (sensation); a second
function which established what it is (thinking); a third function which states whether
it suits us or not, whether we wish to accept it or not (feeling), and a fourth function
which indicates where it came from and where it is going (intuition).
(Jung, 1963)
The Myers-Briggs personality type indicator is a questionnaire which claims to categorise

people on this basis. According to this theory people are classed either sensitive or using
intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving, and extraverted or introverted and there
are thus 16 (2 x 2 x 2 x 2) types of people. Although this questionnaire is used by some
personnel managers, its theoretical basis is extremely weak (what is the evidence that these
orientations exist?) and there are a number of rather devastating critiques (e.g., Stein and
Swan, 2019; Hunsley et al., 2015; Lorr, 1991). It will not be mentioned again.
If Freud’s ideas are diffcult to test, Jung’s are almost impossible to scrutinise scientifcally.
First, many of the concepts are vague in the extreme. For example, it is not entirely clear what
represents a mandala and what does not. Second, we have already observed that the notion
of archetypes is almost impossible to falsify. Even if it could be shown that archetypes such
as the ‘wise old man’ or ‘all-embracing mother’ exist and infuence our psychological
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development, it is not clear whether these fgures stem from the depth of our collective
unconscious or from our memories of our own parents that have accumulated through
childhood. Third, there is no evidence that the interpretations of dreams, visions and other
inner experiences or accounts to explain the origins of neurosis are either accurate or
consistent. Would two Jungian analysts come to the same interpretation? There appears to
have been no attempt to fnd out in the research literature. Even if the interpretations were
consistent, how could one tell whether or not they were actually correct? Most of Jung’s
theories are therefore problematic from a scientifc point of view.
Alfred Adler
Adler was another disciple of Freud’s who, like Jung, rejected Freud’s theories because of their
emphasis on sexual motivation. A Marxist doctor who worked with working-class patients,
Adler (see Adler and Jelliffe, 1917) noticed that someone with a physical disability might strive
to excel in an area in which they might have thought it would be impossible. For example,
people with artifcial legs have climbed Everest (Wainright, 2006); Winston Churchill stuttered
but sought out a career that involved extensive public speaking and oratory (Begbie, 1921).
Adler himself had been crippled in childhood, which may be part of the reason for his interest
in the area. Whatever the reason, Adler believed that the main motivating factor was not
sexual, but a striving for superiority.
This model, in which personality has its roots in social factors rather than biological drives,
ties in with his Marxist beliefs. The principle can apply to psychological factors as well as
physical ones. We all start as weak, powerless children and seek to develop our skills. If this
does not happen (when a child does not perform well at school or at sports for example) an
inferiority complex can develop if, because of a poor self-image, the person introspects too
much and obsesses about this issue. Such individuals will feel that they are a failure. By way
of contrast, some others who obsess about it may develop a superiority complex, whereby
they cover up for their perceived psychological weaknesses and ‘lord it’ over others. Both are
thought to be pathological.
Adler’s model of personality, individual psychology (Adler, 1930), takes a holistic view of
the individual, rather than breaking the person down into components such as the id and the
ego. Indeed,
l society (friendships, humanitarian interests)

l work (cooperative activity benefting others)
l love (caring more for another than oneself)
are thought by Adler to be the most important forces in life; note that there is no mention of
unconscious conficts here, and Adler stressed the importance of parenting in teaching the child
how to respect others and develop in a pro-social way. Each person is thought to have some sort
of idealised goal which is established early in life and which we each try to achieve –
either through cooperating with others, or by manipulating and dominating them. The former
approach is thought to lead to neurosis.
Adler’s approach to assessment included clinical interviews, in which he was alert to signs
of unhealthy need to dominate others (e.g., siblings) during childhood. This led him to theorise
that birth order was all important in shaping personality, the frst-born feeling resentful of
later arrivals and tending to bully them. Unfortunately we now know conclusively that birth
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order does not infuence personality (Rohrer et al., 2015) and so Adler’s assertion that such
childhood experiences mould adult personality is open to doubt.
Adlerian therapy is a cooperative exercise, very different from the Freudian model. Patients
are urged to make explicit their goals and to develop new ones if necessary which will allow
them to enhance society, rather than focusing on themselves. It is clear that many of the
concepts used by Adler are vague and poorly defned. It is therefore diffcult to develop sound
operational defnitions of many of the terms he used and therefore his theories, too, are
diffcult to test empirically.
Critique
What sources of data are useful in evaluating these theories? We discount patients’ and
therapists’ accounts of the effectiveness of treatment, as neither of these will be objective;
having invested thousands of pounds (or a lifetime’s work) in psychoanalysis, it would be
diffcult to admit to oneself that it is completely useless (‘cognitive dissonance’). Scientifc
studies of the effectiveness of psychoanalysis offer another possibility, although proper control
groups are needed, since if patients do get better this may be because of ‘spontaneous
remission’, cognitive dissonance or perhaps just having someone taking an interest in them.
However, evaluating psychoanalysis is not suffcient to test the veracity of Freud’s theories.
Farrell (1981) has observed that Freudian theory is not a single theory, but a collection of
loosely linked subtheories. Thus even if psychoanalysis is shown to be of little value, other
aspects (e.g., psychosexual personality types, structure of mind, defence mechanisms) may
possibly be correct.
Some aspects of Freud’s theories are clearly of central importance, since they are used as
explanations in virtually all the subtheories. If it could be shown that behaviour is completely
unaffected by unconscious factors (i.e., that the id is an unnecessary concept), that there is no
evidence that defence mechanisms flter memories or perceptions on the basis of their
emotional content or that the Oedipus complex does not exist, then many aspects of Freudian
theory would collapse. Hence it makes sense to concentrate on such issues.
Several books summarise the hundreds of studies that have been performed to scientifcally
test some aspects of Freud’s theories, for example, Fisher and Greenberg (1996). Kline (1981)
is one of the better ones because it is evaluative. Clearly, if an experiment has been poorly
designed (perhaps not having control groups, valid tests, a large sample of participants) and/
or is based on a misunderstanding of Freudian theory (for example by asking children which
parent they prefer in an attempt to discover unconscious Oedipal wishes), then its failure to
show anything interesting says nothing about the merits of Freudian theory. Even though
Kline’s book reports several experiments that do appear to give some support to some aspects
of the theory, very few of them appear to have been successfully replicated by independent
research groups. For example, Hammer’s (1953) work on symbolism showed that when men
who were about to be surgically sterilised were asked to draw a house, a tree and a person,
their trees were more often shown as being cut down and their houses lacked chimney pots
when compared with control groups – a fnding which was explained in terms of sexual
symbolism. But no one appears to have replicated this work. Likewise a fnding that people
sweated more (showing anxiety) when exposed to symbols of death rather than to other
shapes (Meissner, 1958) does not appear to have been replicated. One cannot have confdence
that these are solid, reliable effects. Most of the literature described here is elderly, because
these days very few psychologists see any point in attempting to test Freud’s theories.
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Lessons to be learned
We can learn a lot about what a ‘good’ theory of personality should look like by examining
the theories discussed above. Perhaps a good theory should provide the following:
1. Public data. No one other than the patient and analyst knew what went on in the
psychoanalysis sessions, as recording or flming was not allowed. We therefore have no
frm evidence that the patients behaved or responded as the analysts claimed. This does
not imply that the analysts were mistaken or cheating somehow – but the problem is that
we cannot show conclusively that events took place as the analysts claimed. If there are
problems replicating this work (for example, identifying the roots of hysterical symptoms)
it is not possible to go back and check how a particular set of inferences were drawn from
the interaction between the patient and the analyst. At least when questionnaires are used
to measure personality there is a record of precisely how each person responded. If there
are later queries about the inferences drawn from these responses (how the questionnaires
are scored, and what these scores mean) it is possible to go back and re-analyse the
original data. This is simply not possible if no record is kept.
2. Replicable results. If the theory is correct, then any properly trained analyst should be
able to draw the same conclusion as Freud, if they are given patients with similar
symptoms. The problem is that few, if any, studies explored this in any proper scientifc
way, even when psychoanalysts were being trained. We do not know how consistent
analysts are. This is analogous to scoring tests – drawing inferences about theoretical
constructs from observed behaviour (responses to items). It is easy for different people to
draw the same inferences about people from questionnaires, yet diffcult to do so from
their responses to projective tests.
3. A sound basis of evidence. Drawing inferences about how people in general behave from
tiny samples of mainly female, upper-class people with mental health issues may be
unwise. The rest of us may behave quite differently. Finding that obsessional neurosis is
linked to the defence mechanism of isolation (for example) in just one or two patients
does not imply that this is invariably the case – even if it is true in these few instances.
Large, representative samples of people are needed if one wishes to develop a theory
which applies to everyone.
4. Clear concepts which have sound operational defnitions. Whilst some concepts (e.g., the
anal character, striving for superiority) may be operationally defned using questionnaires
and other techniques as described by Kline (1981) it is unclear how one could ever go
about measuring others. How might you measure the death instinct, or strength of a
person’s Oedipal complex, for example? The only real method is the claims of analysts.
By contrast, it is easy to create operational defnitions for terms using questionnaires or
rating scales; to assess sociability one just needs to write items which measure different
aspects of the trait.
5. Testable hypotheses. Cynicism may be (a) be an acceptable way of expressing aggressive
feelings about an object or (b) it could stem from a strong sexual desire that is converted
into its opposite through the defence mechanism of reaction formation. A cynical view
could indicate unconscious feelings of either love or hatred. A theory which is capable
of explaining either outcome may be of little value, for it will be impossible to refute
it, to show that it is incorrect. It is generally agreed that this is a key aspect of any scientifc
theory.
6. Predictions, not just post-hoc explanations. Freud’s theories were modifed over the years
in the light of new data; whenever the theory did not work it was made more complex
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Depth psychology
so that it ftted the new observations. It is easy constantly to modify a theory so that it
fts past behaviour like this; it is much harder to devise a theory which will predict how
a new individual will behave, or how a person will behave in future. However as we will
see in Chapters 17 and 18, modern theories of personality and abilities are rather good
at this.
7. Simple explanations. Oedipal conficts, psychosexual development, superego strength,
repressed complexes and many other variables (of which the individual is frequently
unaware) are thought to interact to infuence behaviour. Complex theories such as these
are diffcult to test. Occam’s Razor is a principle which suggests that theories should be
as simple as possible; psychoanalysis was a complex theory (involving unconscious
motivation, etc.) from the outset. Contrast that with the simple theory that individual
differences in intelligence come about because some people’s nerves transmit information
faster than other people’s (Reed and Jensen, 1991).
8. Practical effectiveness. If psychoanalysis is designed to cure neuroses, then any failure to
do so must cast some doubt on the underlying theory. Freudian psychoanalysis is generally
not an effective form of therapy (Eysenck, 1957) and some of the patients whom Freud
claimed to have cured remained highly disturbed (Sulloway, 1979).
Depth theories in context

Chapter 2 introduced some very simple theories which generally relied on self-reports, and
assumed that people are able and willing to describe their behaviour accurately. The theories
discussed in this chapter go to the other extreme, and assume that nothing that a person says
can be taken at face value because we all practise self-deception in order to protect our egos
from harm. That said, the great complexity of these theories, and their somewhat shaky
evidential basis, are major problems for the approaches discussed in this chapter. Furthermore
their use of unconscious mental processes makes the theories extraordinarily diffcult to test.
Perhaps it is better to base theories on sound observation of behaviour, coupled with a healthy
scepticism about whether self-reports are necessarily accurate – a compromise between the
approaches discussed in Chapter 2 and the present chapter. This approach might allow
theories to be tested and disproved in some cases, which is seen as a necessary step in
developing a scientifc basis for individual difference research; such approaches will be
considered from Chapter 6 onwards.
However the nagging doubts raised by Michell (1997) remain. How can personality
psychology hope to be ‘scientifc’ if its operational defnitions of theoretical terms are not
proper numerical measurements? Has personality theory pretended to be more scientifc than
it really is in order to distance itself from the qualitative models of the psychoanalysts? Is
current research scientism, rather than science? It is good to worry about these things as you
read on.

Most of the references in this chapter are embarrassingly old, for little is now being written
about classical psychoanalytic theory. There really is no substitute for consulting the excellent
and highly readable accounts written by Freud for non-specialist audiences. The shortest
summary is the Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Freud, 1910/1957) with the Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud, 1917/1964) offering slightly more detailed treatment, and
69
Depth psychology
the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud, 1932) providing an updated and
extended summary of Freud’s main theories. There are also some useful summaries of Freud’s
theories, such as those by Brown (1964) or Stevens (1983), but it would be a shame to consult
these without frst reading some original Freud. Kline’s (1981) Fact and Fantasy critically
discusses the methodological problems associated with the various experiments and tries to
ignore the technically fawed literature when drawing some broad conclusions about how well
Freud’s theories have stood up to empirical testing. Other useful texts are Erdelyi’s (1985)
Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychology (but only for those with a background in
cognitive psychology) and Fisher and Greenberg’s (1996) Freud Scientifcally Appraised,
which covers much of the more recent work, although sometimes less critically than one might
expect.
Jung’s theory does not seem to generate so many research papers: those that are published
in the Journal of Analytical Psychology are usually deeply theoretical and/or clinically based
and written by practitioners who are largely committed to the broad principles of Jung’s
theories. They tend not to be based on empirical evidence and so do not really allow for the
scientifc evaluation of Jung’s theories; they do not (perhaps cannot) seek to falsify the basic
tenets of Jungian theory. For example, how could one research synchronicity? That said, the
Society for Analytical Psychology offers a number of short papers for download on their
website (https://www.thesap.org.uk/) which may be of interest. Adlerians publish in the
Journal of Individual Psychology and once again, the material tends to be clinically based or
suggests how the theory could be applied in other settings (e.g., education). But to my eye at
any rate, it is all rather uncritical.
SAQ 4.1
a. Free association is one of the main features of psychoanalysis. The patient
agrees simply to say whatever comes into his or her mind, no matter how
trivial, feeting or shocking it may be. The analyst speaks a word and
observes the patient’s response and in particular notes any diffculty in
producing an association. Such diffculties may suggest that the word is
linked to some traumatic memory and so an unconscious mental process
(called a ‘repression’ in Freud’s early work) strives to keep all associations
with this event out of consciousness.
b. A resistance is an unconscious force that prevents the patient from
producing free associations with words which touch on unresolved
conficts. The resistance prevents these associations from becoming
conscious – it is the force that opposes free association.
c. Repression is one example of a defence mechanism. It is a process by
which a memory, wish or impulse (generally sexual in nature) is kept out
of conscious awareness.
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Depth psychology
SAQ 4.2
a. Any psychological mechanism whose aim is to prevent the contents of
the id from reaching the ego.
b. Isolation.
c. The feeling of love would be turned to hate (by reaction formation), so
that the unconscious feeling ‘I love him’ becomes ‘I hate him’. Projection
turns this into ‘he hates me’. Freud suggested that these two defence
mechanisms occurred in homosexuals, who were supposed to feel
paranoid for this reason.
SAQ 4.3
a. It is not obvious what the analyst would make of this though it would
not be taken as evidence for some sort of Oedipal fxation because the
ego is aware of these feelings. If there were an unresolved Oedipal
confict, the patient would use defence mechanisms to keep it unconscious,
and so the patient would be unaware of the fact that he longed to sleep
with his mother.
b. This would indicate that some sort of defence mechanism was at work,
inhibiting the free association process. They would probably want to
probe childhood memories, examine other ‘blockages’ in association and
so on to try to fnd out what the signifcance of the stick was to the
individual.
c. The defence mechanisms which keep the id contents from entering
consciousness have relaxed too much, causing anxiety. ‘[The defence
mechanisms] can no longer perform its function of preventing an
interruption of sleep, but assumes instead the other function of promptly
bringing sleep to an end. In doing so it is merely behaving like a
conscientious night-watchman, who first carries out his duty by
suppressing disturbances so that the townsmen may not be woken up,
but afterwards continues to do his duty by himself waking the townsmen
up, if the causes of the disturbance seem to him serious and of a kind that
he cannot cope with’. Freud (1900)
d. It sounds as if the individual may be fxated at the oral passive stage of
development.
e. Again, the defence mechanisms are trying to keep the ‘truth’ revealed by
the psychoanalyst out of consciousness.
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Depth psychology
References
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Adler, A. & Jelliffe, S. E. 1917. Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation:
A Contribution to Clinical Medicine. New York: The Nervous and Mental Disease
Publishing Company.
Begbie, H. 1921. The Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Refections. London: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, the Knickerbocker Press
Brown, J. A. C. 1964. Freud and the Post Freudians. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Brown, W. P. 1961. Conceptions of Perceptual Defence. British Journal of Psychology
Monograph Supplements, 35.
Bruner, J. S. & Postman, L. 1947. Emotional Selectivity in Perception and Reaction. Journal
of Personality, 16, 69–77.
Claridge, G. S. 1985. Origins of Mental Illness. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dehaene, S., Charles, L., King, J. R. & Marti, S. 2014. Toward a Computational Theory of
Conscious Processing. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 25, 76–84.
Dixon, N. F. 1981. Preconscious Processing. New York: Wiley.
Erdelyi, M. H. 1985. Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychology. New York: Freeman.
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Fisher, S. & Greenberg, R. P. 1996. Freud Scientifcally Appraised. New York: John Wiley.
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Freud, S. 1923/1955. Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis: Two Enyclopedia
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Freud, S. 1925/1959. An Autobiographical Study. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Lacan, J. & Wilden, A. 1968. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in
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Psychology, 56, 295–299.
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Reaction Time and Intelligence. Intelligence, 15, 33–47.
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Personality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America, 112, 14224–14229.
Stein, R. & Swan, A. B. 2019. Deeply Confusing: Confating Diffculty with Deep Revelation
on Personality Assessment. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10, 514–521.
Stevens, R. 1983. Freud and Psychoanalysis. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Sulloway, F. 1979. Freud, Biologist of the Mind. London: Burnett.
Wainright, M. 2006. A Double Amputee, Several Grandparents and a Playboy Model . . . It’s
Been a Busy Week on Everest. The Guardian, 20 May, p. 3.
Watt, C. A. & Morris, R. L. 1995. The Relationships among Performance on a Prototype
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Chapter 5
Factor analysis
Introduction
This chapter may come as something as a surprise, and it is certainly very different from the
previous one. The reason why it is here is that all modern theories of individual differences
(personality, intelligence, mood and motivation) are based on a statistical technique called
factor analysis, and so to properly understand how these theories developed (together with
their strengths and limitations) it is necessary to have a basic grasp of what factor analysis is,
and how it operates. The theories described in Chapter 6, 7, 9, 10, 12 and 16 all draw on the
methods outlined in this chapter.
The chapter introduces you to the logic of factor analysis in a way which involves little or
no statistical knowledge; it is just necessary to know what a correlation is. (If you are unsure,
read Appendix A.) It also introduces all the terms which you will encounter when reading
books or research papers which use factor analysis to develop models of individual differences.
It does not go into the detail which you need to actually perform factor analysis, or check that
others have performed one properly; this is covered in Chapter 19.
Although we introduced the term ‘trait’ in Chapter 3, traits have not featured greatly in
the theories discussed thus far. However there has been some mention of them. Chapter 4
introduced the idea of the ‘anal character’, for example – and pointed out that Freud claimed
that obstinacy, orderliness and meanness are three characteristics which tend to occur together
in people (i.e., are all correlated together) and so form a trait. Kline’s questionnaire which was
designed to measure the anal character did indeed fnd that people who said that they were
stubborn also said that they kept their room tidy and avoided unnecessary expenses. Even
though the items look different, people tend to respond to them in similar ways. The three
items defne a trait. Factor analysis is a statistical technique which can be applied to self-
reports, observations or ratings of behaviour in order to identify traits and develop scales to
measure them, and so it is the basis for many modern theories of personality and cognitive
abilities.
75
Factor analysis
Learning outcomes
l Show an understanding of how correlations between variables can be
represented geometrically, and how factors can be positioned to describe
the data.
l Explain terms such as factor matrix, factor loading, orthogonal solution,
oblique solution, communality, unique factor, eigenvalue, principal
components analysis, hierarchical analyses.
l Outline the difference between principal components analysis and factor
analysis.
l Discuss how factor analysis may be used to identify personality and ability
traits, free of any theoretical expectations.
‘Factor analysis’ can refer to two rather different statistical techniques. Exploratory factor
analysis is the older (and simpler) technique and forms the basis of this chapter and the frst
section of Chapter 19. Confrmatory factor analysis and its extensions (sometimes known as
‘structural equation modelling’, ‘latent variable analysis’ or ‘LISREL models’) are useful in
many areas other than individual differences and are particularly popular in social psychology.
A brief outline of this technique is given at the end of Chapter 19. Authors do not always
make it clear whether exploratory or confrmatory factor analysis has been used. If you see
the term ‘factor analysis’ in a journal, you should assume that it refers to an exploratory factor
analysis.
Suppose that, in the interests of science, you were to measure the following six variables
(V1–V6) from a random sample of (say) 200 fellow students in the bar of your university or
college late one evening:
l V1 body weight (kg)

l V2 degree of slurring of speech (rated on a scale from 1 to 5)
l V3 length of leg (cm)
l V4 volubility of talking (rated on a scale from 1 to 10)
l V5 length of arm (cm)
l V6 degree of staggering when attempting to walk in a straight line (rated on a scale
from 1 to 3).
It seems likely that V1, V3 and V5 will all vary together, since large people will tend to
have long arms and legs and be heavier. These three items all measure some fundamental
property of the individuals in your sample, namely their size. Similarly, it is likely that V2, V4
and V6 will all vary together – the amount of alcohol consumed in the bar is likely to be
related to slurring of speech and talkativeness and to diffculty in walking in a straight line.
Thus although we have collected six pieces of data, these questions measure only two ‘traits’,
namely size and drunkenness. If you wanted to describe a person to a friend, you could just
say that they were ‘small and sober’ rather than having to describe them on each of the six
different characteristics listed; factor analysis shows that it is legitimate to summarise the data
like this without losing much information.
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Factor analysis
Exploratory factor analysis therefore does two things:
l It shows how many distinct psychological factors are measured by a set of variables. In the
last example, there are two factors (size and drunkenness).
l It shows which variables measure which constructs. In our example, it might well show
that V1, V3 and V5 measure one factor and that V2, V4 and V6 measure another, quite
different factor. If the items relate to personality (e.g., ‘do you keep your desk tidy’. . .) the
factors will be personality traits.
Scores on entire tests (rather than test items) can also be factor analysed. The imprecision
of language and different theoretical background of researchers means that the same
psychological construct may be given several different names by different researchers. Do six
different tests that are marketed as assessing anxiety, neuroticism, negative affect, ego strength,
emotional instability and low self-actualisation measure six different aspects of personality or
do they overlap? If these tests are given to a sample of people, factor analysis of their scores
will show whether or not they all measure the same thing.
Discovering personality factors

An enormous number of words can be used to describe personality, mood, emotions and
abilities; Allport and Odbert (1936) found over 4500 words in the dictionary that could be
used to describe personality alone. We will see in Chapter 6 that it is possible to identify the
main personality traits by taking a sample of these words and asking people to rate how
well each of these words describes them. Crucially, this approach does not require any sort
of theoretical input from the psychologist, other than to try to identify the personality traits
which are revealed by the computer program. This is in stark contrast to the theories
considered in Chapters 2 and 4, which required psychologists to infer which personality
traits were present (‘self-concept’, ‘oral character’, etc.) from clinical interviews. It certainly
looks as if this is an objective, scientifc means of gathering data. The responses that people
give when rating themselves are public and verifable. The analysis can be repeated in other
samples, to check for replicability. It is possible to show that a trait which one researcher
identifed is not found in another group, and so the technique produces results which are
falsifable (and hence perhaps scientifc). In short, this approach to measuring personality
by searching for traits overcomes a great number of the issues identifed at the end of
Chapter 4.
The technique is not restricted to test items or test scores. It would be possible to factor
analyse reaction times from various types of cognitive test in order to determine which (if
any) of these tasks were related. Alternatively, suppose that one took a group of schoolchildren
who had no specifc training or practice in sport and assessed their performance in 30 sports
by any mixture of coaches’ ratings, timings, mean length of throw, percentage of maiden
overs obtained, goals scored or whatever performance measure is most appropriate for each
sport. The only proviso is that each child must compete in each sport. Factor analysis would
reveal whether individuals who were good at one ball game tended to be good at all of them,
whether short-distance and long-distance track events formed two distinct groupings (and
which events belonged to which group) and so on. Thus, instead of having to talk in terms
of performance in 30 distinct areas, it would be possible to summarise this information by
talking in terms of half a dozen basic sporting abilities (or however many abilities the factor
analysis revealed).
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Factor analysis
Exploratory factor analysis by inspection

Table 5.1 shows a six-item questionnaire. Suppose that six students were asked to answer
each question, using a fve-point rating scale as shown in the table. Table 5.2 shows how each
student answered each question; these numbers show the extent to which each student agreed
with each item (a ‘Likert scale’).
Table 5.1 Six-item personality questionnaire
Strongly agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly disagree
1 I enjoy socialising 1 2 3 4 5
2 I often act on impulse 1 2 3 4 5
3 I am a cheerful sort 1 2 3 4 5
of person
4 I often feel depressed 1 2 3 4 5
5 It is diffcult for me to 1 2 3 4 5
get to sleep at night
6 Large crowds make 1 2 3 4 5
me feel anxious
ExERCISE
Table 5.2 shows the responses which six students gave when they completed
the questionnaire shown in Table 5.1. Looking at the numbers in Table 5.2
alone, try to see whether there is any overlap between any of the
six items – and if so, which.
Table 5.2 Responses of six students to the items in Table 5.1
Ql Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6
Stephen 5 5 4 1 1 2
Ann 1 2 1 1 1 2
Paul 3 4 3 4 5 4
Janette 4 4 3 1 2 1
Michael 3 3 4 1 2 2
Christine 3 3 3 5 4 5
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Factor analysis
Table 5.3 Correlations between the six items in Table 5.2
Ql Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6
Ql l.000
Q2 0.933 l.000
Q3 0.824 0.696 1.000
Q4 –0.096 –0.052 0.000 1.000
Q5 –0.005 0.058 0.lll 0.896 1.000
Q6 –0.167 –0.127 0.000 0.965 0.808 1.000
You may have observed that individuals’ responses to questions 1, 2 and 3 (Variables 1–3)
tend to be similar. Stephen tends to agree with all three, Ann tends to disagree with them,
while the others feel more or less neutral about them. These are rough approximations, of
course, but you can see that no one who rates him- or herself as ‘1’ or ‘2’ on one of these three
questions gives him- or herself a ‘4’ or ‘5’ on one of the others. This may suggest that enjoying
socialising, acting on impulse and having a cheerful disposition tend to go together and so
these three items form a factor – a personality trait. Much the same applies to items 4 to 6.
Again, people such as Stephen or Ann who give themselves a low rating on one of these three
questions also give themselves a low rating on the other two questions, while Christine gives
herself high ratings on all three questions.
Thus there seem to be two clusters of questions in this questionnaire. The frst group
consists of questions 1, 2 and 3 and the second group consists of questions 4, 5 and 6.
However, spotting these relationships by eye is diffcult. Had the order of the columns in
Table 5.2 been rearranged, these relationships would have been diffcult or impossible to
identify by just looking at the responses.
Fortunately, however, a statistic called the correlation coeffcient makes it possible to
determine whether individuals who have low scores on one variable tend to have low (or high)
scores on other variables. A brief summary of correlational methods is given in Appendix A,
which should be consulted now, if necessary.
Table 5.3 shows the correlations calculated from the data in Table 5.1. The detailed
calculation of these correlations is not shown, as statistics books such as Howell (2012)
explain this in detail. These correlations confrm our suspicions about the relationships
between the students’ responses to questions 1 to 3 and questions 4 to 6. Variables 1 to 3
correlate strongly together (0.933, 0.824 and 0.696, respectively) but hardly at all with
questions 4 to 6 (−0.096, etc.). Similarly, variables 4 to 6 correlate highly together (0.896,
0.965 and 0.808, respectively), but hardly at all with questions 1 to 3. Thus it is possible to
see from the table of correlations that variables 1 to 3 form one natural group and variables
4 to 6 form another – that is, the questionnaire actually measures two factors, one consisting
of the frst three questions and the other consisting of the fnal three questions.
While it is easy to see this from the correlations in Table 5.3, it should be remembered that
the correlations shown there are hardly typical:
l The data were constructed so that the correlations between the variables were either very
large or very small. In real life, correlations between variables would rarely be larger
than 0.5, with many in the range 0.2–0.3. This makes it diffcult to identify patterns by eye.
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Factor analysis
l The questions were ordered so that the large correlations fell next to each other in Table 5.3.
If the questions had been presented in a different order, it would not be so easy to identify
clusters of large correlations.
l Only six questions were used, so there are only 15 correlations to consider. With
40 questions there would be 40 x 39 / 2 = 780 correlations to consider, making it much
more diffcult to identify groups of intercorrelated items.
There are several other problems associated with performing factor analysis ‘by eye’, not
least of which is that different people might well reach different conclusions about the number
and nature of the factors – the whole process is rather unscientifc.
Fortunately, however, well-known mathematical methods can be used to identify factors
from groups of variables that tend to correlate together and even the very largest factor
analyses can now be performed on a desktop computer. Several statistics packages can be used
to perform factor analysis, including R, SPSS, SYSTAT and SAS or the excellent and free factor
analysis program by Lorenzo-Seva and Ferrando (2006). To understand how computers can
perform this task, it is helpful to visualise the problem in a slightly different way and adopt a
geometrical approach.
A geometric approach to factor analysis

It is possible to represent correlation matrices geometrically. Variables are represented by
straight lines of equal length, which all start at the same point. These lines are positioned such
that the correlation between the variables is represented by the cosine of the angle between
them. The cosine of an angle is a trigonometric function that can either be looked up in tables
or computed directly by all but the simplest pocket calculators – you do not need to know
what cosines mean, just where to fnd them. Table 5.4 shows a few cosines to give you a
general idea of the concept. Remember that when the angle between two lines is small, the
cosine is large and positive. When two lines are at right angles, the correlation (cosine) is zero.
When the two lines are pointing in opposite directions, the correlation (cosine) is large and
negative.
It is but a small step to represent entire correlation matrices geometrically. A line is drawn
anywhere on the page representing one of the variables – it does not matter which one. The
other variables are represented by other lines of equal length, all of which fan out from one
end of the frst line. The angles between the variables are, by convention, measured in a
clockwise direction. Variables which have large positive correlations between them will fall
close to each other, as Table 5.4 shows that large correlations (or cosines) result in small
angles between the lines. Highly correlated variables literally point in the same direction,
variables with large negative correlations between them point in opposite directions and
uncorrelated variables point in completely different directions. Figure 5.1 shows a simple
example based on three variables. The correlation between V1 and V2 is 0.0; the correlation
between V1 and V3 is 0.5 and the correlation between V2 and V3 is 0.867. The correlation
between V1 and V2 is represented by a pair of lines of equal length joined at one end; as
the correlation between these variables is 0.0 the angle between them corresponds to a
cosine of 0.0; that is, 90° (Table 5.4). The correlation between V1 and V3 is 0.5 corresponding
to an angle of 60° and that between V2 and V3 is 0.867 (30°), so V2 and V3 are positioned
as shown.
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Factor analysis
Table 5.4 Table of cosines for graphical representation

of correlations between variables
Angle (in degrees) Cosine of angle
0 1.000
15 0.966
30 0.867
45 0.707
60 0.500
75 0.259
90 0.000
120 –0.500
150 –0.867
180 –1.000
210 –0.867
240 –0.500
270 0.000
300 0.500
330 0.867
Figure 5.1 Correlations between three variables and their geometric

representation
81
Factor analysis

Figure 5.2 shows the geometric representation of the correlations between
fve variables. Use Table 5.4 to try to answer the following questions:
a. Which two variables have the highest positive correlation?
b. Which variable has a correlation of zero with V3?
c. Which variable has a large negative correlation with V3?
ExERCISE
Without looking ahead, try to sketch out roughly how the correlations
between the six test items shown in Table 5.2 would look if they were
represented geometrically.
It may have occurred to you that it is not always possible to represent correlations in two
dimensions (i.e., on a fat sheet of paper). For example, if any of the correlations in Figure 5.1
had been altered to a different value, one of the lines would have to project outward from the
page to some degree. This is no problem for the underlying mathematics of factor analysis,
but it does mean that we cannot perform factor analysis simply by drawing diagrams.
Figure 5.3 is a fairly good approximation of the data shown in Table 5.3. Ignoring lines
F1 and F2 for now, you can see that the correlations between variables 1, 2 and 3 shown in
this fgure are all very large and positive (that is, the angles between these lines are small).
Figure 5.2 Geometrical representation of correlations between fve variables
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Factor analysis
Figure 5.3 Approximate geometrical representations of the correlations

shown in Table 5.3
Similarly, the correlations between variables 4 to 6 are also large and positive. As variables 1
to 3 have near zero correlations with variables 4 to 6, variables 1, 2 and 3 are at 90° to
variables 4, 5 and 6. Computer programs for factor analysis essentially try to ‘explain’ the
correlations between the variables in terms of a smaller number of factors. It is good practice
to talk about ‘common factors’ rather than just ‘factors’ – later on we will encounter ‘unique
factors’ and it is safest to avoid confusion. In this example, it is clear that there are two clusters
of correlations, so the information in Table 5.3 can be approximated by two common factors,
each of which passes through a group of large correlations. The common factors are indicated
by long lines labelled F1 and F2 in Figure 5.3.
It should be clear that, from measuring the angle between each common factor and each
variable, it is also possible to calculate the correlations between each variable and each
common factor. Variables 1, 2 and 3 will all have very large correlations with factor 1 (in fact
variable 2 will have a correlation of nearly 1.0 with factor 1, as factor 1 lies virtually on top
of it). Variables 1, 2 and 3 will have correlations of about zero with factor 2, as they are
virtually at right angles to it. Similarly, factor 2 is highly correlated with variables 4 to 6 and
is virtually uncorrelated with variables 1 to 3 (because of the 90° angle between these variables
and this factor). Do not worry for now where these factors come from or how they are
positioned relative to the variables, as this will be covered in Chapter 19.
In the example just examined, the two clusters of variables (and hence the common factors)
are at right angles to each other – what is known technically as an ‘orthogonal solution’, a
term that you should note. However, this need not always be the case. Consider the correlations
shown in Figure 5.4. Here it is clear that there are two distinct clusters of variables, but it is
equally clear that there is no way in which two orthogonal (i.e., uncorrelated) common
factors, represented here by lines F1 and F2, can be placed through the centre of each cluster.
It would clearly make sense to allow the factors to become correlated and to place one
common factor through the middle of each cluster of variables. Factor analyses where the
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Factor analysis
Figure 5.4 Correlations between six variables showing two factors at right
angles
factors are themselves correlated (i.e., not at right angles) are known as ‘oblique solutions’.
The correlations between factors form what is called a ‘factor pattern correlation matrix’. Try
to remember these terms – it will be helpful when you come to interpret output from factor
analyses, or read books or papers which use factor analysis. When an orthogonal solution is
performed, all the correlations between the various factors are zero. (A correlation of zero
implies an angle of 90° between each pair of factors, which is another way of saying that the
factors are independent.)
It is possible to show all the correlations between every item and every common factor in
a table, called the ‘factor matrix’ or sometimes the ‘factor structure matrix’. These correlations
between items and common factors are usually known as ‘factor loadings’. By convention,
the common factors are shown as the columns of this table and the variables as the rows. The
values in Table 5.5 were obtained by looking at the angles between each common factor and
each variable in Figure 5.3 and translating these (roughly) into correlations using Table 5.4.
Table 5.5 Approximate factor matrix from Figure 5.3 showing

the loadings of each variable on each factor
Variable Factor 1 Factor 2
V1 0.90 0.10
V2 0.98 0.00
V3 0.90 –0.10
V4 0.10 0.85
V5 0.00 0.98
V6 –0.10 0.85
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Factor analysis

Without looking back, try to defne the following terms:
a. oblique solution
b. factor loading
c. factor structure matrix
d. orthogonal solution
e. factor pattern correlation matrix.
The factor matrix

The factor matrix is extremely important, as it shows three things. From it one can tell which
variables are represented by each factor, how well the factors (taken together) represent a
particular variable, and how important each factor is.
Which variables make up each common factor

This can be seen by noting which variables have loadings that are more extreme than some
arbitrary cutoff. By convention, the cutoff value is 0.4. The easiest way to see the variables
that ‘belong’ to a factor is thus to underline those that have loadings higher than 0.4 or less
than −0.4. Thus in Table 5.5, one would deduce that factor 1 is a mixture of V1, V2 and V3
(but not V4, V5 or V6, as their loadings lie between –0.4 and 0.4). Likewise, factor 2 is a
mixture of V4, V5 and V6. Thus the factor matrix can be used to give a tentative label to the
common factor. For example, suppose that 100 ability items were given to a sample of people,
and each item was scored as to whether it was answered correctly (1) or incorrectly (0). These
100 items could then be correlated together and factor analysed and it might be found that
the variables that had substantial loadings on the frst common factor were concerned with
spelling, vocabulary, knowledge of proverbs and verbal comprehension, while none of the
other items (mathematical problems, puzzles requiring objects to be visualised, memory tests,
etc.) showed large loadings on the factor. Because all of the high-loading items involve the use
of language, it seems reasonable to call the frst common factor ‘verbal ability’, ‘language
ability’ or something similar.
Be warned, however, that there is no guarantee that labels given like this are necessarily
correct. It is necessary to validate the factor exactly as described in Chapter 8 in order to
ensure that this label is accurate. However, if the items that defne a common factor form a
reliable scale that predicts teachers’ ratings of language ability correlates nicely with other
well-trusted tests of verbal ability and does not correlate at all strongly with other measures
of personality or ability, it seems likely that the factor was correctly identifed.
You will remember that the square of the correlation coeffcient (i.e., the correlation
coeffcient multiplied by itself) shows how much ‘variance’ is shared by two variables – or in
simpler language, how much they overlap. Two variables with a correlation of 0.8 share 0.82
or 0.64 of their variance. (Consult Appendix A if this is unfamiliar ground.) As factor loadings
are merely correlations between common factors and items, it follows that the square of each
factor loading shows the amount of overlap between each variable and the common factor.
This simple fnding forms the basis of two other main uses of the factor matrix.
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Factor analysis
Amount of overlap between each variable and

all of the common factors
If the common factors are at right angles (an ‘orthogonal’ solution), it is simple to calculate
how much of the variance of each variable is measured by the factors, by merely summing the
squared factor loadings across factors. (When the common factors are not at right angles, life
becomes more complicated.) It can be seen from Table 5.5 that 0.902 + 0.102 (= 0.82) of the
variance of Variable 1 is ‘explained’ by the two factors. This amount is called the communality
of that variable.
A variable with a large communality has a large degree of overlap with one or more
common factors. A low communality implies that all of the correlations between that variable
and the common factors are small – that is, none of the common factors overlaps much with
that variable. This might mean that the variable measures something that is conceptually quite
different from the other variables in the analysis. For example, one personality item in among
100 ability test items would have a communality close to zero. It might also mean that a
particular item is heavily infuenced by measurement error or extreme diffculty, for example,
an item that is so easy that everyone obtained the correct answer or was ambiguously phrased
so that no one could understand the question. Whatever the reason, a low communality
implies that an item does not overlap with the common factors, either because it measures a
different concept, because of excessive measurement error, or because there are few individual
differences in the way in which people respond to the item.
Relative importance of the common factors

It is possible to calculate how much of the variance each common factor accounts for.
A common factor that accounts for 40% of the overlap between the variables in the
original correlation matrix is clearly more important than another that explains only 20%
of the variance. Once again it is necessary to assume that the common factors are orthogonal
(at right angles to each other). The frst step is to calculate what is known as an eigenvalue
for each factor by squaring the factor loadings and summing down the columns. Using the
data shown in Table 5.5, it can be seen that the eigenvalue of factor 1 is 0.902 + 0.982 +
0.902 + 0.102 + 0.02 + (–0.10)2 or 2.60. If the eigenvalue is divided by the number of
variables (six in this instance), it shows what proportion of variance is explained by this
common factor. Here factor 1 explains 0.43 or 43% of the information in the original
correlation matrix.

Try to defne the terms eigenvalue and communality. Then look back at
Table 5.5 and:
a. calculate the communalities of variables 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6
b. calculate the eigenvalue of factor 2
c. work out what proportion of the variance is accounted for by factor 2
d. work out, by addition, the proportion of variance accounted for by
factors 1 and 2 combined.
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Factor analysis
Before we leave the factor matrix, it is worth clarifying one point that can cause confusion.
Suppose that one of the factors in the analysis has a number of loadings that are both large
and negative (e.g., –0.6, –0.8), some that are close to zero (e.g., –0.1, +0.2), but no large
positive loadings. Suppose that the items with large negative loadings are from items such as
‘are you a nervous sort of person?’ and ‘do you worry a lot?’, where strong agreement is coded
as ‘5’ and strong disagreement with the statements as ‘1’. The large negative correlations imply
that the factor measures the opposite of nerviness and tendency to worry, so it may be
tentatively identifed as ‘emotional stability’ or something similar. While it is perfectly
acceptable to interpret factors in this way, it may sometimes be more convenient to reverse all
the signs of all the variables’ loadings on that factor. Thus the loadings mentioned would
change from –0.6, –0.8, –0.1 and +0.2 to +0.6, +0.8, +0.1 and –0.2. It is purely a matter of
convenience whether one does this, as SAQ 5.4 will reveal. However, if you do alter the signs
of all factor loadings you should also:
l change the sign of the correlation between the ‘reversed’ factor and all the other factors
in the factor pattern correlation matrix
l change the sign of all the ‘factor scores’ (discussed later) calculated from the factor
in question.

a. Use Table 5.4 to represent graphically the sets of correlations between
one factor (F1) and two variables (V1 and V2) shown in Table 5.6.
b. Next, change the sign of the correlation between the variables and F1
and replot the diagram.
c. From this, try to explain how reversing the sign of all of a factor’s loadings
alters the position of a factor.
Factor analysis and component analysis

When you completed SAQ 5.3 (d), you will have noticed something rather odd. The two
common factors combined only account for 83.4% of the variance in the original correlation
matrix. Similarly, all the communalities are less than 1.0. What happened to the ‘lost’ 17%
of the variance?
Table 5.6 Correlations between two variables and one factor
F1 V1 V2
F1 1.000
V1 –0.867 1.000
V2 –0.867 0.500 1.000
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Factor analysis
Factor analysis is essentially a technique for summarising information – for making broad
generalisations from detailed sets of data. Here, we have taken the correlations between six
variables, observed that they fall into two distinct clusters and so decided that it is more
parsimonious to talk in terms of two factors rather than the original six variables. In other
words, the number of constructs needed to describe the data has fallen from six (the number
of variables) to two (the number of common factors). Like any approximation, this one is
useful but not perfect. Some of the information in the original correlation matrix has been
sacrifced in making this broad generalisation. Indeed, the only circumstance under which no
information would have been lost would have been if V1, V2 and V3 had shown an
intercorrelation of 1.0 (likewise for V4, V5 and V6) and if all the correlations between these
two groups of variables had been precisely zero. Then (and only then!) we would have lost
no information as a result of referring to two factors rather than six variables.
This, then, is the frst part of the explanation of the missing variance. It is a necessary
consequence of reducing the number of constructs from six to two. Suppose, however, that
instead of extracting just two factors from the correlations between the six variables, one
extracted six factors (all at right angles to each other and hence impossible to visualise). Since
there are as many factors as there are variables, there should be no loss of information. You might
expect that the six factors would explain all the information in the original correlation matrix.
Whether or not this is the case
depends on how the factor analysis is
performed. There are two basic
approaches to factor analysis. The
simplest, called ‘principal components
analysis’, assumes that six factors can
indeed fully explain the information
in the correlation matrix. Thus when
six factors are extracted, each variable
will have a communality of precisely
1.0 and the factors will between them
account for 100% of the variation
between the variables.
Principal components analysis

More formally, the principal components model states that, for any variable being analysed:
total variance = common factor variance + measurement error
Suppose we construct a test in which ten items inquire about worries and negative moods:
‘my moods vary a lot’, ‘I feel agitated in confned spaces’, ‘I get embarrassed easily’, etc. with
each item being answered on a fve-point scale ranging from ‘describes me well’ to ‘describes
me badly’. Suppose that we know that all these items form a single factor which we call
‘neuroticism’. The principal components model therefore states that the way a person answers
an item depends only on their level of the trait that is measured by all the items (here there is
only one trait: neuroticism) plus some measurement error. Measurement error in this context
might refect that some people’s mind may wander, that they may make a mistake when using
the rating scale or anything else implying that their response to the item is not completely
accurate. It implies that when as many factors are extracted as there are variables, these
common factors can explain all of the information in the correlation matrix.
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Factor analysis
Factor analysis
The assumption that anything that is not measured by common factors must just be
measurement error is rather a strong one. Each test item may have some morsel of ‘unique
variance’ that is unique to that item, but which cannot be shared with other items. The extent
to which people fear enclosed spaces may not be 100% determined by their level of neuroticism:
people may vary in the extent to which they show a specifc fear of being shut in, perhaps as
a result of childhood experiences. So to predict how a person would respond to the item, you
would need to consider their level of neuroticism, their level of this specifc fear of being
enclosed and random measurement error. The extent to which the item measures the specifc
fear, unrelated to the personality factor(s) that run through all the items, is refected in the size
of its unique factor variance.
The factor analysis model thus assumes that for any variable or item being factor analysed:
total variance = common factor variance + unique factor variance + measurement error
The amount of unique factor variance in an item is refected in its communality. The more
variance an item shares with the other items in the test, the higher are its correlations with
both them and the common factors. Therefore the higher its communality will be. (Remind
yourself how communality is calculated in order to check this.) An item with a substantial
amount of unique factor variance will therefore never have a communality as high as 1.0, even
if the factor analysis extracts as many factors as there are variables. This is because each item
has some ‘unique factor variance’ associated with it: some people are just more (or less) afraid
of enclosed spaces than you would expect from knowing their level of neuroticism.

Suppose children are given a 20-item attainment test to assess their knowledge
of the geography of Austria, following a course of instruction. Each question
has two possible answers, with a point being awarded for each correct answer
and a point deducted for each incorrect answer. What would you expect to
infuence a child’s performance on this test,
a. assuming the principal components model
b. assuming the factor model?
The test includes some items that involve naming Austrian towns, lakes and rivers. Which
of the following behaviours would lead to random errors of measurement, and which might
contribute to unique factor variance?
c. guessing when one does not know the answer

d. having previously gone on holiday to Austria
e. having a keen interest in fshing
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Factor analysis
f. getting confused by the answer sheet and marking an answer in the

wrong box
g. being absent from some of the classes on which the test is based
h. Suppose that incorrect answers were not penalised. In that case, would
guessing (rather than leaving some answers blank) affect unique factor
variance, or error variance?
It follows that factor analysis is a more complicated process than component analysis.
Whereas component analysis merely has to determine the number of factors to be extracted
and how each variable should correlate with each factor, factor analysis also has to estimate
(somehow) what the communality of each variable would be if as many factors as variables
were extracted. Subtracting this fgure from 1.0 shows how much unique variance is associated
with each variable. The good news is that, in practice, it does not seem to matter too much
whether one performs a component analysis or a factor analysis, as both techniques generally
lead to similar results. In fact, the authorities on factor analysis can be divided into three
groups. Some believe that factor analysis should never be used. Leyland Wilkinson fought to
keep factor analysis options out of his SYSTAT statistics package although commercial
pressures eventually won. Contrariwise, some maintain that a form of factor analysis is the
only justifable technique for analysing data from personality or ability items or tests (e.g.,
Carroll, 1993) and, fnally, some pragmatists argue that, as both techniques generally produce
highly similar solutions, it does not really matter which of them one uses (Tabachnick and
Fidell, 2018).
One slightly worrying problem is that the loadings obtained from component analyses are
always larger than those that result from factor analyses, as the former assume that each
variable has a communality of 1.0, whereas the latter computes a value for the communality
that is generally less than 1.0. Thus the results obtained from a component analysis always
look more impressive (i.e., have larger common factor loadings) than the results of a factor
analysis. This has clear implications for many rules of thumb, such as regarding factor loadings
above 0.4 (or less than –0.4) as being ‘salient’ and disregarding those between –0.39 and
+0.39, but these have not really been addressed in the literature. It is also vitally important
that authors of papers should state clearly whether they have followed the factor analysis or
component analysis model. Authors sometimes mention ‘factor analysis’ in the text even
though they have performed principal components analysis.
Hierarchical analyses
Suppose that one correlates 20 variables together and performs a factor analysis. Suppose that
six factors are found – and that these factors are themselves correlated. It is possible to factor
analyse the correlations between these factors to obtain what are known as ‘higher order’
factors. And indeed if these higher order factors are correlated, it might be possible to factor
analyse the correlations between these . . . and so on, until (a) all of the factors are uncorrelated,
or (b) only one factor is found, when the process stops.
It is easiest to understand this by looking at Figure 5.6. The bottom of this diagram shows
some variables (squares). A factor analysis shows that some of these have large loadings on
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Factor analysis
Figure 5.5 A hierarchical factor analysis of 16 variables, showing three

frst-order and one second-order factors
some factors; the leftmost fve variables have large loadings on one factor, the next six variables
have large loadings on a second factor, the next three variables have large loadings on a third
factor, and the remaining two variables do not have large loadings on any factors. They have
small communalities.
In real life, the frst fve variables might represent arithmetic problems, the next six items
might be vocabulary items, the fnal fve items might measure memory. The reason why only
three of the memory items form a factor needs to be investigated; it might be because they are
too hard or too easy (so that no one or everyone answers them correctly) or because they do
not measure memory at all. So the ‘frst-order factors’ represent arithmetic skill, vocabulary
and memory. If it is found that these frst-order factors are correlated, factor analysing the
correlations between these three factors might reveal one ‘second-order factor’ which might
be called general intelligence or something similar.
Hierarchical models are very common in personality and ability research, as will become
apparent in the next chapter.
Uses of factor analysis

Factor analysis has three main uses in psychology.
Test construction
First, it may be used to construct tests. For example, 50 items might be written more or less
at random; we do not have to assume that they all measure the same trait or state. The items
would then be administered to a representative sample of several hundred individuals and
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Factor analysis
scored (in the case of ability tests) so that a correct answer is coded as 1 and an incorrect
answer as 0. Responses that are made using rating scales (as with most personality and
attitude questionnaires) are simply entered in their raw form – one point if box (a) is
endorsed, two if (b) is chosen, etc. The responses to these 50 items are then correlated
together and factor analysed. The items that have high loadings on each factor measure the
same underlying psychological construct and so form a scale. Thus it is possible to determine
how to score the questionnaire in future simply by looking at the factor matrix. If items 1,
2, 10 and 12 are the only items that have substantial loadings on one factor, then one scale
of the test should be the sum of these four items and no others. It is likely that some items
will fail to load substantially on any of the factors (i.e., show low communalities). This
could happen for a number of reasons: in the case of ability tests, the items could be so easy
(or hard) that there is little or no variation in people’s scores. Personality items may refer
to uncommon actions or feelings where there is again little variation – e.g., ‘there are
occasions in my life when I have felt afraid’, an item with which everyone is likely to agree.
Or items may fail because they are severely infuenced by measurement error or because
they measure something different from any of the others that were administered. Test
constructors do not usually worry about why, precisely, items fail to work as expected. Items
that fail to load a factor are simply discarded without further ado. Thus factor analysis can
show at a stroke:
l how many distinct scales run through the test

l which items belong to which scales (so indicating how the test should be scored)
l which items in a test should be discarded.
Each of the scales then needs to be validated as described in Chapter 8 to ensure that we
have properly understood what it measures. For example, scores on the factors may be
correlated with scores on other questionnaires, used to predict educational success, etc.
Data reduction
The second main use of factor is in data reduction, or ‘conceptual spring cleaning’. Huge
numbers of tests have been developed to measure personality from different theoretical
perspectives and it is not at all obvious whether these overlap. If we take six scales that
measure personality traits, it is useful to know how much overlap there is between them. Do
they really each assess quite different aspects of personality? At the other extreme, might they
perhaps all measure the same trait under different names? Or is the truth somewhere in the
middle? To fnd out it is simply necessary to administer the test items to a large sample, then
factor analyse the correlations between the items. This will show precisely what the underlying
structure truly is. For example, two factors may be found. The frst factor may have large
loadings from all the items in tests 1, 5 and 6. All the substantial loadings on the second factor
may come from items in tests 2, 3 and 4. Hence it is clear that tests 1, 5 and 6 measure
precisely the same thing, as do tests 2, 3 and 4. Any high-fown theoretical distinctions about
subtle differences between the scales can be shown to have no basis in fact and any rational
psychologists seeing the results of such an analysis should be forced to think in terms of two
(rather than six) theoretical constructs – a considerable simplifcation. (It is also possible to
factor analyse the scores on the tests rather than responses to individual items when performing
this sort of analysis. However, this makes the assumption that the tests were properly
constructed in the frst place, which may not be the case.)
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Factor analysis
Refning questionnaires
The third main use of factor analysis is for checking the psychometric properties of
questionnaires, particularly when they are to be used in new cultures or populations. For
example, suppose that the manual of an Australian personality test suggests that all the odd-
numbered items form one scale, while all the even-numbered items form another. When the
test is given to a sample of people in the UK and the correlations between the items are
calculated and factor analysed, two factors should be found, with all the odd-numbered items
having substantial loadings on one factor and all the even-numbered items loading substantially
on the other. If this structure is not found it shows that there are problems with the
questionnaire, which should not be scored or used in its conventional form.
Summary
It is easy to see why factor analysis is so important in individual differences and psychometrics.
The same statistical technique can be used to construct tests, resolve theoretical disputes about
the number and nature of factors measured by tests and questionnaires, and check whether
tests work as they should or whether it is legitimate to use a particular test within a different
population or a different culture.
This chapter has provided a basic introduction to the principles of factor analysis. It has
left many questions unanswered, including the following:
l How does one decide how many factors should be extracted?

l How can computer programs actually perform factor analysis?
l How can we position factors through the centre of clusters of variables using purely
mathematical methods?
l What types of data can usefully be factor analysed?
l How should the results obtained from factor analytical studies be interpreted and reported?
These and other issues will be explored in Chapter 19.

Eysenck’s ancient paper on the logical basis of factor analysis (Eysenck, 1953) is still well worth
reading, while Child (2006) offers another ‘student-friendly’ basic introduction to the topic.
SAQ 5.1
a. The smallest angle between any pair of variables in Figure 5.2 is that
between V1 and V2. Hence these variables are the most highly correlated.
b. The angle between V3 and V2 is approximately 270° (moving clockwise).
Table 5.4 shows that this corresponds to a correlation of 0.
c. The angle between V5 and V3 is approximately 210°, which corresponds
to a correlation of –0.87.
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Factor analysis
SAQ 5.2
a. An oblique solution is a table of factor loadings in which the factors are
not at right angles, but are themselves correlated together.
b. A factor loading is the correlation between a variable and a factor.
c. The factor structure matrix is a table showing the correlations between
all variables and all factors.
d. An orthogonal solution is a table of factor loadings in which the factors
are all uncorrelated (i.e., at right angles to each other).
e. A factor pattern correlation matrix is a table which shows the correlations
between all of the factors in a factor analysis. For an orthogonal factor
analysis, all of the correlations between factors will be 0 (as they are
independent). For oblique solutions, the correlations will generally not
be zero.
SAQ 5.3
The eigenvalue associated with a factor is the sum of the squared loadings
on that factor, calculated across all of the variables. The communality of a
variable is the sum of the squared loadings on that variable, calculated across
all of the factors.
a. The communality of variable 2 is 0.982 + 02 = 0.9604. The communalities
of variables 3, 4, 5 and 6 are likewise 0.82, 0.7325, 0.9604 and 0.7325,
respectively.
b. The eigenvalue of factor 2 is 0.102 + 0.02 + (–0.102) + 0.852 + 0.982 + 0.852,
or 2.4254.
c. As there are six variables, factor 2 accounts for 0.4042 of the variance
between them.
d. The worked example in the text shows that factor 1 accounts for 0.423
of the variance. As the factors are orthogonal, factors 1 and 2 combined
account for 0.43 + 0.4042 = 0.834 of the variance.
SAQ 5.4
a. To tackle this question, you can see from Table 5.4 that the angle which
corresponds to a correlation of −0.867 is either 150° or 210° and for 0.5
the angle is 60° or 300°. (Why two possibilities for each? Well, it depends
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Factor analysis
if you move clockwise or anti-clockwise when calculating the angles

between the factor and each variable.) If these are plotted, the only two
possible sets of lines that will represent these correlations are shown at
the top of Figure 5.6. (It does not matter if you have drawn the fgure
rotated in some other direction: the position of the lines on the page is
arbitrary. The angle between the lines is the critical thing.) Note that you
cannot put both variables on top of each other at an angle of 150° or 270°
to the factor, for then the angle between them would be zero which
corresponds to a correlation of 1.0 not the value of 0.5 shown in Table 5.6.
b. Changing the correlations mean that the angles between the variables and
the factor change to 30° and 330°, as shown at the bottom of Figure 5.6.
Figure 5.6 Answer to self-assessment question 5.4
c. Reversing all of the loadings between the variables and a given factor in
effect causes the factor to have a correlation of –1.0 with its previous
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Factor analysis
position. Table 5.4 shows that this corresponds to its pointing in the
opposite direction (180°) to its previous position. Large negative
correlations between a variable and a factor imply that the factor points
away from the variables which have the largest correlation with it.
Reversing the signs of all of the correlations reverses the direction of the
factor so that it passes through the cluster of variables.
SAQ 5.5
a. The principal components model assumes that performance on the test
is determined by just geographical knowledge (plus some random error;
a child who knows only 20 facts about Austria may be lucky enough to
see 15 of these appear on the test paper, whereas another who also
knows 20 facts may see just fve of them represented in the test).
b. The factor model accepts that performance on the 20-item test will be
infuenced by geographical knowledge, random error plus unique
variance: that is, some children will have better (or worse) knowledge
about Austria than you would expect, given their performance on other
geography tests.
c. Random errors of measurement: some children will guess correctly (their
score will be overestimated) and some will guess incorrectly (their score
will be underestimated).
d. Unique variance: these children may be able to draw on their holiday
memories, and so will know more than you would expect them to.
e. Unique variance: it is possible that fshing magazines may contain articles
about fshing in Austrian rivers or lakes, and if so children who have read
these may have a better knowledge of these aspects of Austrian
geography than one would expect.
f. Random error. Some of the wrongly-marked answers will be correct, and
some incorrect and so guessing will not systematically increase children’s
performance.
g. Unique variance, as children who missed the classes may not know some
of the information, and may therefore not perform to their normal level.
h. If incorrect guessing was not penalised, children who guessed answers
(rather than leaving them blank) would have a higher score, as some of
the guesses will probably be correct. Guessing, rather than leaving items
blank, would affect unique variance – children who guess achieve better
scores than they should.
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Factor analysis
References
Allport, G. W. & Odbert, H. S. 1936. Trait Names: A Psycho-Lexical Study. Psychological
Monographs, 47, whole issue.
Carroll, J. B. 1993. Human Cognitive Abilities: A Survey of Factor-Analytic Studies.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Child, D. 2006. The Essentials of Factor Analysis. London: Continuum.
Eysenck, H. J. 1953. The Logical Basis of Factor Analysis. American Psychologist, 8,
105–114.
Howell, D. C. 2012. Statistical Methods for Psychology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.
Lorenzo-Seva, U. & Ferrando, P. J. 2006. Factor: A Computer Program to Fit the Exploratory
Factor Analysis Model. Behavior Research Methods, 38, 88–91.
Tabachnick, B. G. & Fidell, L. S. 2018. Using Multivariate Statistics. New York: Pearson.
97
Chapter 6
Broad trait theories

of personality
Introduction
In our everyday lives, we often explain people’s behaviour through ascribing to them
characteristics that are consistent across both time and situations (so-and-so is ‘nervy’ or
‘talkative’, for example). Trait theory develops this idea scientifcally, using factor analysis to
discover the main ways in which people differ from one another and to design tests to measure
these traits. It also checks whether people’s behaviour really is consistent. Trait theories are
now widely believed to be the most useful means of studying personality – although there is
less agreement about precisely which trait theory is the most appropriate. Several questionnaires
have been developed to provide reliable and valid measures of the main personality traits, many
of which have been found to have a biological basis, as discussed in Chapters 11 and 13.
Learning outcomes
l Discuss the relevance of the lexical hypothesis for discovering personality
traits, and discuss the problems of circularity and the use of scales which
have items of very similar meaning.
l Outline Cattell’s model of personality and discuss its strengths and
problems.
l Chart the development of various five- and six-factor models of
personality, and show familiarity with the main factors which have been
found.
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Broad trait theories of personality
l Describe Eysenck’s and Gray’s theory-driven model of personality.

l Consider criticisms of trait theory that are sometimes levied by social
psychologists and learning theorists.
The personality theories outlined in Chapters 2 and 4 attempted to understand the nature
of personality and its underlying processes through detailed analyses of individuals. The
pattern of free associations generated by Freud’s small sample of patients led to elaborate and
speculative theories about the structure of mind, child development, motivation and other
aspects of personality structure and process. Kelly sought to understand each person’s unique
pattern of personal constructs – the unique cognitive framework that each individual uses to
anticipate and model events in the world. Rogers’ theory is still less analytical, viewing people
as whole individuals who grow and develop over time, coming to like and accept themselves
as they are.
One problem that is common to all three theories is the diffculty of measuring personality.
‘Self-actualisation’ remains a vague abstraction. There is no clearly valid way of assessing
unconscious mental processes such as the extent of an individual’s Oedipal fxation. Moreover,
while the use of repertory grids may be particularly useful for understanding the number and
nature of the constructs used by individuals, it cannot easily allow individuals to be compared.
Three individuals might complete three different repertory grids, but ultimately there is no
easy way of deciding how, precisely, their personalities differ. This is a problem, for in order
to discover whether (for example) strict parenting affects personality in adulthood, it is
necessary to measure all adults’ personality in the same way.
It may, therefore, be useful to approach the problem from another direction. Instead of
considering each individual’s phenomenological world (as Kelly and Rogers did), it may be
better to develop techniques that will allow people’s personalities to be compared, that is, to
map out the main ways in which people differ from one another. Once the main dimensions
of personality have been established, it should be possible to develop tests to show the position
of each person along each of these dimensions – thus allowing people’s personalities to be
compared directly.
Trait theories of personality follow precisely this approach. They assume (then later test)
that there is a certain constancy about the way in which people behave – that is, they
propose that behaviour is to some extent determined by certain characteristics of the
individual, and not entirely by the situation. This seems to tie in well with personal experience.
We very often describe people’s behaviour in terms of adjectives (‘bossy’, ‘timid’) implying
that some feature of them, rather than the situations in which they fnd themselves, determines
how they behave. (We shall discuss the role of situations in a little more detail later.)
Describing people in terms of adjectives may sound a little reminiscent of Kelly’s theory and
the self-theories encountered in Chapter 2; after all, one use of the repertory grid is to fnd
out which individuals are construed in similar ways. However, the crucial difference lies in
the type of data used. According to Kelly and the self-theorists, an individual’s perception of
other people is what is important – it does not matter whether these perceptions are accurate.
However, trait theories attempt to map out the ways in which people really do differ from
one another and so depend on accurate techniques for measuring personality, abilities and
attainments.
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The basic aims of trait theories are therefore simple:
l To discover the main ways (dimensions) in which people differ. Once this is achieved then
it is necessary to develop valid tests to measure these traits. One can then describe a person’s
personality merely by noting their scores on all of these personality dimensions, in much the
same way that the position of a ship may be defned by specifying its latitude and longitude.
l To check that scores on these dimensions do, indeed, stay reasonably constant across
situations – for, if not, situations must determine behaviour, and there is no such thing as
personality.
l To discover whether people’s scores are reasonably constant over their lifespan, as discussed
in Chapter 14.
l To discover how and why these individual differences come about – for example, whether
they are passed on genetically, through crucial events in childhood (as Freud would have
us believe), through observing others (as suggested by Bandura) or because of something
to do with the biology of our nervous systems.
l If traits are not socially determined, it would be interesting to see if the same traits are
found in different cultures.
The present chapter deals with the frst two issues and (briefy) the last one. A discussion
of personality processes is left until Chapters 11 and 13 and changes over the lifespan in
Chapter 14.
Factor analysis applied to personality

You will recall from Chapter 3 that the main purpose of measuring traits is to describe how
an individual will behave most of the time – hence personality descriptions such as ‘John is
an anxious person’ may lead us to suspect that John will be more likely than most to leap into
the air when startled, to worry about examinations, to be wary of bees and so on. Using one
word – ‘anxious’ – allows us to predict how John will probably behave in a whole range of
situations. But how should one decide which words one should pluck from the dictionary in
order to describe personality?
The frst problem is that there are just too many words. Allport and Odbert (1936) were
the frst to explore this ‘lexical approach’ to discovering personality and found over 4500
words that described personality traits. It would clearly be impossible to assess people on all
of them. Second, if different investigators choose different adjectives, it will be diffcult to
prove that these mean the same thing – for example, if one individual says that ‘Elizabeth is
retiring’, while another says that she is ‘shy’, are they describing precisely the same personality
characteristic? It is impossible to be certain just by looking at the meaning of the words, since
language tends to be imprecise, with many adjectives having subtle nuances and/or multiple
meanings (perhaps you thought that Elizabeth was coming to the end of her working life).
Thus different people may use different words to describe the same feature of personality and
may perhaps use the same words to describe different aspects of behaviour. This does not bode
well for accurate measurement!
Third, it is possible to develop scales that describe trivial aspects of behaviour, while leaving
important aspects of behaviour unmeasured. For example, it would probably be easy to
develop a scale to measure the extent to which individuals feel paranoid, even though paranoia
is probably not an important feature of most people’s behaviour.
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Fourth, this approach only lets us describe personality. It cannot indicate what might cause
people to have different personalities. A ‘circular defnition’ involves deducing presence of a
trait from some behaviour and then using it explain that behaviour. You might feel pain from
swollen tonsils, visit your physician and be told that your throat hurts because you have
tonsillitis. Except, of course, that your physician has just translated your symptom into Latin
(tonsillitis = swollen tonsils) and offered it to you as an explanation. Similarly, in the previous
paragraph we noted that Elizabeth was quiet and retiring and deduced from this that she is
less extraverted than other people. It is very tempting to then try to explain these behaviours
by means of the trait of extraversion – to assert that the reason why Elizabeth avoids parties
is because she is low on the trait of extraversion.
To avoid falling into this trap it is vital to ensure that traits are far broader than the
behaviours that are used to defne them. ‘Tonsillitis’ can be used as explanation only if the
doctor understands that it implies an acute viral or bacterial infection that will probably last
a few days and might perhaps be treated with penicillin. Extraversion is a useful trait if (and
only if) it has broader implications than a liking for parties, etc. If it could be shown to have
a genetic basis, to be heavily infuenced by some actions of one’s parents or related to some
aspect of brain or neuronal functioning, then we could be confdent that the trait of extraversion
is a real characteristic of the individual. The behaviour that we observe (the swollen tonsils,
the lack of socialising) arises because of some real biological, social, developmental, chemical,
cognitive, genetic or other peculiarity of that person. It is a ‘marker’ for some broad ‘source
trait’ that leads the person to avoid social gatherings and is not just a convenient label to
summarise a person’s behaviour. Without such evidence, traits are only convenient descriptions
of behaviour – they cannot be used to explain it.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that factor analysis makes some assumptions about the data
being analysed – particularly that the relationship between two variables (items) can be
described by a straight line rather than a U-shape or some other curve. If this is not the case,
then it makes little sense to calculate a correlation, or perform a factor analysis. Should
researchers check this? Yes. Do they? No, because it would involve looking at thousands of
graphs.
Discovering the origins of personality

How, then, can we go about discovering these ‘source traits’ – these broad dispositions that
cause people to behave in certain ways? Chapter 5 showed that if we factor analyse various
pieces of data from people who have been drinking alcohol to different extents, the technique
tells us that one factor corresponds to the alcohol-induced behaviours (slurring, staggering,
etc.). This obviously represents true causal infuences on behaviour: the three behaviours have
a common origin (alcohol in the bloodstream) and this will affect other behaviours too – for
example, blood pressure and vomiting.
The logic of this approach to discovering source traits is simple – though rarely spelt out
in detail in textbooks. We know that most things which infuence how people behave, think
or feel affect more than one aspect of behaviour, thought or feeling. The fu virus makes me
feel tired, raises my temperature, depresses my appetite, etc. Depression makes someone feel
‘down’ – but also affects their cognitive processes, sleep habits, appetite, and so on. Alcohol
affects a person’s co-ordination, feeling of well-being, tiredness and a host of other things.
And we know that genetic variations lead to not one but several very different changes in
behaviour and/or physiology; those who have the genetic mutation which causes
phenylketonuria typically show light coloured skin, cognitive impairment, eczema, behavioural
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problems and a host of other symptoms. Identifying groups of symptoms like this is how
physicians diagnose a particular disease. Determining whether a person’s lethargy is associated
with feeling down or a raised temperature will guide the physician in deciding whether they
have depression or infuenza. And this is precisely what factor analysis also does.
If we measure a wide range of quite different behaviours in a large sample of people and
perform a factor analysis, the factors represent groups of behaviours which rise and fall
together from person to person – just as the disease symptoms did in the medical examples.
Each of these personality or ability traits may therefore have a common cause – and data need
to be gathered to determine what this is. For example, it is found that adults who enjoy
socialising with other people also tend to be dominant, cheerful, enjoy telling jokes, are happy-
go-lucky and full of energy. This fnding is interesting because there is no logical reason why
people who are dominant have to be optimistic (etc.) – the terms look as if they are quite
different, but factor analysis shows that they tend to correlate together. Having established
that this factor exists, it is necessary to discover what causes people to display these
characteristics. Are genetic variations responsible, for example? Is it something to do with the
way in which parents bring their children up? Could it be something to do with levels of
dopamine (a neurotransmitter) in parts of the brain? It is possible to develop and test plenty
of theories such as this, and some of these will be considered in Chapter 11. However the
remainder of this chapter will focus on the structure of human personality – the main traits
which have been discovered. Some other traits are discussed in Chapters 7, 9 and 10.
Before leaving this section I should mention that the use of factor analysis to discover
‘source traits’ was originally proposed by Cattell (e.g., 1973) and not everyone would be
happy with the claim that factor analysis can identify true causal infuences.
l It is logically possible that some characteristic of the person (whether it is physiological,

connected with child-rearing or other experience) might infuence just one aspect of
behaviour. As it affects just one aspect of behaviour, it could not appear as a factor because
it does not correlate with anything else. Can you think of any intervention, drug, gene or
other infuence which only affects one aspect of a person’s behaviour? I cannot, but this
does not mean that they do not exist.
l In addition, just because groups of correlated variables have a common cause in the
examples quoted above, perhaps it does not follow that they always do. If this is the case,
factor analysis might not be effective in identifying main personality traits.
l Some social psychologists might be unhappy with the idea that any questionnaire can ever
reveal anything about real behaviour; perhaps each person’s reality is unique, so items
such as ‘do you enjoy lively parties?’ mean very different things to different people. This
makes it nonsensical to correlate people’s scores. We try to avoid this by designing
questionnaires which inquire about behaviour to reduce the amount of self-insight
required (see Chapter 20), but it is a possible diffculty.
l Finally, Michell’s (1997) work reminds us that it is dangerous to treat the numbers arising
from Likert scales (or any other rating scale) as representing a quantity. It may therefore
be inadvisable to perform statistical analyses on them. Most researchers ignore this issue.
To summarise: in order to fnd personality traits it is simply necessary to measure a range

of variables (behaviours, ratings or self-reports) from a large number of people, correlate these
variables together and carry out a factor analysis as described in Chapter 5. The factors that
emerge from this analysis will show which behaviours tend to occur together and these are
termed ‘personality traits’. If people’s scores on these traits can be shown to be infuenced by
genetic, biological, social, developmental or cognitive variables, then we can be confdent that
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a true ‘source trait’ has been identifed, which can then be used to explain behaviour. For an
alternative view, see Buss and Craik (1983).
Narrow and broad traits

One diffcult problem with factor analysis is deciding which variables to measure in the frst
place. For (fairly obviously) which factors are found depends on what is measured; if
sociability, dominance, cheerfulness, etc. are not assessed, then the factor analysis cannot
possibly reveal a factor of Extraversion. Determining which variables to assess is therefore of
crucial importance, and there are three main possibilities.
l The remainder of this chapter looks at broad personality traits – those which are developed
from measuring as many varied aspects of behaviour as possible. The aim of researchers
who follow this approach is to include in the factor analysis virtually all characteristics of
people which could possibly be measured. The domain of items is as broad as possible.
l Narrow personality traits arise when someone wants to focus on a more specifc, albeit
theoretically-driven trait. For example, Kline’s work on the ‘anal character’ involved asking
questions which tapped individual differences in obstinacy, orderliness and meanness. The
aim of this type of research is not to map out the entire structure of personality, but just
to see if a narrower sample of items form a trait. We return to these narrow traits in
Chapters 9 and 10. The narrower domain of items is determined by some theory.
l Finally, some researchers take narrowness to an extreme – and essentially ask the same
question over and over, making the domain of items trivially narrow. Someone who agrees
that they ‘continue to punish a person who has done something that I think is wrong’
must surely also agree that ‘I continue to be hard on others who have hurt me’ for these
items mean almost exactly the same thing. If a person understands the meaning of the
words, they must surely answer them in the same way, which means that the items must
correlate and must form a factor. There is no point in even gathering data to demonstrate
this. The two items above are from a genuine test (which I do not cite out of kindness to
its authors) and there are a surprising number of such questionnaires in everyday use. I do
not see how they can measure traits at all (Cooper, in press), although many psychologists
use them uncritically.

What are the four main problems involved in selecting trait descriptors?
The lexical hypothesis and Cattell’s theory

In the previous section, I suggested (somewhat glibly) that, in order to discover the main broad
personality factors, it is merely necessary to measure huge numbers of behaviours, correlate
them together and factor analyse the results. The problem is, of course, that deciding how to
quantify human behaviour is a remarkably diffcult task. Measures of behaviour often contain
dependencies. For example, it is not easy for a person to eat, drink and talk simultaneously
(though I have known several who try) so if an individual is eating, they will not be drinking
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or talking. We shall note in Chapter 19 that such dependencies can play havoc with factor
analyses – they can produce entirely spurious factors.
Cattell (1946) argued that, instead of measuring behaviour, we should focus on adjectives.
Specifcally, he argues that every interesting aspect of personality would probably have been
observed during the course of evolution and a term describing it would have entered the
language. Thus the dictionary should contain words that describe every conceivable personality
characteristic – generally in the form of adjectives such as ‘happy’, ‘bad tempered’, ‘anxious’,
‘uptight’, ‘phlegmatic’ and so on. Suppose a sample of these adjectives were to be extracted
from a dictionary. It would probably be the case that some of these words mean the same as
others – ‘anxious’ and ‘uptight’, for example. Wherever this happens, one or other of the
adjectives could be dropped. This would produce a sample of words that describe different
aspects of personality.
Suppose now that all of these words were put into a questionnaire (so that people could
rate themselves on each adjective) or that trained raters assessed people’s behaviour on the
basis of these adjectives. It would then be possible to collect data from a large sample of people
(several hundred, at least) and use factor analysis to determine which of these ratings tend to
group together. The factors that emerge should be the main personality ‘source traits’. The
assumption, that the factor analysis of correlations between adjectives that differ in meaning
will reveal all of the main personality traits, is sometimes referred to as the ‘lexical hypothesis’.
All one does is measure a sample of people on as diverse a range of items as possible, and let
factor analysis identify the source traits. The approach does not require any theory about the
number or nature of such traits; the entire process is mathematically driven.
Cattell drew heavily on the work of Allport and Odbert (1936) when attempting to
identify the adjectives (trait names) which described personality. These authors extracted a
list of adjectives that could be used to describe people from the 1925 edition of Webster’s
New International Dictionary; this list of adjectives is sometimes known as the ‘personality
sphere’. Cattell then asked English scholars to eliminate synonyms from this list in order to
avoid the problem of interdependent variables; this took the total number of adjectives down
to 171. Unfortunately, it was simply not feasible to perform a factor analysis on 171 variables
using hand calculators and the primitive computers of the time, and so Cattell reduced the
number of variables down to 45 by eliminating some variables which, although not judged
as synonyms, proved to be highly correlated with other variables (Cattell, 1957). He also
added in the names of some personality traits identifed by other theorists, to ensure that
nothing was left out. Thus the original list of 4500 adjectives was reduced to 180 and then
to 45. These terms were used to rate the behaviour of a group of people, whereupon the
correlations between the 45 trait descriptors were computed and factor analysed, yielding
some 23 factors.
The assessment of behaviour through ratings was time consuming. Furthermore, there may
be some personality traits (such as feelings and attitudes) that, except in pathological cases,
may not be obvious to someone who is rating behaviour. Someone may feel frightened when
walking down a lonely road at night, but step out bravely, and so will not appear to be
frightened. The range of situations in which people are observed will inevitably be limited, so
that someone who is grumpy when they get out of bed (for example) might never be rated
thus. Moreover, the very presence of the rater may alter some behaviours – our pedestrian
may not feel as anxious as usual because a friend with a clipboard is close by.
Cattell therefore also attempted to measure personality traits by methods other than
observers’ ratings – most notably through the use of questionnaires and ‘objective tests’. The
hope is that many of the personality factors identifed in ratings will also appear when
responses to questionnaires and objective tests are analysed.
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ExErCIsE
The crucial assumption of the lexical hypothesis is that single adjectives in

the dictionary can describe all types of behaviour. Can you think of any
patterns of behaviour that are not described by a single word? You might
like to discuss some with your friends, to ensure that you all agree that the
patterns of behaviour do actually exist. To get you started, I cannot think of
any English word that describes taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes (as in
the German Schadenfreude). If you can think up many such patterns of
behaviour, this may indicate that the lexical hypothesis is unlikely to be able
to cover the full range of behaviours (or, of course, it may just be that the
behaviours that you notice in other people are illusory – you may think that
you notice characteristics that do not, in fact, exist).

How might you tell whether a personality factor derived from a self-report
scale is the same as a factor that appears in ratings of behaviour?
The 16PF and other tests

Cattell’s most famous tests for measuring personality are the Sixteen Personality Factor
Questionnaires, the 16PF (Cattell and Cattell, 1995; Cattell et al., 1970; Cattell and King, 2000).
I refer to these questionnaires in the plural because there is a whole series of different forms of
these self-report questionnaires that yield scores on 15 personality traits plus intelligence. An
‘industrial version’ was published in 2000, otherwise the ffth edition (1993 in the USA, 1995
in the UK) is the most recent, with scales that have somewhat less measurement error (are ‘more
reliable’) than in previous editions. However, the correlation between some of the scales in the
ffth edition and their supposedly equivalent predecessors is sometimes less than 0.4!
The scales of the 16PF are shown at the top of Table 6.1. Two words are given to describe
each trait and these show the characteristics of a low and high scorer. However, it is important
to remember that these are traits (not personality types) and so the questionnaire does not
categorise someone as either ‘warm’ or ‘reserved’, for example. Instead, for each person, the
questionnaire will produce a score that will usually be somewhere between the two extremes.
Each scale in the 16PF is identifed by a ‘source trait index’. These start at A, B, etc. but
there are some gaps; the 16PF does not measure Factor D, for example. This is because Cattell
found that some of the traits which he identifed in ratings of behaviour could not be
measured through self-report questionnaires. For example, how could you write questionnaire
items to measure modesty? Anyone who said they were modest would not be! Contrariwise,
some traits may possibly show up in self-report questionnaires but not through behaviour
ratings, etc. and these are prefxed Q in Table 6.1. So ‘radical/conservative views’ (Q1) can
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Table 6.1 Personality traits measured by the 16PF questionnaire, plus

seven other traits identifed in questionnaires or ratings but
not both
Source trait In Q-data In L-data Description Typical item: do you . . .

index
A ✔ ✔ Warm/reserved Know how to comfort

others
B ✔ ✔ Intellect Learn quickly
C ✔ ✔ Ego strength Am relaxed most of
the time
E ✔ ✔ Assertive/cooperative Take charge
F ✔ ✔ Cheerful/sober Am the life of the party
G ✔ ✔ Conscientious/expedient Try to follow the rules
H ✔ ✔ socially bold/shy start conversations
I ✔ ✔ sensitive/self-reliant Cry during movies
L ✔ ✔ suspicious/trusting Distrust people
M ✔ ✔ Imaginative/practical Enjoy wild fights of fantasy
N ✔ ✔ socially shrewd/artless reveal little about yourself
O ✔ ✔ Guilty/self-assured Feel crushed by setbacks
Q1 ✔ ✔ radical/conservative Enjoy hearing new ideas
Q2 ✔ ✔ self-suffcient/affliative Want to be left alone
Q3 ✔ ✔ Controlled/impulsive Like order
Q4 ✔ ✔ Tense/tranquil Get irritated easily
Factors found in ratings or questionnaires, but not both
D ✔ Insecure excitability Bubble over with ideas

(conduct disorder)
J ✔ Zestful Enjoy leading group
activities
K ✔ Mature socialisation/ Interested in socially
boorishness important issues
P ✔ sanguine casualness rarely strays into fantasy
Q5 ✔ Group dedication Enjoy projects into which
I can throw all energy
Q6 ✔ social panache Good at inventing
justifcations when in
wrong
Q7 ✔ Explicit self-expression Usually have a clear idea of
what to do next
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only supposedly be detected via questionnaires – and it is reasonable to claim that this would
not be obvious to someone who just observed one’s behaviour.
The bottom part of Table 6.1 shows the traits which were identifed in either ratings or
questionnaires – but not in both. Cattell relished inventing novel names for factors: his Factor
H was termed ‘Threctia/Parmia’, for example. I cannot see the point in reproducing these
names here, and neither can most authors. This is the reason why different authors who
describe Cattell’s 16PF factors often use different words. It is therefore always much safer to
use the ‘source trait index’ numbers and letters when describing a 16PF scale (‘Factor C’ for
example) rather than descriptive words.
Cattell developed other questionnaires, too. There is also a variant of the 16PF designed
for adolescents (the High School Personality Questionnaire), 8 to 14 year olds (the Children’s
Personality Questionnaire), 6 to 8 year olds (the Early School Personality Questionnaire) and
4 to 6 year olds (the Preschool Personality Questionnaire). There is some variation in the
number and nature of the factors measured by these questionnaires, which Cattell (e.g., 1973)
explains by suggesting that some traits develop later than others. He also explored personality
in clinical groups and developed the Clinical Analysis Questionnaire, which measures (among
other things) some seven distinct factors of depression.
More controversially, Cattell tried to develop ‘objective tests’ to measure personality. Some
were just bizarre, and included ‘amount of laughter at jokes’, ‘willingness to play practical
jokes’, ‘readiness to imitate animal sounds’, ‘distance covered in a brass fnger maze with and
without electric shock’ (Cattell and Kline, 1977). The ‘Objective Analytic Test Battery’ (Cattell
and Schuerger, 1978) claimed to measure a number of personality traits, some of which should
have been the same as those in the 16PF. These ‘objective tests’ measured personality in ways
which were not obvious to the participants who took part. For example, participants
completed an attitude questionnaire, the questions of which were totally irrelevant. The test
was scored by noting the extent to which people chose the middle (neutral) option rather than
the extremes – which might show whether they tended to have strong opinions about issues.
Cattell also tried to measure personality by fnding how many factors were needed to
explain individual differences in humour, in the hope that some of these would also refect
personality. The Humour Test of Personality (Cattell and Tollefson, 1966) presented
participants with 104 pairs of jokes and asked them to decide which was the funnier. (The
jokes were all terrible, which made this task much less fun than it sounds.) The Music
Preference Test (Cattell and Eber, 1954) did the same thing with music.
Overview of Cattell’s work

It is probably fair to say that Cattell was more interested in determining the number and
nature of the main personality factors through statistical analysis than exploring their origins
through the methods of experimental psychology. Although he did a little work exploring
whether some of his personality factors were infuenced by genetics or the environment in
which children grew up, he developed his own method for performing such analyses which
turned out to be fawed (Loehlin, 1965). So the process of discovering how and why individuals
develop different levels of each of these factors was largely left for others to attempt.
It seems from the previous section that Cattell’s work was huge in scope. He clearly
understood the need to sample a wide range of items in order to discover the broad personality
source traits, and developed an amazing array of questionnaires and other techniques for
measuring them. So why consider any alternative? The problem is that no one apart from
Cattell and his colleagues can fnd anything approaching 16 factors in the 16PF. If the
questionnaires do, indeed, measure 16 distinct personality traits, it should be possible to
108
administer these to a large sample of people, correlate the items together, perform the factor
analysis as described in Chapter 19 and discover that the items load 16 factors precisely as
claimed by Cattell. The literature on this really is defnitive – for whatever reason, the 16PF
simply does not measure anything even approaching 16 factors (Barrett and Kline, 1982a;
Byravan and Ramanaiah, 1995; Howarth, 1976; Matthews, 1989; Wells and Good, 1977).
Most of the factors which Cattell studied simply do not exist, and so there is no point in even
trying to explore their origins. This means that the 16PF should not be scored according to
the instructions in the handbook, as each ‘scale score’ on the questionnaire is a mixture of
quite different traits. Items simply do not belong to the scales which the test manual claims.
Everyone who has been using the test has been scoring it in a meaningless fashion. Despite
this fundamental problem, the test is still widely used, particularly in occupational psychology,
which is a source of concern.
Cattell’s attempts to measure personality by means of ‘objective tests’ were, if anything,
even less successful. Kline and Cooper (1984) showed that the factors in the ‘Objective
Analytic Test Battery’ resolutely refused to emerge as expected and that the test appeared to
measure ability rather better than it assessed personality. It completely failed to measure any
of the expected personality factors. The IPAT music test is just as bad (Kline, 1973).
Cattell (Cattell, 1986; Cattell and Krug, 1986) disagreed with the studies that failed to
demonstrate the expected structure in the 16PF. He argued that everyone else had failed to
perform factor analyses properly – an opinion with which most psychometricians would
disagree. The simplest way to rebut the criticisms would be for Cattell to produce a clear,
16-factor matrix arising from his studies with the 16PF. The 1970 handbook for the 16PF did
not include such a table and when one was eventually produced (Paul Barrett, personal
communication) it did not show the clear factors that everyone expected.
The reasons for these problems are uncertain. Recall that the 16PF was constructed through
factor analyses performed by hand – an enormously laborious and error-prone process. It may
be that errors crept in here. But the problem is that the raw data which Cattell analysed were
never made available; others could not re-analyse it to see if they came to the same conclusions.
It seems that there are fewer personality traits than suggested by Cattell and that all the tests
designed to measure Cattell’s personality traits are fawed. Given these problems, it is hardly
worthwhile discussing the nature of Cattell’s factors or considering the evidence for the
validity of the 16PF. So whilst Cattell’s work is important in that he showed how work in this
area could usefully proceed, his implementation had major issues. Instead, we shall consider
a more modern lexical approach to personality measurement.

When a test is factor analysed, why is it important to check that the items
that form factors correspond to the instructions for scoring the test that are
given in the test handbook?
The ‘Big Five’ models of personality

Tupes and Christal
Several researchers have developed slightly different models of personality based on fve
(rather than 16) factors. Tupes and Christal (1961/1992) were military psychologists who
109
became interested in reapplying the behaviour rating scales for personality devised by Cattell
and described in the previous section. As before, the aim was to factor analyse the correlations
between the adjectives to reveal the fundamental dimensions of personality. They asked
several groups of 25–30 Air Force trainee offcers who all lived and trained together to rate
each other on 35 of the variables that Cattell used. The average rating given to a person by
the other 24–29 members of the group on each variable was calculated and it was argued that
this would be more accurate than just using one rater, as Cattell did. By using large samples
of people (790 in one study), more modern methods of factor analysis and a computer to
perform the analysis, they hoped to discover a factor structure that was more accurate and
hopefully more replicable than Cattell’s. They repeated this analysis in eight samples (including
students and older offcers) to check whether the same factors emerged consistently from each
sample – which they did. Tupes and Christal consistently found just fve personality factors
rather than Cattell’s 16, as shown in Table 6.2.
Unlike Cattell, Tupes and Christal seem to have found some highly replicable personality
factors, most of which also seem to make psychological sense, although the ffth (‘Culture’)
factor is harder to interpret just by looking at its large loadings. The only real problem is that
Passini and Norman (1966) discovered when people were asked to rate the behaviour of
complete strangers (whose behaviour they had not observed), the same factors emerged! It is
therefore possible that the raters used by Tupes and Christal may not have recorded how
people actually behaved, but instead how they thought the people being rated should behave
(Lassiter and Briggs, 1990). Thus the factors may be based on stereotypes, rather than accurate
assessments of behaviour.
Norman and Goldberg

Because of the problems with Cattell’s work, Norman (1967 and available online from ERIC
at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED014738) started again from scratch, re-visiting and reducing the
Allport and Odbert list of trait descriptors. He compiled a list of 2800 terms that could
describe personality, describing in detail how and why the original list of terms was reduced.
These were sorted into 75 clusters of words having similar meanings.
Goldberg (1990) took 1710 of Norman’s trait descriptors and persuaded a group of college
students to rate themselves on each term. He then calculated a score for each person on each
Table 6.2 Five factor model of Tupes and Christal (1961/1992)
Factor Terms from rating scale
surgency or Extraversion Talkativeness, Frankness, Adventurousness, Assertiveness,

sociability, Energetic
Agreeableness Good-Natured, Not Jealous, Emotionally Mature,
Mildness, Cooperativeness, Trustfulness
Dependability Orderliness, responsibility, Conscientiousness, Perseverance,
Emotional stability Not Neurotic, Placid, Poised, Not Hypochondriacal, Calm,
Emotionally stable, self-suffcient
Culture Cultured, Esthetically Fastidious, Imaginative, socially
Polished, Independent-Minded
110
of the 75 ‘Norman Clusters’ for each person. These scores were then factor analysed, and fve
factors emerged once again. The factors were very similar to the Tupes and Christal traits
shown in Table 6.2. There were two main differences:
l Conscientiousness replaced Dependability. This probably makes sense, as the Tupes and
Christal work was mainly performed on offcers who needed to rely on each other; perhaps
dependability is not such an important characteristic for college students, and so does not
appear in the ratings which they make
l Intellect replaced Culture. The ‘Culture’ factor was always hard to interpret, as Tupes and
Christal themselves acknowledged. The ‘Intellect’ factor identifed by Goldberg refects
interest in intellectual activities, creativity, curiosity and insight, which makes far more sense.
It also somewhat mirrors Cattell’s fnding of an ‘intelligence’ factor (Factor B) in the 16PF.
When similar studies have been performed in other languages, broadly similar factors have
emerged – although there have been some inconsistencies, as discussed by Ashton et al.
(2004a) amongst others. These authors also tried extracting six factors (rather than the usual
fve) from their English-language data, and found that the sixth factor seemed to be one of
honesty v. humility – a factor which is also found in several other languages (Ashton et al.
(2004a)). Their HEXACO model is discussed below.
Costa and McCrae

The strongest proponents of a fve-factor model are Paul Costa and Robert McCrae (Costa and
McCrae, 1976). They began by using cluster analysis (a rough and ready approximation of
factor analysis) to investigate correlations between the scales (not the items!) in Cattell’s 16PF.
They found two clear clusters of scales that appeared to measure ‘extraversion’ (Cattell’s A, F,
H, -Q2 factors) and ‘Neuroticism’ (-C, O, Q4 and L.), plus a tiny third cluster (Cattell’s I and
M factors). More items were added in order to give more breadth to the third factor (Costa and
McCrae 1978) which was then termed Openness to Experience and supposedly refected the
ways in which people deal with novel events, such as fantasy, aesthetics, feelings and actions.
They then decided, quite arbitrarily, that each of these three factors should be measured
by six aspects of behaviour that they termed ‘facets’. These represent lower level forms of
behaviour which, taken together, defne the factor. For example, ‘angry hostility’ is one facet
of Neuroticism – it could be assessed by expressions such as ‘I am quick to anger’, ‘it doesn’t
take a lot to make me mad’ and so on. In other words, Costa and McCrae developed a
hierarchical model rather like that shown in Figure 5.6. The personality items are at the
bottom of the hierarchy. The frst-order factors represent the facets, and the second-order
variables represent the personality factors.
There are some obvious problems with this work. First, there is no earthly reason why
there should be precisely six facets per factor. This seems to be a completely arbitrary decision
which does not fow from the analysis of the data. For factor analysis might show that some
factors may have only four facets, others might have nine; it is surely an empirical issue rather
than one to be decided by fat.
Second, recall that Costa and McCrae began by analysing the scales in the 16PF. Earlier
on we mentioned that there is excellent evidence that the items in the 16PF do not form 16
scales, and so that it is nonsensical to score the test as Cattell recommended. Doing so will
result in scale scores which are mixtures of quite different traits. Correlating and factor
analysing these scale scores thus makes little sense. It is far better to factor analyse items, or
clusters of items which are near synonyms, which is what Goldberg (1990) did.
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Table 6.3 Costa and McCrae’s fve personality factors
Trait Description of someone scoring high
Openness Imaginative, moved by art, emotionally sensitive,

novelty seeker, tolerant
Conscientiousness Competent, orderly, dutiful, motivated to achieve,
self-disciplined, thinks before acting
Extraversion Warm, gregarious, assertive, active, excitement seeker,
positive emotions
Agreeableness Trusting, straightforward, altruistic, cooperative,
modest, tender minded
Neuroticism Anxious, angry, hostile, depressed, self-conscious,
impulsive, vulnerable
Third, even if the 16PF had formed scales as Cattell suggested there would still be problems.
Costa and McCrae correlated and factor analysed the scores on each of Cattell’s 16 scales of
the 16PF (A, B, C, E, etc.). These scores correspond to the frst-order factors in Figure 5.6;
Costa and McCrae were essentially analysing the correlations between Cattell’s 16 frst-order
factors, and not the correlations between the 184 items in the 16PF. They were looking for
higher-order factors, although they never made this clear.
Finally, it should be noted that the items used to measure the facets were often very similar
in meaning – near synonyms, in fact. There is nothing wrong with this, as long as one does
not try to interpret scores on the facet as if it were a source trait; the problem is that some
authors do just this (e.g., Walton et al., 2018).
Undeterred by all this, Costa and McCrae developed 6 × 3 = 18 sets of eight items, which
eventually managed to form factors much as they were designed to. However, by this stage
all attempts to keep to a lexical sampling model had been abandoned – the items were designed
to measure a particular set of facets and factors.
Two further factors were later added to this three-factor model in order to allow Goldberg’s
two factors of ‘Agreeableness’ and ‘Conscientiousness’ to be measured, although some
violence was done to Goldberg’s fve-factor model in the process. No one argued about the
basic factors of Extraversion and Neuroticism, but Goldberg’s third factor (previously
identifed as ‘intellect’) was altered so that it more closely resembled ‘openness to experience’.
The fve factors shown in Table 6.3 (acronym OCEAN), constitute the currently popular fve-
factor model of personality, whose factors are usually measured using the NEO-PI(R)
questionnaire (Costa and McCrae, 1992b) or Goldberg’s free alternative at http://ipip.ori.org.
Considerable work has now gone into researching the NEO-PI(R) factors, generally by:
l establishing their existence in a variety of languages with varying degrees of success. Early
work seemed to show that the factors appeared in several cultures (McCrae and Costa,
1997) but more recently De Raad et al. (2010) show that only Extraversion, Agreeableness
and Conscientiousness seem to occur in the 12 languages they examined, and there seems
to be little evidence for the model in largely-illiterate Bolivians (Gurven et al., 2013). This
is important, as if the fve factors are truly source traits which represent the ways that
humans in general behave, they should appear in all cultures.
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l correlating them with other questionnaires.

l determining whether scores on the traits predict behaviour; for example, sexual behaviour
(Allen and Walter, 2018).
l examining the origins of these factors and facets; that is whether they are infuenced by
genes, family environment or extra-familial infuences (Jang et al., 1998).
l checking the structure of the test by factor analysing or correlating the items or facets.
Facets that supposedly belong to quite different factors can turn out to be quite highly
correlated, as shown in the NEO-PI(R) manual. For example, assertiveness (a facet of
Extraversion) correlates –0.42 with self-consciousness (a facet of Neuroticism). This
correlation is actually larger than four out of the fve correlations between assertiveness
and the other facets of Extraversion! And this is not an isolated example. A related problem
is that some of the fve factors are themselves highly correlated. Block (1995) mentions a
correlation of –0.61 between Neuroticism and Conscientiousness. This paper is well worth
reading if one is at all sceptical about the merits of the fve-factor model. In fairness I should
mention that some studies fnd that the correlations between the facets do ft the fve-factor
model as expected (e.g., Aluja et al., 2005).
Variants of the fve-factor model

HExACO
The HEXACO model of personality sprang from Michael Ashton’s discovery that in cross-
cultural studies of the lexical basis of personality, six (rather than fve) factors often emerged
(Ashton et al., 2004b), and that an honesty-humility factor may need to be added to the Big
Five traits. In addition, some of the facets seemed to differ. The HEXACO model built on
these cross-cultural studies by measuring those traits and facets which were best replicated
across cultures. Thus although most of the HEXACO traits have similar names to the Big Five
traits, there are usually differences in their makeup, as the facets are different. The four facets
that defne each trait are those which appear most consistently across cultures. Lee and Ashton
(2004) describe the origin and structure of the HEXACO Personality Inventory (HEXACO-PI)
in some detail; the revised version of this inventory can be downloaded free (for academic use)
from http://hexaco.org. It measures Honesty/humility, Emotionality, Extraversion,
Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness. The HEXACO model is becoming popular,
with good reason. Its factor structure emerges cleanly and consistently (Lee and
Ashton, 2018), and it shows predictive power in some real-life settings (e.g., Anglim et al.,
2018; Burtaverde et al., 2017).
ExErCIsE
spend 15 minutes measuring your own personality at http://hexaco.org/

hexaco-online to see what a modern personality test looks like. You may
want to try to work out which items belong to the six HExACO scales as
you take the test. Do you agree with the results? If you feel comfortable
doing so, ask a close friend to rate your personality using the rating form
of the questionnaire on the same site. Are the results similar to the
self-report?
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Table 6.4 The six main HExACO factors.
Scale Brief description Facets
Honesty-Humility Uninterested in manipulating sincerity, fairness, greed-

others, wealth or social status avoidance, modesty
Emotionality similar to Neuroticism; Fearfulness, anxiety,
anxious, fearful and dependence, sentimentality
empathetic
eXtraversion sociable, confdent and self-esteem, social boldness,
enthusiastic sociability, liveliness
Agreeableness Forgiving, compromising and Forgivingness, gentleness,
without a quick temper fexibility, patience
Conscientiousness Careful, thoughtful, well- Organisation, diligence,
organised and disciplined perfectionism, prudence
Openness Imaginative, inquisitive, Aesthetic appreciation,
curious and unconventional. inquisitiveness, creativity,
unconventionality
The scales measured by the HEXACO model are shown in Table 6.4.
Zuckerman’s alternative Big Five model

Marvin Zuckerman has long been interested in sensation seeking as an aspect of personality
and developed the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire (Zuckerman, 2002) to
measure this and other personality traits. Rather than trying to sample the whole range of
trait descriptors (which would ensure that all traits were identifed, if the assumptions of the
lexical model are correct) Zuckerman based his questionnaire on the analysis of items from
46 published scales including his own Sensation Seeking Scale. So it is perhaps unsurprising
that a sensation seeking factor (‘Impulsive Sensation Seeking’) emerged. Neuroticism appeared
much as expected, as did Sociability (Extraversion). Impulsive Sensation Seeking was the
virtual opposite of Conscientiousness and Aggression-Hostility proved to be very highly
(negatively) correlated with Agreeableness. The only real difference between the models was
in the ffth factor: Zuckerman’s factor of Activity did not resemble Openness to Experience
in the NEO-PI(R). This model is not widely used; it is mentioned in case readers encounter it
elsewhere.
Cloninger’s model
Cloninger’s model of personality was based on a model of how people adapt to novelty,
reward and punishment. It is highly infuential within psychiatry (Cloninger, 1987; Cloninger
et al., 1993) measuring seven traits, viz. novelty seeking, persistence, harm avoidance,
reward dependence, self-directedness, self-transcendence and cooperativeness. De Fruyt
et al. (2000) show that each of these correlates at least 0.4 with one of the NEO-PI(R) scales,
and that a combination of NEO scales could predict some of the scores on the Cloninger
114
scales, although it is clear that the two systems are not equivalent. This is perhaps hardly
surprising given their different origins; Cloninger’s traits sprang from theoretical and clinical
considerations, rather than an attempt to discover source traits. Again, this model of
personality is rarely used by psychologists who prefer to base their inferences on non-clinical
groups.
The work of Eysenck and Gray

Whereas Cattell and the Five Factor theorists’ approach to exploring broad personality traits
was data-driven – a ‘bottom-up’ process relying on statistical analyses rather than theory –
Hans Eysenck advocated a ‘top-down’ method of analysis in which likely personality traits
were identifed from the clinical and experimental literature. He spent 50 years investigating
the three main aspects of personality, namely Introversion vs Extraversion, Neuroticism vs
emotional stability, and Psychoticism (or tough mindedness) vs tender mindedness. The frst
two terms, in particular, have a long history. Eysenck and Eysenck (1985) have shown that
these appeared in the 18th and 19th century and we noted in Chapter 4 that Extraversion
featured in the writings of Carl Jung during the 1920s. They are of course currently aspects
of the various fve-factor models. The basic premise of all these writers is that there are two
basic dimensions of personality, rather as shown in Figure 6.1.
The vertical line in Figure 6.1 represents the personality dimension of emotional instability,
or ‘Neuroticism’. Highly neurotic individuals are moody, touchy and anxious, whereas those
low on Neuroticism are relaxed, even tempered and calm. The second dimension is that of
Extraversion. Extraverts are hearty, sociable, talkative and optimistic individuals – the types
who insist on talking to you on train journeys. Introverts are reserved, pessimistic and keep
themselves to themselves. The fact that these two lines are at right angles suggests that these
two dimensions of personality are independent (uncorrelated). Figure 6.1 also shows the four
‘Galen types’ (melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic and sanguine) relative to these axes and
around the outside are descriptions of behaviours that might be observed from various
combinations of these dimensions. Thus someone who is neither particularly stable nor
unstable, but very introverted, might be described as quiet or passive, a stable extravert might
be described as responsive and easygoing, and so on.
Figure 6.1 does not show Eysenck’s third major dimension of personality, which was added
to the theory in 1976. Eysenck’s dimensions of Extraversion and Neuroticism could not
differentiate between people with schizophrenia and those with no psychiatric diagnosis.
A third dimension, Psychoticism, was introduced to the model in an attempt to achieve this.
Individuals scoring high on Psychoticism would be emotionally cold, cruel, risk taking,
manipulative and impulsive. They are more likely than low scorers to develop schizophrenia
(Chapman et al., 1994). Those scoring low on Psychoticism would be warm, socialised
individuals. Psychoticism is thought to be largely uncorrelated with either Extraversion or
Neuroticism and so Eysenck’s model of personality can thus be represented by three
personality dimensions at right angles to each other – Extraversion, Neuroticism and
Psychoticism. These traits are measured using the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire
(EPQ-R) or an alternative at http://ipip.ori.org. Unlike some of the other questionnaires
considered earlier, the items in Eysenck’s scales do form three clear factors precisely in
accordance with expectations (Barrett and Kline, 1982b; Eysenck et al., 1985).
Eysenck has thus concentrated on two of the personality traits that emerge from the fve-
factor model together with a dimension of Psychoticism that he fnds to be appreciably
115
UNSTABLE
moody touchy
anxious restless
rigid aggressive
sober excitable
pessimistic changeable
reserved implusive
Melancholic Choleric
unsociable optimistic
quiet active
INTROVERTED EXTRAVERTED
passive sociable
careful
Phlegmatic Sanguine outgoing
thoughtful
talkative
peaceful
responsive
controlled
reliable easygoing
even-tempered lively
carefree
calm
STABLE
Figure 6.1 Personality dimensions of Neuroticism and Extraversion

(reproduced from Nyborg, 1997, p. 18, with permission)
negatively correlated with Costa and McCrae’s ‘Agreeableness’ and ‘Conscientiousness’.

According to Eysenck (1992) Goldberg found a correlation of –0.85 between Psychoticism
and these two measures (combined), indicating that (low) Agreeableness and Conscientiousness
may well be components of Psychoticism, rather than factors in their own right; Heaven
et al. (2013) also found these variables to be substantially correlated.
Jeffrey Gray devised a personality theory which was very similar to Eysenck’s, except that
the factors representing Extraversion and Neuroticism were rotated through 45 degrees in
Figure 6.1. The axis passing from ‘peaceful’ to ‘excitable’ was known as ‘impulsivity’, and the
one from ‘responsive’ to ‘sober’ was termed anxiety. Gray’s work was based on animal models
of reward and punishment and is important because it led to reinforcement sensitivity theory,
discussed in Chapter 9.
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A general factor of personality?

Given that the fve factors of the Big Five model are somewhat correlated, some researchers
have suggested that the correlations between these factors should themselves be factor
analysed to produce a ‘higher order’ factor of personality, rather as described in Chapter 5.
Musek (2007) found that such a factor consisted of a mixture of Extraversion, Agreeableness
and Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience, together with low Neuroticism. But
what does it mean? One possibility is that it measures social desirability (the tendency to
present oneself in a good light when completing personality questionnaires) as high scores
on the general factor (high Extraversion, etc.) are socially valued. However the correlation
between scores on the general factor and a scale measuring social desirability is only in the
order of 0.2 to 0.25 (Schermer and Vernon, 2010), suggesting that the general factor is not
just social desirability. Instead it has been suggested that the general factor may refect
‘social effectiveness’ (van der Linden et al., 2016) by which is meant making
oneself popular and likeable. This paper is well worth reading for its review of the literature
in the area.
Given that there seems to be evidence linking Eysenck’s Psychoticism factor to low
Conscientiousness and low Agreeableness, it might be worthwhile exploring whether the
general factor of personality corresponds to low Psychoticism in Eysenck’s model of
personality. However this does not seem to have been attempted yet.
Although research on the general factor of personality is currently popular, the exact
meaning of the factor is still somewhat unclear, and it is not entirely obvious that the same
general factor of personality is found when different questionnaires are analysed. However
the literature here gets somewhat technical, as Revelle and Wilt (2013) have identifed a
number of technical and conceptual problems with analysing and interpreting the general
factor of personality. It is best described as ‘work in progress’.
Dissenting voices
Before we leave this chapter, it is necessary to consider some criticisms that have been levelled
against all types of trait theory. Mischel (1968) and other social psychologists have argued
that it is situations, not traits, that determine behaviour. They argue that although we choose
to believe that individuals behave in consistent ways (corresponding to personality traits),
such beliefs are at odds with the data. However, three pieces of evidence show that this view
is untenable.
l If personality were determined purely by situations, personality traits simply would not
exist and so measures of these traits (such as scores on personality questionnaires) would
be unable to predict any aspects of behaviour. However plenty of evidence shows that
personality traits can predict a range of behaviours (e.g., Paunonen, 2003; Graham
et al., 2017).
l If personality were determined by situations, then personality could not be infuenced by
our genetic makeup. Several are, as described in Chapter 15.
l Finally, studies such as those by Conley (1984) and Locke et al. (2017) show a considerable
consistency in behaviour over time and/or situations. Indeed, Conley has shown that after
correcting for measurement error, the consistency of personality traits over time is of the
order of 0.98.
117

Using the data in Table 6.5, plot a graph showing how each individual’s level
of anxiety varies from one situation to another. What would you expect this
graph to look like if:
a. situations, not personality, determine behaviour
b. personality, not situations, determines behaviour
c. behaviour is determined by the interaction of situation and personality?
Which of these best resembles your graph?
Other theories such as learning theory and social learning theory have been proposed as
alternatives to traits, for if our actions are determined by our reinforcement history and/or
the behaviour of our role models, then personality traits certainly cannot be said to cause
behaviour. One way of addressing this issue is to consider the effects of such processes on
personality traits. If role modelling and reinforcement techniques are all important in
determining how a child or adult behaves, one would expect brothers and sisters to have
similar personalities, by virtue of their having been brought up according to the same family
ethos. To anticipate Chapter 15, the infuence of this ‘shared environment’ on children’s
personalities is minuscule and there is enormous variation in personality within families.
This makes it unlikely that such learning theories will be of value as explanations for
behaviour.
A third criticism of trait psychology comes from social psychologists with an interest in the
‘construction process’ (Hampson, 1997). Rather than viewing personality as a characteristic
of the individual, these theorists delve into the processes whereby personality attributions are
made – that is, how behaviours are identifed, categorised and attributed to either the person
(‘John is a snappy person’) or the situation (‘John is under stress’). Personally, I have no
problem with this work, except that it is social psychology rather than anything to do with
individual differences! For if we defne traits as being real, internal characteristics of the
individual, then it matters not one jot how others view them. Studying the social construction
process may be useful in fostering awareness of some measurement problems inherent in
personality questionnaires, but once again the acid question is whether or not scores on
personality questionnaires can predict anything. If they can, then it seems to me that there is
more to personality than this.
Table 6.5 Hypothetical anxiety scores of three people in fve situations
In lectures Coffee with In a statistics Watching a Reading Dickens

friends practical class horror flm
8 7 18 14 6
3 2 16 4 2
7 8 17 8 7
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summary
This chapter has covered a lot of ground and has outlined the most promising approaches to
the measurement of personality. You should now be able to defne traits and discuss the
problem of ‘circularity’ in using traits to describe behaviour, and discuss the logic of using the
lexical hypothesis for sampling personality traits from the language – you may have your own
views on the adequacy of this method. Five-factor models are currently hugely popular,
although I have far more regard for Goldberg’s model and the HEXACO six-factor model
than Costa and McCrae’s work, as the former two approaches involved fewer ad-hoc
modifcations of the model. The ‘take home’ message from this chapter is that if you want to
measure a person’s personality, you should use a fve- or six-factor model – perhaps the
HEXACO model, whose questionnaire is free to download and use from hexaco.org, and
which has been widely used and translated.
There is general agreement that Extraversion and Neuroticism are two important aspects
of personality. Conscientiousness and Agreeableness are also found consistently across
cultures, although Eysenck argues that these might be better represented as components of
Psychoticism. The status of Intellect (or ‘Openness’, or ‘Culture’, depending which fve-factor
model one follows) is far less clear. Research into the general factor of personality is currently
popular, though there is less-than-perfect consensus about what the factor means, which is a
problem.
You may also wish to consider whether the totally atheoretical approach to discovering
personality source traits outlined in this chapter is entirely adequate, or whether (and why?)
there are any important personality traits which do not seem to be captured by the factor
models discussed here. Finally, you should be familiar with some criticisms of trait theory that
are sometimes levied by social psychologists and learning theorists.
suggested additional reading

The best solution would be to consult the papers and books cited in the text, perform a
literature search, browse the journals Personality and Individual Differences, the Personality
section of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Research in Personality,
the European Journal of Personality, or Journal of Personality, or visit William Revelle’s
excellent website, the ‘Personality Project’ (https://personality-project.org) at Northwestern
University. Old papers by Costa and McCrae and Eysenck (Costa and McCrae, 1992a;
Eysenck, 1992) are still well worth reading for two conficting accounts of the advantages of
the fve-factor model over the three-factor model, while Matthews et al. (2009) provide an
excellent account of the nature and background of trait theories of personality.
SAQ 6.1
First, there are a great many adjectives in the language and so it is diffcult
to know how to choose between them. second, if different investigators
happen to choose different samples of words, it is going to be diffcult to
119
ascertain whether their tests actually measure the same underlying

psychological dimensions of personality. Third, it is diffcult to ensure that all
potential personality traits have been examined – that is, that the model is
comprehensive. Finally, it is necessary to show that any concept (trait)
measured by a set of adjectives is broader in scope than the adjectives that
are used to measure it, before it can be used as an explanation for behaviour.
SAQ 6.2
There are two possibilities, both of which require that the same large (n >100)
sample of people have their behaviour assessed by raters and fll in the
questionnaire. One can either correlate the two measures together or factor
analyse the correlations between all of the items (both ratings and
questionnaire items). Factoring is the better approach, as this will also identify
any items that fail to measure the trait(s) in question.
SAQ 6.3
The factor analysis shows which items measure the same underlying trait.
suppose that a ten-item test is factored, and the analysis shows that items
1 to 5 load on one factor and items 6 to 10 load on another quite different
factor. Obviously the test should be scored so that items 1 to 5 form one scale
and items 6 to 10 form another. If, by way of contrast, the test handbook
recommends adding together scores on items 1, 2, 3, 7, 8 and 9, the resulting
total score will be a mixture of two quite different traits – and quite
meaningless. (Consider, for example, how you would interpret a person’s
score from a test in which fve of the items measured nervousness and fve
items measured vocabulary – it is impossible.)
SAQ 6.4
a. Very jagged – each person’s score would vary enormously from situation
to situation, and there would be no differences in the average score of
each person (computed across situations).
b. The graphs would be entirely fat – people would yield precisely the same
score in every situation.
c. A mixture of the two.
Your graph is best described by (c).
120
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Chapter 7
Emotional intelligence
Introduction
Chapter 6 discussed the broad personality traits which were discovered by exploring the
‘lexical hypothesis’ – the idea that if a personality characteristic exists, then words will have
been invented to describe it. Thus broad personality traits should emerge when people’s
responses to the various words are factor analysed. It did not take long for it to be recognised
that this approach did not seem to reveal all important aspects of personality. This chapter,
and Chapters 9 and 10, explore narrow personality traits – traits which are hypothesised to
exist, but which did not seem to appear as broad personality factors in the fve-factor (or any
other) model.
One apparent gap is ‘emotional intelligence’, or ‘EI’. Whilst each of the personality models
considered in Chapter 6 included a factor of ‘neuroticism’, ‘anxiety’ or ‘emotional
[in]stability’, these refer to feelings of anxiety, depression and other negative emotions; some
people are habitually more anxious/depressed/moody than others. It might also be interesting
to discover how people use their emotions. Why are some individuals ‘good with people’ – by
which I mean able to identify their emotional state, work out the right thing to say and
demonstrate social awareness? Likewise, why do some people fy into passionate rages
and appear to be at the mercy of their emotions, while others seem to be able to understand
and manage their feelings?
The whole area received a massive burst of publicity in 1995 following the publication of
Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, a journalist with a PhD in psychology (Goleman,
1995). It was written for a popular audience and made several far-reaching claims: for
example, the sub-title of the book is ‘why it [emotional intelligence] can matter more than
IQ’. Because this work is so well known (and often accepted uncritically by non-psychologists),
it is important to outline its merits and its shortcomings.
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Learning outcomes
l Describe and evaluate Goleman’s contribution, and explain the difference
between ability emotional intelligence (ability-EI) and trait-EI.
l Outline Mayer and Salovey’s four-branch model of ability-EI, and discuss
experimental evidence which may support the model.
l Discuss how ability-EI may be measured using the MSCEIT, STEM and STEU.
l Consider the overlap between ability-EI and general intelligence (g), and
the problems that this presents for researchers.
l Discuss Bar-On’s model, and evaluate the claim that it measures 15 aspects
of trait-EI.
l Evaluate Schutte’s, and Petrides and Furnham’s models of trait-EI, and
their relationship to other aspects of personality.
Goleman’s contribution
Throughout his book Goleman argued that mainstream psychology has paid insuffcient
attention to recognising and managing emotions. He argues that the being able to recognise
one’s own and other people’s emotions and learning how to regulate one’s own emotional
state is important in understanding why the most successful people are not (he claims) always
the most intelligent – i.e., why EI is important in everyday life. He suggests that problems in
recognising, regulating and using emotions can have important implications for everyday life
(e.g., our dealings with others; high school shootings) and points to the importance for
psychological and social wellbeing of controlling impulses and negative feelings such as rage
or worry. Only then can we reach the ‘fow’ – a condition in which we are able to focus
completely on what we are doing, with little awareness of events in the outside world; this
produces a feeling of great satisfaction or joy.
Goleman presents a number of case studies to support his thesis that emotional intelligence
really matters. These include the burglar who ‘saw red’ and bludgeoned two people to death,
the child who is skilled at using several techniques to alter their sibling’s emotional state, and
people with no social graces who simply lack the self-insight to recognise when they are boring
others or behaving inappropriately.
Goleman discusses some literature which shows that the limbic system and amygdala are
important in determining how we express our emotions, and that cognitive techniques also
modify the nature and strength of the emotions that we experience. For example, we may
recognise that we are starting to feel upset, so focus on some happy memory. All this does not
sound very different from Eysenck’s theory of personality. As outlined in Chapters 6 and 11,
Eysenck’s factor of neuroticism describes, at one extreme, people who are at the mercy of their
negative feelings, such as worry, guilt, anxiety and depression, and mood swings and, at the
other, people who are sanguine, in touch with their inner emotional life and emotionally
stable. Is this form of ‘emotional intelligence’ the same as neuroticism? Unfortunately, it is
impossible to tell this from reading Goleman’s book, as it does not contain a single reference
to any of the researchers who have studied anxiety/neuroticism, such as Eysenck, Cattell,
Costa or Goldberg. Neither does Goleman give any hints as to how we should go about
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assessing this form of emotional intelligence, which makes the theory diffcult to test. Without
having an operational defnition of emotional intelligence one can only rely on case studies
and persuasive argument – neither of which are particularly scientifc, as the accuracy of the
model and its predictions cannot be shown to be false.
The clinical approaches discussed in Chapter 4 showed that although case studies may
make interesting reading, these alone cannot always reveal psychological truths. Much the
same applies to Goleman’s thesis. Although he argues that emotional intelligence is important,
his thesis tends to depend on anecdote rather than sound empirical research with good
operational defnitions of theoretical concepts.
Goleman also sometimes ignores alternative explanations for phenomena. For example, he
cites Mischel et al. (1989) on delay of gratifcation. Here young children are given the choice
of taking one small reward (a marshmallow) immediately or being promised that they will
receive two when the experimenter returns in 20 minutes. Goleman argues that delay of
gratifcation is an early attempt at emotional control and so children with higher scores on
emotional intelligence will be more likely to opt for two marshmallows. However, there is
also a substantial literature relating performance on this task to general intelligence (g).
A meta-analysis (Shamosh and Gray, 2008) shows that intelligent children delay gratifcation.
Finding that some children delay gratifcation while others do not is not, on its own, sound
evidence for emotional intelligence. Indeed, one could argue that an emotionally aware child
who is well aware of the fckle nature of adults should take the marshmallow immediately,
given there is no guarantee that the experimenter will ever return – the very opposite of
Goleman’s prediction!
Goleman recounts how children who delay gratifcation when aged 4 also tend to show
higher scores on mental ability tests, are better adjusted as adolescents and are far superior
as students to those who act on a whim. This might indicate that being able to manage one’s
emotions leads to positive outcomes in later life, as Goleman suggests. However it is dangerous
to assume a causal model from correlational data. Mehrabian (2000) factor analysed several
measures, including delay of gratifcation, emotional sensitivity and general intelligence (g).
Delay of gratifcation fell out on the same factor as did general intelligence; it did not have a
large loading on the emotional intelligence factor. It is therefore more likely that the delay of
gratifcation task is infuenced by general intelligence (or vice versa), and that general
intelligence (rather than emotional intelligence) infuences performance later in life.
It is probably unkind of me to criticise Goleman’s work in this way as his book was written
early and was intended for the general public rather than the specialist. The reason I comment
on it is to show that:
l as we learned in Chapter 4, a collection of case studies cannot really provide solid evidence
for the usefulness of a theory. Proper operational defnitions, sound experimental design
and the analysis of data from carefully constructed samples of the population are far
preferable.
l it is incredibly important to read widely and test for alternative explanations whenever
performing research in individual differences. This is something which I have tried to do
throughout this book; rather than just listing theories and empirical studies I have tried to
evaluate them. Of course some of my evaluations may be quite wrong – but critical evaluation
is a useful skill to develop whenever you read a journal article, or a story in the popular
press. Are there plausible alternative explanations? Does the literature suggest that any of
the alternative explanations are more likely? Applying Occam’s razor, which explanation is
the simplest? This is how science progresses, and this ‘deep processing’ of information will
also help you understand and remember what you read (Gordon and Debus, 2002).
127
Emotional intelligence: ability trait,

personality trait, or both?
The frst experimental studies of emotional intelligence took place in the late 1980s when
researchers such as Salovey and Mayer (1990) reviewed the literature and started to develop
a detailed model of emotional intelligence. They defned emotional intelligence as the ‘ability
to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to
use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions’ and link it to the concept of ‘social
intelligence’. According to this defnition, emotional intelligence is an ability, as it should be
possible to evaluate how well a person can monitor their own feelings, discriminate between
different emotions in themselves and others, and use information about emotional states to
infuence one’s own or others’ behaviour. There may be clear right and wrong answers. Does
that grimace indicate amusement, disgust or fear? Should I listen to gentle relaxing music if
I want to ‘brainstorm’ and come up with creative ideas? What should you say to calm a
customer who is shouting at sales staff?
Other researchers such as Bar-On (1997) and Petrides and Furnham (2000) have argued
that this is not the whole story. Being sensitive, genuine, well adjusted, assertive, optimistic,
happy, able to inspire trust, and being self-actualised are all qualities that may refect emotional
intelligence. However they are (arguably) not abilities: they are instead descriptions of how a
person usually behaves across most situations. They are personality traits, in other words
refecting style of behaviour, rather than how well a person can perform. Hence it is usual to
treat emotional intelligence as both an ability and a personality trait. Some researchers focus
on one branch, and some on the other. When reading the literature on emotional intelligence
it is important to bear in mind whether a particular book or research paper refers to ability-EI
or what some authors have called ‘trait-EI’, the branch of research which treats EI more like
a personality trait. (The term ‘trait-EI’ is unfortunate as ability-EI is also a trait, but the term
is now well ingrained in the literature.)

What is the essential distinction between trait-EI and ability-EI?
Ability-El
Mayer and Salovey (1997) argued that there are four main areas in which people can
demonstrate their level of ability-EI: the ‘four-branch model’ shown in Figure 7.1. They claim
that scores on these four abilities are correlated so that it is also possible to combine scores
in these four areas and use an overall measure of ability-EI. They expanded the theory slightly
in 2016 (Mayer et al., 2016).
Perceiving emotion
Perceiving emotion is perhaps the most obvious way of assessing a person’s ability-EI. For
example, how well can a person perceive the emotion in someone’s face, tone of voice, posture,
behaviour and so on? Can we tell when others try to deceive us when they display an ‘emotion’
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Figure 7.1 Mayer and Salovey’s four-branch model of ability-EI
which they do not really feel? Can we recognise emotions in music and other forms of art?
How accurately can we perceive our own emotional states? Some of these are clearly more
diffcult than others.
The literature shows that there are substantial individual differences in people’s ability to
‘read’ the emotional state of others, although these skills are also affected by cultural factors,
group membership, etc. (Reich et al., 2001). Factors other than EI seem to matter when
recognising emotions. It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that emotional recognition can
be learned; what is most surprising is that it is learned very early in life. Dunn et al. (1991)
assessed the extent to which parents, children aged 36 months and a sibling used ‘feeling state
terms’ (words such as ‘sad’ or expressions such as ‘that’s disgusting’) when interacting
normally at home. The 36 month old infants were followed up and it transpired that there
was a signifcant correlation between the amount of emotional talk at 36 months and these
children’s ability to recognise emotions when they were 6 years old – and this did not just
seem to happen just because some children were more verbally fuent than others. It also seems
that social skills are important predictor of later individual differences in emotional
understanding; children seem to develop at different rates but those who have good social
skills, good language skills and parents who understand their child’s perspective are better
able to understand emotions as they develop (Karstad et al., 2015).
Emotions and thought

The second branch of emotional ability concerns how well people understand the links between
emotions and thought. Mayer et al. (2016) suggest that this may include generating emotions
in oneself so as to better relate to the experiences of another person, or to improve one’s
judgement or memory (calming oneself down before an examination, or before making an
important decision, for example). Or we could decide what cognitive operations would be
most appropriate given our emotional state; for example, brainstorming and generating new
129
ideas when excited or slightly manic. There is a considerable literature showing that a person’s
emotional state (both natural and induced) infuences the way in which they tackle problems
and the quality of thought. Isen’s (2001) review demonstrates that positive feelings increase
creativity and improve problem solving in both laboratory-style tasks and more practical tasks,
such as resolving disputes between people and even making accurate medical diagnoses. It has
been suggested (Spering et al., 2005) that false feedback about performance on an intelligence
test produces ‘negative affect’ (feelings of sadness – see Chapter 16) and this changes the way
in which information is processed, leading to more low-level information gathering and careful
analysis. The usual interpretation of this is that our mood may affect our cognitive skills. It is
however dangerous to infer causality from a correlation. It seems just as possible that when a
person thinks they have performed poorly on an intelligence task, it might be better to slow
down, make sure that one has not missed any important information and take care in future
tasks; negative affect may have no direct infuence on performance. Whatever the fne details
of such relationships, someone with high levels of emotional intelligence should be sensitive
to the ways in which their moods affect their cognitive processes.
Understanding emotions
The third aspect of ability-EI involves the understanding of emotions – for example, being
able to say which emotion one is experiencing, understanding which situations are likely to
lead to which emotions, forecasting how a person might feel if their situation changes, or
knowing what the emotional impact of a particular event is likely to be for oneself or others.
This can be assessed by presenting people with various scenarios and asking them to assess
their likely emotional impact. This ability too seems to have a surprisingly early onset. Denham
et al. (1994) asked preschool children (aged approximately 48 months) to identify the
emotions shown by four puppets (happy, sad, angry and afraid). The children were asked to
describe events that could have made the puppet feel like this. For example, the child might
feel that a puppet was happy because it had been given an ice cream. These authors were
mainly interested in the origins of such skills (socialisation), but from our perspective the
interesting thing is that such young children were able to identify sensible causes of emotion
at all. It has also been found that these children’s understanding of emotion predicts their
social competence later in life (Denham et al., 2003; Denham, 2018), so individual differences
in social understanding emerge at an early age.
The presence of autistic traits and the development of theory of mind are both likely to
affect performance on this aspect of ability-EI. For adults, this ability is likely to be more
analytical: for example, to be able to appreciate the distinction between liking and loving, to
understand complex feelings such as awe and to appreciate the possibility of feeling love and
hate simultaneously.
Emotion management
The fnal area of ability-EI is the management of emotion. Sometimes feelings just develop
as a consequence of life events (for example, sadness following a tragedy) but at other times
it may be possible to manage or manipulate emotions in oneself or in others. For example,
an emotionally intelligent individual may know which activities will help them to manage
their anger or depression or what to say to another person in order to change their mood in
some desired direction. Playing sport or exercising in order to get in the mood to study is
one obvious example. This aspect of ability-EI has also been studied in another context by
Gross and John (2003), whose Emotion Regulation Questionnaire measures the extent to
130
which people cognitively re-appraise situations (i.e., look at things in a different way) in
order to change their mood.

What are the four branches of ability-EI proposed by Mayer and Salovey
(1997)?
Measuring ability-EI
The MSCEIT. Ability-EI is usually assessed using the Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional
Intelligence Test, the MSCEIT (Mayer et al., 2002) a good description of which is given by
Mayer et al. (2003).
Figure 7.2 shows a still from a video (McRorie and Sneddon, 2007) recorded as part of a
research project designed to capture real (rather than acted) emotions. To test your emotional
intelligence, what emotion do you think is being experienced?
Figure 7.2 Spot the emotion (reproduced from McRorie and Sneddon
(2007), with permission)
131
Perceiving emotion is perhaps the most obvious way of assessing a person’s ability-EI. For
example, how well can a person perceive the emotion in someone’s face, tone of voice, posture
and so on? In Figure 7.2, Lynne Spence (our long-suffering school secretary) was genuinely
experiencing great fear – she was teetering on top of a high and (she thought) extremely unsafe
stack of crates and the rope round her waist was (she thought) only loosely attached to a tree
branch.
Unfortunately almost all research in this area asks people to judge emotions from photographs
which are posed by actors under the direction of a psychologist – as with Figure 7.3.
The frst problem is that there is no guarantee that the emotions posed in this way resemble
genuine emotions. What the psychologist believes to be a typical expression of fear or joy may
not be accurate. Some facial muscles may not be under voluntary control, so the actor may
not be physically able to display a realistic emotion. Secondly, viewing a still picture (rather
than a video) reduces the information available to the observer and makes the whole exercise
rather artifcial; we do not look at still photographs when assessing emotions in our everyday
lives. A meta-analysis of smiling by Gunnery and Ruben (2016) shows that both of these
Figure 7.3 A posed facial expression from Ebner et al. (2010)
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things can really matter, and it is worthwhile bearing this issue in mind when reading the
ability-EI literature.
Ability-EI can sometimes be assessed like any other ability – by developing a test whose
items can each be scored as correct or incorrect – for example, whether a person can correctly
identify the emotions being depicted in posed (or ideally naturalistic) photographs or videos.
It is also possible to write items to explore how well a person can understand or use their
emotions using items such as those shown in Table 7.1.
That one is fairly straightforward. Others are harder, such as the item in Table 7.2 which
measures how people know how to use their emotions.
The MSCEIT is not without its controversies. First, how should one determine the ‘correct’
answers to items such as the one shown in Table 7.2? How should one score the items? Two
approaches have been followed: consensus scoring and expert scoring.
Consensus scoring simply means administering the items to a large sample of people
(several thousands) and assuming that the most popular answer is ‘correct’. For example, if
most people feel that tension would be a fairly useful emotion to feel when meeting in-laws,
people who answered ‘fairly useful’ might be awarded fve points. The adjacent answers (‘very
useful and ‘neutral’) might get four points, ‘not very useful’ three points and ‘not at all useful’
two points. Thus unlike most ability tests the items in the MSCEIT are not scored as ‘correct’
or ‘incorrect’, but rather how close they are to the best answer. The problem is that some
people may give the most socially desirable response, or rely on stereotypes; there is no
guarantee that the popular view is correct.
Table 7.1 Sample item from the MSCEIT (Caruso, 2019)
Tom felt anxious and became a bit stressed when he thought about all the work he
needed to do. When his supervisor brought him an additional project, he felt ____. (Select
the best choice.)
a) Overwhelmed c) Ashamed
b) Depressed d) Self-Conscious
e) Jittery
Table 7.2 A second sample item from the MSCEIT (Caruso, 2019)
What mood(s) might be helpful to feel when meeting in-laws for the very frst time?
Mood Not at Not very Neutral Fairly Very

all useful useful useful useful
Tension 1 2 3 4 5
Surprise 1 2 3 4 5
Joy 1 2 3 4 5
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Expert scoring involved a panel of 21 expert researchers making essentially the same
decision. Roberts et al. (2001) and Maul (2012) identify this as being a problem, and also
outline a number of other issues with the MSCEIT; Mayer et al. (2012) respond. Anyone
planning to use the MSCEIT could usefully read these papers. As this is a commercial test,
the scoring system is not publicly available, which makes life diffcult for those who want to
check out the psychometric properties of the scales (e.g., their factor structure).
One obvious problem with this test is that cultural differences may well creep in; it is
probably wise to be wary of using the (US-based) scoring scheme in other cultures. Although
there is some disquiet in the literature about the merits of these approaches and concern
that they may sometimes produce very different results (Roberts et al., 2001), if just a few
items have been wrongly scored as a result of this procedure, this should be detected
via the factor analysis/item analysis procedure and so such items are likely to be removed
from the test.
There are other problems with this approach which are a little too technical to cover here
although readers who plan to use the MSCEIT should explore them. When the scoring system
is improved to eliminate these (Legree et al., 2014) there seems to be little evidence for the
four-branch model shown in Figure 7.1. Instead there is just a single factor of ability-EI which
correlates very substantially (0.79) with general intelligence. It also seems that the items in
the MSCEIT are rather easy for most adults, and that several of its items do not measure
emotional intelligence very well (Fiori and Antonakis, 2011).
The STEM and the STEU. MacCann and Roberts (2008) have developed two tests, The
Situational Test of Emotion Management (STEM) and Situational Test of Emotional
Understanding (STEU) to measure two aspects of ability-EI; their paper shows that the
two scales seem to assess what they claim, which was also the case in the analyses
performed by Austin (2010). Furthermore the MacCann and Roberts tests are free to use
(rather than being a commercial product like the MSCEIT) and the details of the scoring
procedure are freely available – two features which make them extremely attractive to
researchers.
Typical items from the STEM and STUE are shown in Table 7.3.
These two tests have not yet been as widely used as the MSCEIT but seem to have a lot of
potential.
Tests of emotional competence. Developmental psychologists have also studied ability-EI

in children, which they call ‘emotional competence’. The Test of Emotional Comprehension
(Pons and Harris, 2000) is typical of work in this area. It presents children with pictures; a
story is read to them and they are asked to choose between several possible emotions (by
pointing at a face) to show which emotion a character is experiencing. Some of the variables
measured by this test involve theory of mind as well as emotional competence (for example,
how does a rabbit feel when it eats a carrot, unaware of a fox hiding behind a tree) but many
of the variables measured by this test certainly seem to resemble ability-EI. These include
identifcation of emotions from facial expressions, understanding how events may infuence
emotions, the regulation of emotion and the possibility of hiding one’s emotional state; there
are others, too. A Portuguese study suggests that the items form factors much as they
are supposed to (Rocha et al., 2015), but I cannot fnd any literature which links performance
on this scale to the MSCEIT, or which develops a similar measure for adults. This is a shame,
as the format looks promising.
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Table 7.3 Examples of items from the STEM and STUI (MacCann and
Roberts, 2008)
Katerina takes a long time to set the DVD timer. With the family watching, her sister says,
‘You idiot, you’re doing it all wrong, can’t you work the video?’ Katerina is quite close to
her sister and family. What action would be the most effective for Katerina?
a Ignore her sister and keep at the task.
b Get her sister to help or to do it.
c Tell her sister she is being mean.
d Never work appliances in front of her sister or family again.
An irritating neighbour of Eve’s moves to another state. Eve is most likely to feel:
a regret
b hope
c relief
d sadness
e joy
The importance of ability-EI

When assessing the importance of ability-EI for making real world decisions about people
(e.g., for personnel selection) it is important to consider two distinct issues. First, do people’s
scores on a test measuring ability-EI correlate with real world behaviour, such as performance
at work or school, or health or emotional problems. An applied psychologist with little
interest in theory would need to know nothing more than this. They just want a test which
predicts behaviour. However as scientists we academics also need to understand why such
correlations are found. Is it because being able to identify, understand, use and manage
emotions is an important new characteristic of people which was previously overlooked?
Or is ability-EI really not much more than a mixture of several well-known and well-
understood abilities and (perhaps) personality traits? If it is an ability, does it behave like
an ability?
It is possible to train emotional competence in children (Sprung et al., 2015) which is
interesting for two reasons. First, it shows that emotional competence behaves rather
differently from general intelligence, which is resistant to training (Redick et al., 2013) –
although of course training people on how to approach the particular cognitive test which is
used can be effective, training someone to perform well at intelligence tests does not necessarily
boost their intelligence. It might just teach them how to best tackle the problems. Second, it
raises the question of what a person’s ability-EI tells us. Is it an ability, or is it more of an
attainment (as defned in Chapter 3)? Remember that the defnition of ability used there was
that the problems in ability tests should be unfamiliar; it is not obvious that asking people to
identify emotions is a totally unfamiliar task! However this is just my personal view, and many
researchers and practitioners regard ability-EI as a cognitive ability (Mayer et al., 1999). That
said, there are some oddities. For example, Elizabeth Austin shows that there is no simple link
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between ability-EI and performance on other tasks which correlate with intelligence. Intelligent
people tend to have faster reactions, as discussed in Chapter 13. Intelligent people are also
better able to identify shapes which are presented for shorter periods of time. However there
is no link between ability-EI and either of these variables (Austin, 2009; Farrelly and Austin,
2007) suggesting that ability-EI does not behave as one might expect if it were a form of
intelligence.
It is also important to check that any correlation between ability-EI and performance
does not simply occur because both are infuenced by general ability. In other words, it is
necessary to ensure that ability-EI adds something over and above general ability. We have
already noted that when it is scored differently the MSCEIT correlates substantially with
intelligence (Legree et al., 2014). Schulte et al. (2004) administered the MSCEIT alongside
a Big Five personality questionnaire and a test of ability scored it in the conventional way
and found that these scores correlated 0.45 with general cognitive ability (‘general
intelligence’). Their analysis showed that scores on the MSCEIT very closely resembled the
scores which people obtained on a test of general intelligence combined with measures of
the Big Five personality factors. The multiple correlation was over 0.8 and as these authors
had a restricted range of ability in their student sample, the value in the general population
would probably be even higher. They concluded that the MSCEIT really just measured a
mixture of general intelligence and personality. Perhaps being able to assess emotional states
is not a distinct ability at all.
The importance of ability-EI in applied psychology (education, psychology at work, etc.)
will be discussed in Chapter 18.
Trait-El
Several models of the personality-like trait emotional intelligence have emerged since the
1980s. Trait-EI deals with sensitivity to one’s own and other people’s emotional state, being
able to control one’s emotions, social skills and so on. We will consider just two models in
detail – the Bar-On model because it is widely used, and Petrides and colleagues’ Trait
Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue) because it is well supported by research.
One problem with the trait-EI approach concerns the sampling of items. Precisely what types
of question should go into a questionnaire measuring emotional intelligence? Theorists
cannot take a global approach like Cattell and the early fve-factor theorists did, identifying
all the words in the language that could possibly describe emotional intelligence – because
by defnition, no one knows at the outset what emotional intelligence actually is! Some
theorists view traits such as ‘conscientiousness’ and ‘achievement drive’ as components of
emotional intelligence, which is odd considering they are major and well-studied traits in
their own right. There is a real danger that the concept of emotional intelligence may have
been over-extended by ‘pop psychologists’ and those wishing to sell tests to occupational
psychologists under this fag of convenience. Many authors seem to draw on Salovey and
Mayer’s (1990) list of facets of emotional intelligence (see Table 7.4) which includes several
facets that were dropped from their 1997 theory of ability-EI because they did not seem to
measure abilities.
Bar-On’s model
Reuven Bar-On initially studied factors associated with feelings of wellbeing and developed
15 scales/133 items to measure 15 factors of emotional intelligence. These 15 scales, each of
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Table 7.4 Salovey and Mayer’s (1990) original facets of emotional intelligence
Original label Current label Abbreviation Defnition Sample item
Emotion in the Recognition of RecSlf Being in touch with one’s feelings and If I am upset, I know the cause
self: verbal emotion in the self describing those feelings in words of it
Emotion in the Nonverbal emotional NvExp Communicating one’s feelings to others I like to hug those who are
self: nonverbal expression through bodily (i.e., nonverbal) expression emotionally close to me
Emotion in others: Recognition of RecOth Attending to others’ nonverbal emotional I can tell how people are feeling
nonverbal emotion in others cues, such as facial expressions and tone of even if they never tell me
voice
Emotion in others: Empathy Emp Understanding others’ emotions by relating I am sensitive to other people’s
empathy them to one’s own experiences feelings
Regulation of Regulation of RegSlf Controlling one’s own emotional states, I can keep myself calm even in
emotion in the self emotion in the self particularly in emotionally arousing highly stressful situations
situations
Regulation of Regulation of RegOth Managing others’ emotional states, Usually, I know what it takes to
emotion in others emotion in others particularly in emotionally arousing turn someone else’s boredom
situations into excitement
Flexible planning Intuition versus IvR Using emotions in the pursuit of life goals; I often use my intuition in
reason basing decisions on feelings over logic planning for the future
Creative thinking Creative thinking CrTh Using emotions to facilitate divergent People think my ideas are daring
thinking
Mood redirected Mood redirected MRA Interpreting strong – usually negative – Having strong emotions forces
attention attention emotions in a positive light me to understand myself
Motivating Motivating emotions MotEm Pursuing one’s goals with drive, perseverance I believe I can do almost
emotions and optimism anything I set out to do
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which is supposed to indicate an aspect of successful emotional functioning, are supposed to

form fve higher-order factors as shown in Figure 7.4. There is also a short (51-item) version
of the test and versions designed for younger participants.
Although it claims to be based on a comprehensive survey of the literature, very little of
Bar-On’s work has been published in academic journals. It is very much a commercial (rather
than an academic) enterprise and the test has reached the marketplace without the usual
processes of peer commentary, debate over the soundness of the underlying theory, statistical
methods and so on.
There are several points of interest about this model. First, the defnition of emotional
intelligence is very broad. Reality testing, for example, is supposedly the ability to recognise
whether one’s impressions accurately correspond with the real world: problem solving is the
ability to defne and solve problems. It is not at all obvious to me why these are included.
Neither is it clear why happiness and optimism are thought to be indices of emotional
intelligence. Even if it can be successfully argued that happiness and optimism should be
Figure 7.4 The Bar-On model of trait emotional intelligence
138
included, my second point is that there could well be explanations other than EI that account
for some people being happier than others. Third, some of the concepts seem rather similar:
happiness and optimism again, for example. Is it possible to be optimistic without being
happy? Fourth, as Palmer et al. (2003) observe, Bar-On’s own empirical evidence for the
15-factor/fve dimension structure of the test is less than convincing; he sometimes suggests
that other models ft the data better.
Palmer et al. (2003) factor analysed the items of the EQ-i using an Australian sample.
Their analyses were methodologically superior to those used by Bar-On, and showed just
six (not 15) scales. The most important factor found in their analysis comprised items that
should, in theory, have formed two quite different scales: self-regard and happiness items,
together with a scatter of items from other scales. The impulse control, problem solving
and emotional self-awareness factors were found to emerge cleanly, while items that should
have formed two separate fexibility and independence factors all loaded on the same factor.
Items that should have formed three distinct factors (interpersonal relationship, social
responsibility and empathy) all loaded substantially on one factor, suggesting that no
meaningful distinction can be made between these concepts. All this is hardly convincing
evidence for the structure of the EQ-i. When just one factor was extracted, most of Bar-On’s
items showed substantial loadings on the factor, suggesting that it might be safer to talk in
terms of a general factor of EI rather than Bar-On’s 15-factor/fve-dimensional model. There
appear to have been no later attempts to test the structure of the English version of this
scale.
It seems that there are real problems with the Bar-On model. The items may measure a
single trait of emotional intelligence, but there is scant evidence that the items in the
questionnaire measure 15 facets of trait-EI which form fve factors.

What other sorts of experiment might you run to check whether a test
claiming to assess emotional intelligence really did assess this trait?
Schutte’s model
Schutte et al. (1998) developed a short self-report measure of trait-EI, the Emotional
Intelligence Scale, which was designed to assess a single factor of emotional intelligence.
Subsequently, others such as Petrides and Furnham (2000) and Saklofske et al. (2003) noted
that only 33 of the 62 items which Schutte administered actually showed large loadings on
this EI factor; the others were simply dropped from the questionnaire. This makes it diffcult
to argue that Schutte’s questionnaire measures all aspects of EI. Like Saklofske et al. and
others, Keele and Bell (2008) showed that the 62 items actually measured four factors of
EI labelled ‘optimism/mood regulation’, ‘appraisal of emotions’, ‘social skills’ and
‘utilisation of emotions’ although some others have occasionally found different structures
(Gong and Paulson, 2018). Despite these problems the Schutte scale is still fairly widely
used, not least because it is not a carefully protected commercial test; the 33 items are
reproduced in the original 1998 article.
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Petrides and colleagues’ model

Petrides and his colleagues at University College London have been developing and testing a
four-factor model of trait emotional intelligence which they have defned as a constellation of
emotional perceptions measured through questionnaires and rating scales (Petrides et al.,
2016; Petrides et al., 2007). It tried to include measures of all of the variables shown in Table
7.1, plus other relevant personality characteristics such as alexithymia (inability to identify
and describe emotions). These 15 facets of trait emotional intelligence are (sensibly) not
interpreted individually, but are found to form four factors – wellbeing, self-control,
emotionality and sociability. These four factors then intercorrelate to produce a second-order
factor of trait emotional intelligence. In addition, two additional facets infuence the second-
order general factor of emotional intelligence directly. Table 7.5 shows the detailed structure
of this scale.
The test which measures these factors, the TEIQue (the Trait Emotional Intelligence
Questionnaire; Petrides, 2009) has been extensively peer reviewed, is available in both a long
and a short form (153 or 30 items) and has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Some sample items are shown in Table 7.5.
Best of all it is free to use (although donations are encouraged), and may be downloaded
from http://psychometriclab.com/. This site also contains a number of useful links and
offprints. The structure of the TEIQue has received much empirical support from other
researchers, for example, Mikolajczak et al. (2007), whilst a wealth of other studies. (e.g.,
Chirumbolo et al., 2019; Laborde et al., 2016) fnd good support for its structure in different
cultures. It seems that if one wants to measure trait emotional intelligence, the TEIQue is the
test to use.
It has been found that trait-EI is very closely related to the general factor of personality
(tentatively named ‘social effectiveness’) which was outlined in Chapter 6. The evidence for this
is reviewed by van der Linden et al. (2016) who conclude that trait-EI ‘centralizes the emotion-
related variance that is scattered among the fve, supposedly orthogonal, higher-order personality
dimensions and augments it by incorporating signifcant additional variance as refected in its
compelling evidence of incremental validity’. Their analysis of a large body of data revealed a
correlation of 0.86 between the general factor of personality and trait-EI as measured by the
TEIQue, after correcting for errors of measurement. The two traits are extremely similar. This
is all the more impressive as the items in the questionnaires which measure the general factor
of personality are not generally similar in meaning to those in the TEIQue.
The importance of trait-EI in applied psychology (education, psychology at work, etc.) will
be discussed in Chapters 17 and 18.
EXERCISE
Scores on the general factor of personality are calculated by combining the

traits from the fve-factor model of personality. Van der Linden et al. (2016)
demonstrated that the general factor of personality is very similar to trait-EI.
Think whether knowledge of people’s scores on trait-EI can be expected to
predict behaviour much better than knowing their fve personality traits?
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Table 7.5 Sample items from the TEIQue. Adapted from Petrides (2009) with permission
Factor Facet Description Sample item (‘R”’= reverse-scored)
Well-being Self-esteem successful and self-confdent I believe I’m full of personal strengths.
Happiness cheerful and satisfed with their lives Life is beautiful.
Optimism confdent and likely to ‘look on the bright side’ of life I generally believe that things will work
out fne in my life.
Self-control Emotion regulation capable of controlling their emotions When someone offends me, I’m usually
able to remain calm.
Impulse control refective and less likely to give in to urges I tend to get ‘carried away’ easily. (R)
Stress management capable of withstanding pressure and regulating I’m usually able to deal with problems
stress others fnd upsetting.
Emotionality Emotion perception clear about their own and other people’s feelings I often it diffcult to recognise what
(self and others) emotion I’m feeling
Emotion expression capable of communicating their feelings to others Others tell me that I rarely speak about how
I feel. (R)
Empathy capable of taking someone else’s perspective I fnd it diffcult to understand why certain
people get upset with certain things. (R)
Relationships capable of maintaining fulflling personal I generally don’t keep in touch with
relationships friends. (R)
Sociability Social awareness accomplished networkers with superior social skills. I can deal effectively with people.
Emotion capable of infuencing other people’s feelings I’m usually able to infuence the way other
management (others) people feel.
Assertiveness forthright, frank, and willing to stand up for their When I disagree with someone, I usually
rights fnd it easy to say so.
Facets which Adaptability fexible and willing to adapt to new conditions I usually fnd it diffcult to make
infuence adjustments to my lifestyle. (R)
general EI Self-motivation driven and unlikely to give up in the face of I tend to get a lot of pleasure just from
directly adversity doing something well.
141
Summary
Two aspects of emotional intelligence (ability-EI and trait-EI) seek to explain how well people
can identify and use emotions, and understand why it is that some people seem to show better
emotional awareness and sensitivity than others. We briefy discuss some experimental
evidence supporting several models of ability-EI and trait-EI together with methods of
assessing them. We show that some caution needs to be used when interpreting the results of
scales measuring ability-EI, and that the TEIQue appears to be an effective means of measuring
trait-EI.

You might wish to download the TEIQue from http://www.psychometriclab.com to look
at its items. As the norms are not publicly available you will not be able to interpret your
score – re-read Chapter 3 if this seems unfamiliar. You could however compare scores with
friends, to see who is highest, and perhaps produce a table of norms for your class.
Very little of the literature in this area is particularly technical (although some does require
a basic grasp of multiple regression techniques) and so any of the references cited in this chapter
can safely be recommended. Mayer et al. (2016) spell out some of their more recent thoughts
about ability-EI. For a broad overview of the area coupled with a discussion of how EI is related
to performance at work, Cartwright and Pappas (2008) is hard to beat. Mayer et al.’s (2008)
upbeat overview of the status of EI is also worth reading – although perhaps in conjunction
with Schulte et al. (2004), as it is possible that the reason that ability-EI predicts performance
is because it is correlated with general cognitive ability, g. (See also Chapter 12 of this book.)
Petrides et al. (2016) offer a well-balanced overview of recent developments in the area, while
Andrei et al. (2016) present a large meta-analysis based on the TEIQue. The paper by Westfall
and Yarkoni (2016) is crucially important when determining whether any measure of EI
measures anything over and above general intelligence or the Big Five personality traits, but at
the time of writing EI researchers do not appear to have explored the issues which it raises.
SAQ 7.1
Trait-EI refers to personal characteristics – personality traits, if you like – that
describe how ‘emotionally intelligent’ a person is – but where the assessment
method does not require them to demonstrate how good they are at
perceiving, managing, regulating or using emotions. Trait-EI is typically
assessed by asking someone to rate how well various statements such as ‘It is
important for me to keep in touch with my true emotions’, ‘People have told
me that I am “genuine”’, ‘I am good at calming other people down’, for
example, apply to them.
Ability-EI requires people to demonstrate how effectively they can use
emotions. For example, someone might be asked to identify which emotions
142
they would experience in a particular situation or what emotion another

person is experiencing in a video clip (where there is a strong consensus from
experts as to what the ‘correct’ answers are).
SAQ 7.2
Mayer and Salovey’s four branches of ability-EI refer to:
1. perceiving emotions accurately in others and oneself
2. being able to use emotions to facilitate thought
3. grasping the meaning of emotions, recognising how your actions may
affect other people’s emotional state and being able to talk about
emotions
4. managing emotions where necessary – e.g., preventing anger leading to
road rage.
SAQ 7.3
In order to test whether EI is the cause of a particular relationship – for
example, to test whether high levels of EI result in greater happiness – it is
necessary to also measure other variables which could affect EI and
happiness: for example, the Big Five personality traits and perhaps general
intelligence. Then one can perform some statistical analyses that essentially
determine how well the Big Five personality traits and g (but not EI) predict
happiness. Finally, one can consider whether adding EI to this selection of
tests signifcantly improves the overall level of prediction. If so, then it is
clear that the correlation between EI and happiness does not just come
about because some other traits (the Big Five and g) infuence both happiness
and scores on the trait-EI questionnaire. It is instead likely that there is
something ‘special’ about EI, which causes it to infuence happiness, quite
independently of the other traits. Hierarchical regression analysis, path
analysis and partial correlations are some of the types of analysis that can
be used to test this.
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Chapter 8
Reliability and validity of

psychological tests
Introduction
Chapter 3 made the point that in order to measure abstract psychological concepts we need
to construct tests or questionnaires and use the scores on these tests or scales as operational
defnitions of the theoretical terms. For example, we might decide to use the score on the
TEIQue as an operational defnition of trait emotional intelligence. Clearly, if we make a bad
decision when choosing a test, so that scores on test do not refect levels of the trait we are
trying to measure, the results of any study would be meaningless. Thus we have to fnd ways
of identifying a ‘good’ test, by which we mean one whose scores correlate substantially with
the trait we are trying to measure. In practice this normally involves two steps: determining
whether a set of items form a trait (reliability) and checking that the trait which the items
measure is the one we are trying to measure (validity).
Learning outcomes
l Outline the principles of psychological measurement.
l Discuss the domain sampling model of reliability.
l Show an appreciation of the meaning and importance of coeffcient
alpha.
l Discuss several forms of validity and give examples of their use.
l Show an understanding of the relationship between reliability and
validity, and why both of them are important characteristic of scales.
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Reliability and validity of psychological tests
l Show an understanding of the terms unidimensionality, random errors

of measurement, systematic errors of measurement, bias, reliability, true
score, domain sampling model, standard error of measurement,
coeffcient alpha, validity, face validity, content validity, construct validity,
predictive validity and incremental validity.
All measuring instruments, whether measuring physical or psychological characteristics,

share three basic principles. The frst is that they should assess only one aspect of an object
(or person) at a time. The reading on a ruler is infuenced by the length of the thing which we
wish to measure – not its weight, colour, hardness or anything else. Similarly, scores on a
psychological scale need to refect just the single trait or aptitude which the scale is supposed
to measure, and not other things – otherwise it is impossible to determine the meaning of a
person’s score. Suppose that a person obtained a middling score on a scale half of whose items
measured knowledge of sport and half of which measured their ability to visualise things. You
would not be able to tell whether the person knew a lot about sport but could not visualise
things at all, whether they were wonderful at visualisation but knew nothing about sport, or
whether they performed at an average level in each area. Knowing that the person had a
middling score would not really help you to understand them at all.
The second principle is that there should be as little random error as possible associated
with the measurement. We are all familiar with the problem of trying to take readings from
devices such as those in Figure 8.1. These are diffcult to read accurately; because the needle
is above the dial, the angle of the gauge will affect the reading which we make. And the sundial
lacks any fne markings, so we have to estimate whether the time it shows is 2.53 or some
slightly different value.
The third basic principle is one that we usually take for granted in the physical
sciences – that the instrument actually measures what it claims to. We trust the manufacturer’s
claim that the dial attached to the piping measures temperature and is uninfuenced by
pressure, or anything else. We assume that the position of the shadow on the sundial
represents time of day, and not the season of the year or the humidity of the air.
When applied to psychological tests, the principle that a scale should measure only one
trait or state is known as ‘unidimensionality’. The principle that scores of test should be
accurate, in the sense that they are little infuenced by random errors of measurement, is
known as ‘reliability’. The principle that the inferences drawn about the meaning of a
particular test score should be correct is known as ‘validity’. Psychometrics is a branch of
statistical theory that has been developed to produce tests that are unidimensional, reliable
and valid.
Before trying to estimate how accurately we can measure psychological concepts, it is also
necessary to ensure that the numbers that we measure are suitable for the types of mathematical
operation that we perform on them. For example, if you coded the colours of fruit as red = 1,
green = 2 and yellow = 3, there is nothing to stop you computing a number from the sum of
a plum, a lime and a banana; you could even say that these three fruits are equal to eight red
apples if you want to. But these mathematical operations make no sense at all: the numbers
that you have measured are not suitable for mathematical operations such as this. You may
feel that this point is obvious – but as we noted in Chapter 3, Michell (1997) has argued that
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Figure 8.1 Two dials which are diffcult to read accurately
it is inappropriate to compute scores from questionnaires, etc. – or indeed perform any

mathematical operations (e.g., adding together scores on several items) without frst
demonstrating that the data are suitable for this. There is not space to go into these issues
here, but they merit thought should you plan to do advanced work in this area.
Random errors of measurement

It is useful to break down the measurement that we obtain into two components – the thing
we are trying to measure (the true time, in the case of the sundial) plus measurement error:
reading obtained on any occasion = true time + measurement error
The reason this is useful is that it allows us to develop some statistical principles for reducing
the amount of measurement error. In fact, it is possible to deduce much of this from common
sense: if we believe that the sundial is accurate then it seems reasonable to assume that the
error that infuences the readings that we make is random. That is, that we are (a) as likely
to overestimate as underestimate the time, and (b) the amount by which we overestimate the
time is likely to be similar to the amount by which we underestimate the time on another
occasion: the distribution of errors is likely to be symmetric rather than skewed. Finally (c),
we are more likely to make a small error (e.g., misreading the time on the sundial by 1 minute)
than a large one (misreading it by 5 minutes). The frst two assumptions tell us that the mean
for the error term is likely to be zero. (If the error term did not have a mean of zero this would
imply that we will systematically over- or underestimate the time – as would happen, for
example, if the sundial was poorly constructed or positioned so that its readings were always
15 minutes ‘fast’.)
Those with a background in the physical sciences will know that even when measurement
errors are substantial (such in reading the sundial), there is a simple method for obtaining a
more accurate reading. Assuming that the measurements we make are independent of each
other, because we assume that the errors form a normal distribution, measuring something
on several occasions and averaging these measurements is a surefre way of improving the
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accuracy of our measurement. This is because some estimates are likely to be a little high,
some a little low, but when they are averaged they should be close to the true value. Random
measurement errors tend to cancel one another out. So if we ask 71 people to read the sundial
(in very quick succession!) and plot a graph (histogram) of their readings, it will look something
like Figure 8.2a.
We can estimate the true time by averaging the readings; for this example, it is 10.53. To
see the distribution of error scores, it is just necessary to subtract this value from each
reading, as shown in Figure 8.2b. These errors of measurement form a bell-shaped normal
distribution with a mean of zero. The width of the curve (its standard deviation) refects how
much measurement error there is; the wider the curve, the more error there is in reading the
dial. In this example, we can be fairly sure that we can read the time to an accuracy of ± 2
minutes or so. We would like the standard deviation of the measurement error to be as close
as possible to zero, for this implies that a single reading is likely to be very close indeed to
the true time.
Can we apply this principle when measuring ability, mood, personality, etc.?
Given that repeated measurements reduce the amount of error in any assessment, it
would seem logical to construct a test simply by simply repeating the same item over and
over again. In the physical sciences (above the atomic level, at any rate) the act of measuring
something does not appreciably infuence the quantity being measured. However, the same
is not true in psychological tests. Once a person has solved a puzzle in an ability test, they
are going to remember the solution if given exactly the same puzzle again. If a person is
asked to rate how much they fear the dark, they will simply remember what they answered
if asked the same question on a second occasion; the second response will be infuenced by
the way they responded on the frst occasion. The measurements are not independent if the
same item is repeated several times in a test. One reason why it is not possible to construct
a test by repeating exactly the same item over and over again is because these measurements
Figure 8.2 Time readings and error distribution from a sundial
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will not be ‘locally independent’ of each other, as required by the statistical theory
underlying the averaging of scores.
Systematic errors of measurement

There is a second reason why it is inappropriate to repeat the same item over and over in a
test. Single items in psychological tests are probably not unidimensional: they do not measure
a single trait plus measurement error. The way we respond to an item is infuenced by
(a) the trait or state we seek to assess, (b) random error and (c) several systematic errors.
Systematic errors are simply traits or states other than the one we are trying to assess, and
the infuence of these needs to be minimised for us to be able to interpret the meaning of
scores. Some of these systematic errors may simply be personality or ability traits. For
example, way in which people respond to the item ‘Do you often procrastinate?’ using a
seven-point Likert scale will be infuenced both by the personality trait of conscientiousness
and by their vocabulary, as some people may not know the meaning of the word
‘procrastinate’.
To make matters worse, some people may (for reasons best known to themselves) tend to
agree with every question which they are asked . . . there are other possibilities, too. These
are known as ‘response biases’ because they describe idiosyncratic ways in which people use
the response scale. They are discussed in Chapter 21.
The key thing to note is that while readings on physical measuring devices (rules, scales,
etc.) are generally infuenced by only a single characteristic of the thing being assessed (e.g.,
its temperature, or the time of day), the way in which a person responds to an item in a test
will be infuenced by a whole bundle of different ability traits, personality traits, moods,
motivational factors and response biases, as well as random error. Individual test items are
unlikely to be unidimensional.
ExERCISE
Suppose that you asked a student the question ‘do you enjoy drunken
parties?’ in a personality questionnaire and they then responded by marking
a fve-point scale ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’. Make
a list of half a dozen things that might infuence the response they mark.
Apart from those variables that are likely to show little variation within the group (such
as being able to understand all of the words in the sentence), my list includes the following:
l their level of Extraversion (a personality trait), which is what the item was designed to
measure
l the number of parties they have recently attended (their liver may need a rest)
l their age
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l their religious beliefs/ethnic background

l social desirability – some students may fnd it diffcult to admit that they would much
rather be working in the university library than partying and so would tend to overstate
their true liking for parties
l the context in which the question is asked – a potential employer and a psychology student
might well obtain different answers to this question
l the student’s impression of what is being assessed – for example, one person may read the
question, assume that it is being used to assess whether they have a drinking problem and
answer it accordingly, whereas someone else may believe that it measures their level of
extraversion and so answer it accordingly
l the way in which a person uses the fve-point scale – some individuals use scores of 1 and
5 quite freely, while others never use the extremes of the scale
l a tendency to agree (acquiescence)
l the student’s mood
l random error – if you asked the student the same question a couple of minutes later you
might obtain a slightly different result.
Your list probably contains other important variables, too. A whole host of these
‘nuisance factors’ determines how an individual will respond to a single item in a personality
test and we shall consider some of these in Chapter 21. Much the same applies to items in
ability tests. Performance here might be affected by anxiety, luck in guessing the correct
answer, misunderstanding of what is expected, the effects of drugs, social pressures
(perhaps copying others, or deliberately underperforming so as not to stand out from the
group), perceived importance of obtaining a high mark and so on, as well as ability. We
could make a similar case for ratings of behaviour (when aspects of the rater’s personality
and sensitivity would also affect the ratings made). Every piece of data collected when
assessing individual differences is thus likely to be infuenced by a vast number of factors,
as shown in Figure 8.3
The variables at the top of Figure 8.3 are systematic infuences. One of these is what the
item is supposed to assess, while the others are unwelcome systematic errors of measurement.
The ‘measurement error’ term refers at the bottom of the fgure refers to random errors of
measurement. Figure 8.3 also includes ‘unique variance’. This should be familiar from
Chapter 5. Here it means that people enjoy drunken parties to a particular extent – and this
is cannot be predicted from the other traits. Some people just like or dislike parties for no
obvious reason!
It is easy to estimate how well an item measures the trait which it is supposed to measure,
simply by gathering some data and correlating people’s scores on an item with the best
available estimate of the true score. In practice it is almost impossible to fnd a personality
test item where the personality trait explains more than 20% or so of the variance
(corresponding to a correlation with the true score of about 0.45); 80% or so of the variation
in scores between people refects random error, unique variance and traits other than the one
the item is supposed to assess.

How might you estimate each person’s true score, so that you can determine
how accurately each item measures it?
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Agreeing Peer group pressure
Social desirability Age Sociability
Response to one item in questionnaire Unique variance
Measurement error
Figure 8.3 Some variables that may infuence a person’s response to one
item on a personality inventory
This is all rather embarrassing. It seems that it is diffcult or impossible to devise items that
are pure measures of a trait, since individuals’ responses to a single test item are going to be
infuenced by a whole host of traits, states, attitudes, moods and luck. It also provides a second
reason why it is nonsensical to construct a psychological test by repeatedly administering the
same item (or another item which means almost the same thing) over and over again. Unlike
random errors, the systematic errors will not tend to cancel one another out when measurements
are repeated. Suppose that we write an item which is supposed to measure Extraversion.
Item 1: I love meeting new people at social functions.
We then paraphrase it twice:
Item 2: Parties are great for getting acquainted with people.

Item 3: Getting to know other people at festive occasions is fun.
I think these items are paraphrases because it is not obvious how a person could agree with
one of the items yet disagree with one of the others. They all mean much the same thing, and
will so be all affected by the same ‘nuisance variables’. I would also guess that two of these will
be social desirability (few people will want to admit that they are shy) and social anxiety. Hence
responses to all three items will probably be infuenced by all three of these variables. (This can
be checked, by correlating responses to each item with scores on other personality traits.)
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Let us assume that these items are scored using a Likert scale, with ‘strongly agree’ scoring
fve points and ‘strongly disagree’ one point. Administering all three of these items to people,
rather than just the frst one, and averaging their scores on the three items will reduce the
infuence of random errors of measurement; people who misread the question or did not know
the meaning of one of the words are unlikely to make the same mistake three times in
succession! However it should be obvious that a person’s average score on the three questions
will still measure a mixture of extraversion, social desirability and social anxiety. Creating
tests by using items with similar meanings will not help eliminate non-systematic errors of
measurement.
However, there is a way round this problem. Instead of taking multiple measurements using
the same item, it is possible to devise several different items measuring extraversion, each of
which will probably be infuenced by a different set of ‘nuisance factors’. Chapter 6 shows
that Eysenck views extraverts as being sociable, optimistic, talkative and impulsive, etc., so it
would be possible to phrase questions to measure these variables, too. An item such as ‘do
you keep quiet on social occasions?’ would be infuenced by a number of nuisance factors,
only a few of which would be the same as for the frst item. Thus if a questionnaire were
constructed from a number of items, each affected by a different set of nuisance factors, the
infuence of the nuisance factors would tend to cancel out, while the infuence of the trait
would accumulate.
To give an example of this, in order to stop individual differences in acquiescence (agreeing
with items) from being confounded with scores on the trait of interest, it is simply necessary
to ensure that about half of the items in a test are phrased so that agreeing with it implies a
high score on the trait (‘I enjoy drunken parties’ for extraversion) while half of the items are
phrased in the opposite direction (‘I enjoy spending time on my own’). In order to produce a
more accurate measure of a trait, we need to average responses to several different items, each
of which is infuenced by a different set of ‘nuisance factors’.
It is important to remember this assumption, as many people write items that are so similar
in content that they will be infuenced by the same nuisance factors. For example:
Item 1. At times I think I am no good at all.

Item 2. All in all, I am inclined to feel that I am a failure.
Item 3. I feel I do not have much to be proud of.
Item 4. I certainly feel useless at times.
These items are taken from a real test that has over 1000 citations in social psychology, the
Rosenberg inventory, which was mentioned in Chapter 2. It is supposed to measure self-
esteem, but it seems to be fawed on two counts. First, as the items are paraphrases of each
other, people will remember how they answered previous items and are bound to answer them
all similarly because they all say the same thing. Second, because they all say the same thing,
each will be infuenced by the same set of ‘nuisance factors’ (for example, ‘no’ seems to be the
socially desirable response for all of them), so when we add together people’s scores on the
items, the test score will not be unidimensional – and this is precisely what has been found
(Marsh et al., 2010).
Contrast these items with the following:
Item 1. I believe that insurance schemes are a good idea.

Item 2. I would take drugs that may have strange effects.
Item 3. I sometimes tease animals.
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These three items (from the Psychoticism scale of another real test – the Eysenck Personality
Questionnaire) ask genuinely different questions. People’s responses to the frst item would
not dictate how they must respond to the other two. The frst item is scored in the opposite
direction to the other two, to reduce the effects of acquiescence. And because the items vary
so much in content, each is likely to be affected by a different set of ‘nuisance factors’ meaning
that when the scores are added together these will tend to cancel out, thus leading to a test
score that measures a single dimension of personality. Psychometricians would say that the
items show ‘local independence’, which means that the only reason that they correlate is
because they each measure Psychoticism to some extent; answering one item in a particular
way does not determine how one has to respond to another item.
Many psychologists make their reputations and livings from developing and analysing
scales whose items are not locally independent, and the journals are full of such papers and
‘theories’. I think that doing so is seriously misguided for the reasons given above, but this is
perhaps a minority view; your lecturer may well disagree with it. However if I am correct, it
means that many scales which are widely used in psychology may not measure traits at all.
They just show that people can understand the meaning of the items, and respond consistently.
I discuss the issues further in Cooper (2019).
Reliability
The domain sampling model
Suppose that we want to assess spelling ability. As a huge dictionary contains a list of all the
words in the language, it would be possible (in theory) to ask people to spell every single word
in the language under optimal testing conditions. The score they obtained would be a completely
accurate measure of their spelling ability, as it is based on every word in the language (the
complete domain of items). It is known as their true score. Of course, administering all these
words is impractical; it would take weeks or months to do. It makes sense to try to estimate what
people’s true scores on the spelling test would be through giving them tests based on samples of
words taken from the dictionary. For example, one could repeatedly stick a pin in the dictionary
in order to produce a random sample of words which could be given to a large sample of people.
If the test is effective, people’s scores on the test should correlate very substantially with their
true scores – the scores that they obtained when given all words in the domain.
The square of this correlation between people’s scores on a test and the scores that they obtain
if they are given every possible item that could conceivably be written to measure the topic is
known as the reliability of a test. It shows how much random measurement error is associated
with people’s scores on the test, a reliability of 1.0 indicating that that the test is completely free
from measurement error, as it correlates perfectly with people’s true scores. A term called the
‘standard error of measurement’ (SEM) refects this directly. If scores on a test have a standard
deviation of s and a reliability of α, the standard error of measurement is given by the formula:
SEM = s 1 − ˛
So if scores on a test correlate 0.8 with the true score (implying a reliability of 0.64: see above)
and the standard deviation of its scores is 10, its SEM is 6. The SEM is important since it
allows us to infer how close to a person’s true score their test score is: there is only a 0.05
chance that their observed score will be more than about 2 SEMs away from their true score.
If a person’s true score is 72 on a test with reliability of 0.64 and a standard deviation of 10,
we can be fairly confdent that when we measure their score using this test it will lie somewhere
155
between 72 – (2 × 6) and 72 + (2 × 6) – that is, between about 60 and 84. The ‘2’ is because
we know that about 95% of the scores lie plus or minus two standard deviations from the
mean of a normal distribution. (Several test handbooks say that if a person’s observed score
is 72 their true score lies between 60 and 84. This is not correct; see for example Cooper
(2019) if you ever plan to perform such analyses.) This is a very useful technique to remember
if you ever plan to interpret an individual’s score on a test – which often happens in applied
psychology, when assessing individuals on tests of intelligence, etc.
Although the idea of the domain sampling model is most obviously applicable when the
number of potential items is fnite (e.g., the number of words in the dictionary: the number
of two-digit addition problems), the same principles apply even when the number of items
that could be written is near infnite. For example, a test measuring anxiety is a sample of
all the (many!) items that could conceivably have been written to measure the many aspects
of anxiety. A test of mathematical ability is a sample of the near infnite number of
mathematical items that could possibly have been written. The concept of reliability is still
useful in these cases as (counter-intuitively, perhaps) it is not necessary to actually compute
the correlation between the true score and the scores on the test to estimate the reliability of
a test. Statistics such as ‘coeffcient alpha’ can give us a good approximation of what this
correlation would be.
Coeffcient alpha
I earlier showed that while an individual test item is a poor measure of a trait, a much better
estimate of the value of a trait can be obtained if we add up the scores on a number of items,
each of which measures some different aspect of the trait. Suppose some items are written to
measure a certain trait and are then administered to about 200 people. Specialised computer
programs (such as the SPSS ‘reliability’ procedure) can be used to calculate a statistic from
these data that various authors have referred to as the ‘alpha’, ‘coeffcient alpha’, ‘KR20’,
‘Cronbach’s alpha’ or ‘internal consistency’. It is amazingly important. For long tests,
coeffcient alpha is a very close approximation to the square of correlation between individuals’
scores on a particular mental test and their ‘true score’ on a trait (Nunnally 1978). Thus a
coeffcient alpha of 0.7 implies a correlation of 0.7 or 0.84 between scores on the test and
individuals’ true scores, whereas an alpha value of 0.9 implies that the correlation is as large
as 0.95. Since the whole purpose of using psychological tests is to try to achieve as close an
approximation as possible to a person’s true score on a trait, it follows from this that tests
should have a high value of alpha. The key point is that it is a statistic, calculated from data,
that can be used to estimate the correlation between the test score and the true score – even
if we cannot measure people’s true scores.
As you might expect from reading the previous section, coeffcient alpha is infuenced by
two things:
l the average size of the correlation between the test items. Since we assumed in the previous
section that different test items are affected by different ‘nuisance factors’, the only reason
why individuals’ responses to any pair of items should be correlated is because both of these
items measure the same underlying trait. A large correlation between a pair of items thus
indicates that they are both good measures of the trait; a smaller correlation suggests that
responses to one or both of the items are substantially infuenced by random error or by
‘nuisance factors’ such as social desirability, other personality or ability traits, etc.
l the number of items in the scale. Again, I pointed out that the whole purpose of building
a scale from several test items is to try to ensure that the nuisance factors cancel out.
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It should hopefully be obvious that the more items there are in a scale, the more likely it is
that these nuisance factors will all cancel out. A statistical procedure known as the
Spearman–Brown formula (given in any standard psychometrics text) is useful here. It
allows one to predict how the reliability of the scale will increase or decrease if the number
of items in the scale is changed.
A widely applied but theoretically baseless rule of thumb suggests that a test should not be
used for any purpose if it has an alpha value below 0.7, and that it should not be used for
important decisions about an individual (e.g., for assessment of the need for remedial
education) unless its alpha value is above 0.9.
Unfortunately, if items are written so that they share the same ‘nuisance factors’ (as in the
example of the self-esteem scale given earlier) the correlations between the items will be
infated and the value of alpha will be high. It is up to the person writing the items to ensure
that the only possible reason why the responses to any pair of items should be correlated
together is because of the underlying personality or ability trait that they are both assumed
to measure and not because they are infuenced by similar response biases or other traits, or
because answering one item in a particular fashion forces them to answer another item in a
particular way, just because the items mean much the same thing.

Five test items designed to measure Extraversion were given to a large sample
of people. The correlations between the test items were calculated, and are
shown in Table 8.1.
a. What does the correlation between any pair of items show?
b. Which item seems to be the least effective measure of the trait?
c. Suppose that you calculated alpha from the correlations shown in
Table 8.1 and found that it was lower than 0.7. What might you do?
Table 8.1 Correlations between fve hypothetical test items, each of

which has been scored such that a high score indicates the
extraverted response
Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 4 Item 5
Item 1 1.0
Item 2 -0.02 1.0
Item 3 0.10 0.28 1.0
Item 4 -0.15 0.31 0.24 1.0
Item 5 -0.12 0.25 0.27 0.36 1.0
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It is also important to ensure that the sample of individuals whose test scores are used to
compute alpha is similar to the group on whom the test will be used. It is pointless to fnd an
alpha value of 0.9 with university students and then conclude that the test will be suitable for
use with the members of the general population, for university students are not a random
sample of the population; they are generally young, academically talented, literate and
numerate. Again, there is no numerical way to determine whether a test that has a high alpha
value in one sample will also work in another group – it is a matter of using common sense.
I would certainly be wary about assuming that a personality test, developed using American
college students, will work for the general population of the UK (or vice versa), but not
everyone shares these misgivings.
It is safest to calculate alpha whenever one uses a test, although this does presuppose that
a large sample of people will be tested. This is because like any statistic, the value of alpha
will vary from sample to sample, so it is highly advisable to calculate confdence intervals for
alpha as described by Feldt et al. (1987); a spreadsheet for performing these analyses is given
in Cooper (2019). This shows how close the value of alpha calculated from a particular
sample is likely to be to its true value – the average alpha which would be obtained if data
were obtained from hundreds of different samples. If alpha is calculated from a small sample
of people, it can be substantially larger or smaller than its true value, so calculating alpha
from small samples is pointless (although several researchers do so). There are also other ways
of estimating the reliability of a test; McDonald’s omega, Revelle’s beta and Raykov’s rho are
alternative statistics which will occasionally be encountered.

Suppose that a 50-item questionnaire has a coeffcient alpha of 0.9. Do you
think that this must imply that it measures a single trait?
Alternate-forms reliability
This involves constructing two different tests by randomly sampling items from the domain.
For example, two spelling tests, Test A and Test B, may each be constructed by randomly
sampling 100 words from the dictionary. As these tests are the same length and are constructed
in the same way, you would expect each of the test scores to show the same correlation with
the true score: rA,true = rB,true: the tests will have the same reliability, which is the square of this
correlation. We cannot easily measure the correlation between scores on the test and the true
score. However, we can administer both versions of the test to the same group of people and
work out the correlation between Test A and Test B, rA,B. The reliability of either test can be
shown to be estimated by rA,B. So if two tests are constructed by randomly sampling items
from some domain and are found to correlate 0.8 in when administered to a large sample of
people, we may conclude that reliability of the test is 0.8.
Parallel-forms reliability
This is similar to alternate-form reliability, except that it involves two tests that have been
developed to have items of similar diffculty and so the distribution of scores on the two
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versions of the test will be the same. In order to create two parallel forms of a test, items are
administered to a large sample of people and pairs of items with similar content and diffculty
are identifed. For example, both may involve the solution of seven-letter anagrams, the
answer being a word with a similar frequency of occurrence in the language. The diffculty of
the two items must also be similar; perhaps only about 25% of the sample will be able to solve
each one. One item will then be assigned to Form A of the test and the other to Form B. These
two tests are marketed separately and (in theory) it should not matter which one is used for
a particular application, since care is generally taken to ensure that the two versions produce
similar distributions of scores (thus allowing the same tables of norms to be used for each
form of the test). If both tests measure the same trait, one would expect a high positive
correlation between individuals’ scores on the two forms of the test, just as with alternate-
forms reliability. This correlation is known as the parallel-forms reliability. However, as
relatively few tests have parallel forms, it is rarely used.
Split-half reliability
In the early days of testing, when reliability coeffcients had to be calculated by hand,
calculating coeffcient alpha was time consuming and so a shortcut was developed to estimate
alpha. Instead of adding together all of the items in a test to derive a total score, two scores
were calculated – one based on the odd-numbered test items and the other on the even-
numbered items. These two scores were then correlated together and after applying the
Spearman–Brown formula (since the set of the odd or even items is only half as long as the
full test), this yielded the split-half reliability. The problem is that there is no compelling reason
why one should take the odd and even numbered items. Why not divide the test into three
parts rather than two? Or compare the frst half with the last half? There are obviously a
number of different ways of dividing up the items to perform a split-half analysis and each
will probably give a different result – yet there is no logical or statistical reason for preferring
one method of subdividing the test to another. Split-half reliability lacks the clear statistical
rationale of alpha. There is no good reason to use it today.
Test-retest reliability
Test-retest reliability, sometimes known as temporal stability, provides us with another way
of estimating the reliability of a test. Whilst the four forms of reliability discussed above
try to estimate how well scores on a test correlate with people’s true scores on a trait, test-
retest reliability checks whether trait scores stay more or less constant over time. Most tests
are designed to measure traits such as extraversion, numerical ability or neuroticism and
the defnition of a trait stresses that it is a relatively enduring disposition. This implies
that individuals should have similar scores when they are tested on two occasions
provided that:
l nothing signifcant has happened to them in the interval between the two tests (e.g., no
emotional crises, developmental changes or signifcant educational experiences that might
affect the trait)
l the experience of sitting the test at Time 1 does not infuence the scores obtained at Time
2 other than via the trait which the test assesses. For example, we must assume that people
cannot remember their answers to individual questions. Otherwise the score at Time 2 will
be infuenced by memory, as well as the trait which the test assesses.
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If a test shows that a child is a genius one month and of average intelligence the next, either
the concept of intelligence is a state rather than a trait or the test is fawed.
Assessment of test-retest reliability typically involves testing the same group of people on
two occasions, which are generally spaced at least a month apart (in order to minimise the
likelihood of people remembering their previous answers), yet not too far apart (in case
developmental changes, learning or other life events affect individuals’ positions on the trait).
Test-retest reliability is simply the correlation between these two sets of scores. If it is high
(implying that individuals have similar levels of the trait on both occasions) it can be argued
that the trait is stable and that the test is likely to be a good measure of the trait.
This form of reliability is very different from the others discussed above, as it is based
on the total score – it says nothing about how people perform on individual items. A set of
items that had nothing in common could still have perfect test-retest reliability. Suppose you
asked someone to add their house number, their shoe size and their year of birth on
two separate occasions. This statistic would show impressive test-retest reliability, although
the three items correlate zero (implying a coeffcient alpha of zero), and adding the items
together makes no sense as the ‘test’ that results is not unidimensional.

a. What are the KR20 and the internal consistency of a test?
b. Why is it unwise to paraphrase the same item a number of times when
designing a test?
c. What does the standard error of measurement tell you?
d. Suppose you have two tests that claim to assess anxiety. Test 1 has a
reliability of 0.81, and Test 2 a reliability of 0.56. What will be the
correlation between each of these tests and the true score? What is the
largest correlation that you are likely to obtain if you correlate scores on
Test 1 with scores on Test 2?
When constructing tests researchers usually report both coeffcient alpha and test-retest
reliabilities, as these two statistics tell us rather different things about the scale.
Validity
At the start of this chapter, we set out three criteria for adequate measurement. These are
that scores should only reflect one property of the thing (person) being assessed
(unidimensionality), that they should be free of measurement error (show high reliability)
and that the scores on the measuring instrument should refect the thing that the test claims
to measure: a test purporting to measure anxiety should measure anxiety and not something
else. The frst two of these issues were dealt with in the previous section. The validity of a
test addresses the third issue, that of whether scores on a test actually measure what they are
supposed to.
We have seen that reliability theory can show whether or not a set of test items seem to
measure some underlying trait. What it cannot do is shed any light on the nature of that trait,
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for just because an investigator thinks that a set of items should measure a particular trait,
there is no guarantee that they actually do so. In the early 1960s a considerable literature built
up concerning the ‘Repression-Sensitization Scale’ (R-S Scale). This scale was designed to
measure the extent to which individuals used ‘perceptual defence’(see Chapter 4) – that is,
tended to be less consciously aware of emotionally threatening phrases than neutral phrases
when these were presented for very brief periods of time. The items formed a reasonably
reliable scale, so everyone just assumed that this scale measured what it claimed to do –
it generated a lot of research. Then it was found that scores on this test showed a correlation
of –0.91 with a well-established test of anxiety (Slough et al., 1984). As you know, the
maximum correlation between two tests is limited by the size of their reliabilities, so a
correlation of –0.91 actually implies that all of the variance in the R-S Scale could be accounted
for by anxiety. It did not measure anything new at all.
This tale conveys an important message. Even if a set of items appears to form a scale, it
is not possible to tell what that scale measures just by looking at the items. Instead, it is
necessary to determine this empirically by a process known as test validation. Test validation
shows whether scores on a test provide a good operational defnition of some theoretical trait;
for example, whether the Extraversion scale of the NEO-PI test is a good measure of
extraversion.
A test is said to be valid if it does what it claims to do, either in terms of theory or in
practical application. For example, a test that is marketed as a measure of anxiety for use in
the general UK population should measure anxiety and not social desirability, reading skill,
sociability or any other unrelated traits. A test that is used to select the job applicants who
are most likely to perform best in a particular occupation really should be able to identify the
individual(s) who will perform best. Whilst the reliability of a test can be expressed as a certain
number (for a particular sample of individuals), the validity of a test also depends on the
purpose of testing. For example, a test that is valid for selecting computer programmers from
the UK student population may not be useful for selecting sales executives. A test that is a
valid measure of depression when used by a medical practitioner will probably not be valid
for screening job applicants, since most individuals will realise the purpose of the test and
distort their responses.
It follows that reliability is necessary for a scale to be valid, since low reliability implies
that the scale is not measuring anything. However, high reliability itself does not guarantee
validity, since as shown earlier this depends entirely on how, why and with whom the scale
is used.
There are fve main ways of establishing whether a scale is valid.
Face validity
Face validity merely checks that the items in a test or scale look as if they measure the trait of
interest. The R-S Scale debacle described earlier shows that scrutinising the content of items
is no guarantee that the test will measure what it is intended to. Despite this, some widely
used tests (particularly in social psychology) are constructed by writing a few items, ensuring
that alpha is high (which is generally the case because the items are paraphrases of one
another) and then piously assuming that the scale measures the concept that it was designed
to assess. It is vital to ensure that a test has better credentials than this before using it. It is
necessary to establish that the test has some predictive power and/or that it correlates as
expected with other tests before one can conclude that the test really does measure what it
claims. The only real use of face validity is to ensure that the items look vaguely sensible, for
if they do not then some participants may not take the test seriously.
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Content validity
Very occasionally it is possible to construct a test that must, by defnition, be valid. For
example, suppose that one wanted to construct a spelling test. Since, by defnition, the
dictionary contains the whole domain of items, any procedure that produces a representative
sample of words from this dictionary has to be a valid test of spelling ability. This is what is
meant by content validity. To give another example, occupational psychologists sometimes
use ‘workbasket’ approaches in selecting staff, where applicants are presented with a sample
of the activities that are typically performed as part of the job and their performance on these
tasks is in some way evaluated. These exercises are not psychological tests in the strict sense,
but the process can be seen to have some content validity. The problem is that it is rarely
possible to defne the domain of potential test items this accurately. How would one determine
the items that could possibly be used to measure creativity, for example? Thus the technique
is not often used in ability tests, although it can be useful in constructing tests of attainment,
where the assessment shows how many facts a person has assimilated following a course of
instruction. Will your instructor assess you by looking at the index of this book and check
that you know the meaning of a sample of these entries?
Should you want to see how this works in practice, Hunt et al. (2011) show how a
mathematics anxiety scale may be developed; they try to ensure content validity by
identifying as wide a range of situations as possible where students are likely to encounter
mathematics.
Construct validity
One useful way of checking whether a test measures what it claims to assess is to perform
thoughtful experiments to determine whether scores on the test behave as they should
according to theory and previous studies. Suppose that a test is designed to measure anxiety
in UK university students. How might its validity be checked through experiment?
The frst approach (sometimes called convergent validation) is to check that the test scores
relate to other things as expected. For example, if there are other widely used tests of anxiety
on the market, a group of students could be given both tests and the two sets of scores may
correlated together. A large positive correlation would suggest that the new scale is valid.
A test measuring state anxiety could be administered to a group of students who claim to
have a phobia about spiders, before and after showing them a tarantula. If their scores
increase, then the test might indeed measure anxiety. It would be also be possible to discover
whether students who were receiving counselling because of their high trait anxiety obtained
higher scores on the test than control groups (e.g., a random sample of students, or students
receiving counselling for other reasons). The basic aim of these convergent validations is to
determine whether the test scores vary as would be expected on theoretical grounds.
Unfortunately, a failure to fnd the expected relationships might be due to some problem,
either with the test or with the other measures. For example, the other test of anxiety may
not be valid or some of the individuals who say that they are phobic about spiders may not
be. However, if scores on a test do appear to vary in accordance with theory, it seems
reasonable to conclude that the test is valid.
Studies of divergent validity check that the test does not seem to measure any traits with
which it should, in theory, be unrelated. For example, the literature claims that anxiety is
unrelated to intelligence, socioeconomic status, social desirability and so on. Thus if a test
that purportedly measured anxiety actually showed a massive correlation with any of these
variables, doubt would be raised as to whether it really measured anxiety at all.
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Predictive validity
Psychological tests are very often used to predict behaviour and their success in doing so is
known as their predictive validity. For example, a test might be given to candidates for a post
as a salesperson. The test would have predictive validity if it could be shown that the people
with the highest scores on the test tended to make the most sales. This process sounds
straightforward, but in practice tends not to be.
The frst problem is the nature of the criterion against which the test is to be evaluated.
Although noting the volume of sales achieved is quite straightforward, many occupations lack
a single criterion. A university lecturer’s job is a case in point. Mine involved teaching,
administration and research, committee work, the supervision of postgraduate students,
providing informal help with statistics and programming, supporting and encouraging
undergraduates and so on – the list is a long one and it is not obvious how most of these
activities can be evaluated or their relative importance determined. In other cases (e.g., where
employees are rated by their line manager), different assessors may apply quite different
standards and so a higher score need not necessarily indicate better performance.
A second problem is known as ‘restriction of range’. Selection systems generally operate
through several stages, for example initial psychometric testing to reduce the number of applicants
to manageable proportions, followed by interviews and more detailed psychological assessments
of individuals who get through the frst stage. Applicants who are eventually appointed will all
have similar (high) scores on the screening tests, otherwise they would have been rejected before
the interview stage. Thus the range of scores in the group of individuals who are selected will be
much smaller than that in the general population. This will create problems for any attempt to
validate the screening test, since this restricted range of abilities will tend to reduce the correlation
between the test and any criterion. There are ways around this (Dobson, 1988), but these
two examples show how diffcult it can be to establish the predictive validity of a test.
There are several designs that can be used to establish the predictive validity of tests. Most
obviously, the tests may be administered frst and criterion data gathered later, such as when
ability tests are used to predict sales performance, or aptitude in piloting an aircraft. Or the
criterion data may be gathered retrospectively: for example, a test may be administered to
measure adults’ social adjustment and the criteria data (of the quality of interaction with
peers when they were at school) may be gathered through interviewing parents, teachers, etc.
This is sometimes known as ‘postdiction’. Sometimes the criterion data may be gathered at
the same time as the test is administered, such as when a frm is considering using a new
selection test and decides to see whether it can predict the effectiveness of workers who are
already in the organisation. Here the test and performance measures (e.g., supervisors’
ratings, sales fgures) may be obtained at the same time that the test is administered, a design
that is sometimes referred to as ‘concurrent validity’.
Incremental validity
Applied psychologists often want to combine scores on several different tests in order to
predict behaviour. They will therefore want to know whether considering an extra variable
(perhaps scores on another test, administered to job applicants) will appreciably improve their
ability to predict some criterion performance. We will assume that they have access to people’s
scores on several selection tests, and that they also know how well each person performs
within the organisation.
Techniques such as multiple regression (or logistic regression when the criterion has only
two values, such as passing or failing a driving test) allow good performance on one scale to
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compensate for poor performance on another; it shows the relative importance of the variables
for predicting the criterion, as well as a statistic called the ‘multiple correlation coeffcient’,
R, which indicates how well the optimally combined test scores together predict the criterion.
It has a sound statistical rationale and shows how the scores on the various scales should be
weighted and added together to predict the criterion. For example, analysing the data from
200 job applicants might show that the best possible estimate of a salesperson’s annual
turnover is given by the equation
Estimated turnover (in dollars) = 100 000 + 500 × Extraversion score – 130 ×
Neuroticism score
Once a regression equation like this is set up, it is possible to study the extent to which adding
another variable to the selection battery improves the accuracy of the prediction. If adding a
new variable (for example, including a test of general intelligence as well as Extraversion and
Neuroticism) leads to a useful increase in predictive power (a signifcant increase in R) then
the new variable is said to have incremental validity.

a. Must a reliable test be valid?
b. Must a valid test be reliable?
c. What is meant by the construct, content and predictive validity of a test?
d. What are ‘convergent validity’ and ‘divergent validity’?
Overview of validity
Establishing whether a test is valid is time consuming, diffcult – and absolutely vital. The
problem is that here is no short answer to questions such as ‘what is the best test for assessing
verbal ability’. It all depends on the age and ability of the people to be tested, their background
(a test developed for white middle-class samples may well not be valid for minority group
members, an issue known as ‘test bias’ – see Chapter 21) the degree of accuracy required, the
time available for testing and whether the test is to be given to individuals or groups. Some
tests may make fne discriminations between people at the bottom end of the spectrum (useful
for detecting dyslexia) but be unable to make fne distinctions between the most able pupils.
Some may measure speed of response as well as level of response, for example, determining
how many synonyms a person can identify within 5 minutes, while others may give the child
as long as they want to do the test. Some tests will require participants to make an open-ended
response (e.g., defning the meaning of a word) while others will be multiple choice. So much
depends on the purpose of testing that it is rarely possible to recommend a single test for all
situations.
Factors which can reduce the validity of tests

Several things can affect the validity of test scores; they are discussed in more depth in Chapter 21.
One of the more important variables is ‘bias’ – where a test systematically over- or underestimates
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the scores of group members. For example, a quiz about the rules of sport which contained
questions about cricket would likely be harder for Canadians than for people from Pakistan or
Australia, as Canadians do not generally play or follow the game. The quiz would systematically
underestimate the sporting knowledge of Canadians. Issues of bias become important when
measuring personality or ability from people of different racial, gender or cultural backgrounds.
Bias must reduce the validity of a test, as a person’s score on a biased test will be affected by both
the level of the trait which the test supposedly measures and by their membership of a certain
group (racial, gender, etc.). It is a particular problem if tests are used for personnel selection, as
a biased test will systematically under- or overestimate the scores of some applicant groups. Note
that although they affect validity, bias and the other problems described below would not
necessarily affect the reliability of a test. For example, if members of one group rated themselves
one point lower than they should on each item of a Likert scale, this would not affect the
correlations between the items (and so would not affect coeffcient alpha).
Impression management is also important; when they are trying to give a good impression
of themselves people may try to make themselves appear more extraverted, agreeable,
conscientious and open and less neurotic than they really are. (How do we know this?
By asking people to fll in questionnaires under two conditions – e.g., honestly and as if they
want to portray themselves in a good light – and note the difference in means.) If everyone
distorted their scores to the same extent it would not pose a problem; the validity of a test
will be affected if some people are honest whilst others are less so. Because (once again) the
score on a test refects both people’s level of the trait which the test is designed to measure
and the extent to which they distort their responses.
Finally, people might be genuinely unaware about how they behave. For example, you
might think you are an excellent wit, whilst in reality everyone cringes because you insist on
telling awful inappropriate jokes. Hence although you genuinely believe that you are
completing a questionnaire honestly, your responses may not be accurate, and so this too will
affect the validity of the scale.
Summary
The reliability of a test is important because it shows how closely the test score resembles a
person’s true score on the trait being measured, provided that some assumptions are met.
Unfortunately, it is easy to overestimate internal consistency (coeffcient alpha) by including
items in a test that are paraphrases of one another – an obvious problem that is not suffciently
recognised in the literature. To avoid this, test designers need to check all pairs of test items
to ensure that the assumption of local independence seems reasonable. The second form of
reliability, test-retest reliability, shows whether scores stay stable over time. If test-retest
reliability is low, the test may not measure a trait.
It is vitally important to establish the content validity, construct validity and/or predictive
validity of a test before using it for any purpose whatsoever. These analyses show how well
scores on a particular test serve as an operational defnition of some trait or state. A test with
low reliability cannot be a valid measure of a trait. However, high reliability does not guarantee
high validity.

All psychometrics textbooks give accounts of reliability theory and discuss validity, although
modern approaches to the topic can become rather technical. The book that psychometricians
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usually recommend is still Nunnally (1978) as this derives many of the formulae mentioned
earlier. Messick (1987) offers a frst-rate treatment of test validity which may be downloaded
without charge and De Von et al. (2007) give a simple account of test reliability and validity
aimed at nurses. Cooper (2019) gives rather more detail about the topics covered here.
SAQ 8.1
One can either use their score on another scale measuring the same trait or
calculate their total on all the other items in the scale to estimate their true
score. It would not be a good idea to correlate each person’s score on an item
with the total score on that scale, as that item also contributes to the total
score.
SAQ 8.2
a. Assuming that each pair of items is infuenced by a different set of
nuisance factors, the correlation will show the extent to which the pair
of items assesses the trait being measured – Extraversion in this case.
b. Since Item 1 shows low correlations with all of the other items, it would
appear to be a poor measure of Extraversion.
c. The obvious thing would be to write more test items, give the old and
new items out to a new sample of individuals (at least 200 of them) and
recompute the correlations and alpha. Since coeffcient alpha depends in
part on the number of items in the test, increasing the number of items
will increase alpha. There is also another possibility. We saw in the answer
to (b) that Item 1 really is not very good – it shows low correlations with
all of the other test items. Removing this item from the test will both
increase the average correlation between the remaining items (from
0.206 based on ten correlations to 0.285 based on six correlations) and
reduce the length of the test. The frst factor will tend to increase alpha
and the second will tend to decrease it. Thus it is possible – although not
certain – that removing Item 1 may also increase alpha. We shall return
to this in Chapter 20.
SAQ 8.3
Because coeffcient alpha depends on the number of items in a scale and
the average correlation between them, it is possible to obtain a large
coefficient alpha even if the items in a scale measure two or more
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uncorrelated factors. This is illustrated in Table 8.2 for a four-item scale; the
same average correlation is obtained if all of the items have a modest
correlation with each other (i.e., measure one factor) or if the items form
two uncorrelated factors – V1&V2 and V3&V4. It is important to appreciate
that factor analysis is necessary to show whether a set of items measure a
single trait. Coeffcient alpha does NOT show this.
Table 8.2 Two very different sets of correlations between items

which will produce the same coeffcient alpha
V1 V2 V3 V4 V1 V2 V3 V4
V1 – –
V2 0.8 – 0.267 –
V3 0 0 – 0.267 0.267 –
V4 0 0 0.8 – 0.267 0.267 0.267 –
Average r = 0.267 Average r = 0.267
SAQ 8.4
a. Alternative names for the internal consistency or reliability of a test,
which I have termed alpha throughout this book.
b. Doing so is bound to produce a very high reliability, as the items share
unique variance as well as measuring the same trait.
c. The SEM shows how accurate an assessment of an individual’s score is
likely to be. For example, if one test suggested that a person’s IQ was 100
with an SEM of 3, we would be more confdent that the child’s IQ really
was 100 than if the test had an SEM of 5.
d. 0.81 = 0.9 and 0.56 = 0.75. Suppose that Test 2 was completely reliable.
The correlation between Test 1 and Test 2 would then be the same as the
correlation between Test 1 and the true score, i.e., 0.9. However, as Test
2 is not perfectly reliable, the correlation will be lower. It can be shown
that the largest correlation that one can expect between two tests is the
product of the square roots of their reliabilities. In this case, one would
not expect the tests to correlate together by more than 0.9 × 0.75 or
0.675. This is how I was earlier able to claim that all of the variability in
the R-S Scale could be explained by anxiety, although the correlation
between the two scales was only 0.91, not 1.0.
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SAQ 8.5
a. Most certainly not. High reliability tells you that the test measures some
trait or state, not what this trait or state is.
b. Yes. Although beware if the reliability of a short scale appears to be too
high (e.g., ten-item scales with a reliability of 0.9). This may suggest that
the same item has been paraphrased several times.
c. Construct validity involves relating people’s test scores to scores on other
traits, to determine if it shows the correlations which would be expected
if scores on the test were a good operational defnition of the concept
(trait) that the test supposedly measures. Content validity involves
sampling items randomly from some well-defned domain of items, such
as all possible two-digit addition problems. Studies of predictive validity
relate test scores to some later criterion behaviours – for example,
measuring children’s emotional intelligence and relating it to their school
performance or level of behavioural problems some years later.
d. In construct validation, convergent validity is a measure of whether a test
correlates with the characteristics with which it should correlate if it is
valid – for example, whether an intelligence test correlates with teachers’
ratings of children’s academic performance. Divergent validity checks
that a test shows insubstantial correlations with characteristics to which
it should theoretically be unrelated. For example, scores on the intelligence
test could be correlated with tests measuring social desirability, various
aspects of personality, etc., the expectation being that these correlations
will be close to zero.
References
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109551.
De Von, H. A., Block, M. E., Moyle-Wright, P., Ernst, D. M., Hayden, S. J., Lazzara, D. J.,
Savoy, S. M. & Kostas-Polston, E. 2007. A Psychometric Toolbox for Testing Validity and
Reliability. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 39, 155–164.
Dobson, P. 1988. The Correction of Correlation Coeffcients for Restriction of Range When
Restriction Results from the Truncation of a Normally Disributed Variable. British Journal
of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 41, 227–234.
Feldt, L. S., Woodruff, D. J. & Salih, F. A. 1987. Statistical-Inference for Coeffcient-Alpha.
Applied Psychological Measurement, 11, 93–103.
Hunt, T. E., Clark-Carter, D. & Sheffeld, D. 2011. The Development and Part Validation of
a UK Scale for Mathematics Anxiety. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 29,
455–466.
Marsh, H. W., Scalas, L. F. & Nagengast, B. 2010. Longitudinal Tests of Competing Factor
Structures for the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale: Traits, Ephemeral Artifacts, and Stable
Response Styles. Psychological Assessment, 22, 366–381.
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Messick, S. 1987. Validity. Document RR-87-40. ETS Research Report Series. Princeton NJ:
Educational Testing Service.
Michell, J. 1997. Quantitative Science and the Defnition of Measurement in Psychology –
Reply. British Journal of Psychology, 88, 401–406.
Nunnally, J. C. 1978. Psychometric Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Slough, N., Kleinknecht, R. A. & Thorndike, R. M. 1984. Relationship of the Repression-
Sensitization Scales to Anxiety. Journal of Personality Assessment, 48, 378–379.
169
Chapter 9
Narrow personality traits
Introduction
The theories described in Chapter 6 sought to map out the whole of personality: that is,
discover (and measure) all the important personality traits along which people vary. However,
not everyone has approached the study of personality in this way. Some have chosen to focus
on one particular trait – perhaps based on something that has been identifed from the clinical
literature, such as autism or self-concept; we have already encountered Emotional Intelligence
which falls into this category. By writing items, factor analysing the correlations between them
and validating the scale as described in Chapters 5 and 8 it is possible to determine whether
such a trait exists. An important part of this validation process involves establishing how the
trait relates to the ‘standard’ personality traits described in Chapter 6 as there is always the
risk that a supposedly ‘new’ trait is in fact identical to an existing trait or a mixture of existing
traits.
There are vast numbers of tests that claim to number huge numbers of narrow personality
traits and choosing which to include in this chapter is inevitably arbitrary. I have included
some which are widely cited in the literature, or are of some theoretical or practical importance.
Traits which have obvious relevance to clinical psychology or psychopathology are discussed
in Chapter 10; the present chapter discusses those which do not have such connections.
Learning outcomes
Having read this chapter and the recommended reading you should be able to:
l Discuss the nature and biological basis of sensation seeking and its
relationship to other personality traits.
171
l Give an overview of Morningness-Eveningness, and comment on its

applications and relationship to behaviour and other correlates.
l Outline research into Mindfulness and its applications.
l Form an opinion about some problems with assuming that self-esteem
infuences behaviour.
Chapter 6 considered models of personality that were intended to identify all the major
personality traits and suggest how they should best be assessed. The advantages of this
approach are several. First of all, it allows for the proper sampling of variables. The lexical
hypothesis (on which Cattell’s model and the fve-factor model are based) should, in theory,
ensure that all possible traits have been considered when mapping personality. What is more,
because synonyms were removed from the list of trait names, we can be reasonably sure that
the traits are not trivial. Trivial personality traits – Cattell calls them ‘bloated specifcs’ –
emerge when the words or phrases used in a personality scale are essentially paraphrases of
each other or all refer to the same very narrow aspect of behaviour. If we assume that people
behave consistently when answering such a questionnaire, the response they give to one item
determines what the responses to the rest of the items must be. There is no need to gather data
to prove this point: it follows inevitably from the meanings of the words in the scale. Finding
that such items form a factor is not a fnding of any scientifc interest, for there is no evidence
that any such factor represents a source trait. Many colleagues will disagree with this view
and narrow traits are widely used in practice; you may well fnd that your lecturers and other
books and journal articles do not see this as being an important issue. It therefore seems fairest
to fag that this is a possibly idiosyncratic view at the outset, and let readers make up their
own minds.

Suppose that participants were asked to rate how accurately each word or
phrase described them. Suppose too that factor analysis showed each item
had a loading above 0.4 on the one factor that emerged. How might you
investigate whether these items form a ‘bloated specifc’?
l certain of myself
l self-assured
l confdent
l in control of myself
l unsure of myself (reverse scored)
This chapter and Chapter 10 will introduce some of the many narrow personality traits
that have been developed by researchers who are interested in exploring specifc aspects of
personality, rather than trying to discover its broad structure.
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It is quite possible that a ‘narrow’ personality factor lies somewhere between two or more
well-established personality traits (e.g., from the fve-factor model, or Eysenck’s model of
personality). For example, suppose we have some scale that claims to measure a new trait –
Trait X. A factor analysis might show that all of the items in that scale form a single factor
(i.e., they are unidimensional). However the location of this factor might mean that people’s
scores on Trait X may be predicted if one knows their scores on other traits, such as
Extraversion (E) and Neuroticism (N). Suppose that we gave scales measuring Trait X, E and
N to a sample of people and found that the correlation between E and N was 0.0, that E
correlated 0.866 with Trait X and N correlated 0.5 with Trait X. This shows that people’s
scores on Trait X can be entirely predicted by knowing their levels of Extraversion and
Neuroticism. How can we tell? You will remember from your statistics courses that the square
of the correlation shows how much variance is shared by two variables. As 0.8662 plus
0.52 =1.0, a person’s score on Trait X can be predicted with perfect accuracy if one knows
their scores on E and N. Another way of looking at it is to point out that the items used to
measure Trait X, E and N might form three distinct oblique factors, with Trait X being
correlated with both E and N. Finding the position of a factor relative to other, well-established
factors is sometimes known as locating a trait within personality factor space.
This raises an interesting issue. It is quite possible for a trait to exist – even though it may
have zero incremental validity. But it may not be of much practical use, if it does not explain
anything more than existing, well-established traits. This is why I discuss the extent to which
each trait overlaps with the Big Five personality traits.

What does ‘locating a trait within factor space’ mean and why is it important?
Sensation Seeking
This personality trait has an unusual origin, stemming from military psychologists’ attempts
to determine how susceptible individuals would be to ‘brainwashing’ techniques of
interrogation supposedly used during the 1960s. Brainwashing involved putting people into
environments that were as unstimulating as possible: for example, they might be immersed in
a tank of water in a dark, silent room, so receiving no stimulation from touch, sight, hearing,
smell or taste. It was found that this was a most unpleasant sensation and people often became
disoriented, losing track of time and hallucinating. People in these settings try to stimulate
themselves, for example by tapping or singing in order to reduce the monotony of the
environment (Jones, 1969). Such activity is not confned to humans. Sensory stimulation acts
as a positive reinforcer for animals who are kept in unstimulating surroundings, who will
learn to press a bar if this leads to stimulation (Kish, 1966). Thus it seems that people are
hungry for stimulation when placed in monotonous environments.
This effect may not be limited to unstimulating laboratory studies. There may also be
important individual differences in the extent to which people seek out novel, thrilling
behaviour. Some people thrive on driving fast, having varied sex lives and forever seeking
exciting new experiences (e.g., bungee jumping, parascending) while others may actively avoid
novelty and risk and prefer an unstimulating, routine lifestyle, enjoying the same routine at
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work each day and travelling to the same hotel at the same time each year to read safe,
unexciting books. Sensation seeking may thus be a personality trait.
Marvin Zuckerman researched individual differences in sensation seeking for over 40 years
(Zuckerman, 1979, 1994, 2007). He defned sensation seeking as ‘the seeking of varied, novel,
complex and intense sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical, social,
legal and fnancial risks for the sake of such experience’ (Zuckerman, 1994) and developed
several scales to measure this trait, two of which are reproduced along with norms, scoring
keys, reliability and validity data and details of foreign translations (Zuckerman, 1994). The
items from Form V of the SSS (Sensation Seeking Scale) are in Zuckerman et al. (1978).
Factor analysis of items written to assess sensation seeking suggests that it comprises four
distinct facets:
l Thrill and Adventure Seeking involves seeking out frightening physical activity.
l Experience Seeking involves stimulation through travel, the arts and trying alternative
lifestyles.
l Boredom Susceptibility implies a dislike of a fxed routine or of dull people.
l Disinhibition involves stimulation from social activities: casual sex, getting drunk or using
drugs socially.
The correlations between these facets are all positive, but vary drastically in size depending
on which version of the test is being used. For Form IV of the scale the correlations usually
range from 0.28 to 0.58, whereas for Form V of the SSS they vary from about 0.14 to about
0.41 (Zuckerman, 1994). Despite this, factor analyses suggest that the factor structure of
Form V is satisfactory (Roberti et al., 2003).
Sensation Seeking and the main personality factors

The four subscales from Form V of the SSS and the scale scores from a short form of
Eysenck’s EPQ were jointly factored by Glicksohn and Abulafa (1998). These researchers
extracted three factors: Extraversion, Neuroticism and Psychoticism. Three of the sensation-
seeking subscales (Experience Seeking, Boredom Susceptibility and Disinhibition) all had
substantial loadings (above 0.6) on Eysenck’s P (Psychoticism) factor. Thrill and Adventure
Seeking loaded on both P and E. A factor analysis of the items in the SSS and EPQ-R-S
revealed a similar story and almost the same thing was earlier reported by Zuckerman et al.
(1988). Zuckerman et al. (1991) found that all the sensation-seeking scales fell onto the
P factor.
It is therefore clear that Sensation Seeking is highly correlated with Psychoticism and, to a
lesser extent, Extraversion. Zuckerman and Glicksohn (2016) explore the nature of these
relationships in more detail, and discuss the possibility that Impulsivity infuences both
Sensation Seeking and Psychoticism.
Figure 9.1 shows Eysenck’s dimensions of Psychoticism and Extraversion (cf. Figure 6.1
for Extraversion and Neuroticism) and how Sensation Seeking relates to these two factors.
This fgure shows that sensation seeking is not simply a mixture of Psychoticism and
Extraversion: if this were the case it would be of little psychological interest, because there
would be no need to develop a questionnaire to measure Sensation Seeking; instead, one
could just estimate it by (for example) multiplying someone’s Psychoticism score by 3 and
adding it to their Extraversion score. Instead, the line representing sensation seeking in
Figure 9.1 slants up through the plane of the paper into a third (sensation-seeking)
dimension. Sensation Seeking is a dimension of personality that is correlated with P (and to
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Figure 9.1 Sensation seeking (SS) located relative to Eysenck’s factors of

Extraversion (E) and Psychoticism (P)
some extent with E) but one that also has some special meaning of its own; scores on a
Sensation Seeking scale cannot be perfectly estimated from P and E alone, as shown by
Glicksohn and Abulafa (1998).

What are the main characteristics of sensation seeking?
As Costa and McCrae included excitement-seeking as one of the facets which defne their
Extraversion factor and that novelty-seeking is a facet of their Openness factor, it is
unsurprising that Sensation Seeking correlates with Extraversion and Openness when these
are measured using the NEO-PI(R). This is not a fnding of much psychological signifcance
as far as I can see – but a mere consequence of asking (essentially) the same questions twice,
in the SSS and the NEO-PI(R) scales. Given that Psychoticism is essentially a combination
of (low) Agreeableness and (low) Conscientiousness in the Five-Factor model, as discussed
in Chapter 6, one might expect Sensation Seeking to correlate with these traits, which it
does (Aluja et al., 2003). These relationships are also found with the HEXACO model,
although the SSS also correlates with HEXACO Honesty–Humility and Emotionality
(de Vries et al., 2009).
Correlates of sensation seeking

Scores on the various sensation-seeking scales have been found to correlate signifcantly with
such a huge range of variables that it is not possible to summarise them all here; summaries
are given in Zuckerman (1994, 2007). High sensation seekers take part in risky activities,
ranging from climbing Everest to bomb disposal (Breivik, 1996; Glicksohn and Bozna, 2000).
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The higher someone’s level of sensation seeking, the more they self-stimulate themselves
through movement when undergoing sensory deprivation (Zuckerman et al., 1966). They are
more likely to use drugs and explore sex at an early age (Stanton et al., 2001), have ‘one night
stands’ (Kaspar et al., 2016), enjoy abstract art (Furnham and Avison, 1997), drive after using
psychoactive drugs (Jamt et al., 2020) and fnd rude and incongruous jokes funny (Ruch,
1988). In short, they seek out excitement thrills and novelty.
An obvious problem with this work is that some of the items in the sensation seeking
questionnaire may relate directly to the criterion behaviour. For example, if we count alcohol
as a drug then fve of the items in the SSS-V scale relate directly to drug use, with others (e.g.,
admitting to sometimes doing things that are a little frightening or illegal) having more
tangential relevance. If you ask someone whether they take drugs and then include several
drug-related questions in a personality questionnaire, then there is bound to be a link between
the two measures. To combat this, researchers sometimes omit the drug-related items in the
SSS when looking at sensation seeking and drug use; drop the sex-related items when exploring
sensation seeking and sexual behaviour or attitudes and so on. It is worthwhile checking that
this sort of precaution has been taken when interpreting any study – not just those involving
sensation seeking. For if only fve out of 40 items relate perfectly to drug taking while the
other 35 have no relationship whatever to it, the correlation that is obtained will be in the
order of 0.35–0.40, which can easily get mistaken for a genuine fnding instead of a statistical
artefact.
Psychobiology of Sensation Seeking

As discussed in Chapter 6, in order to use any trait description (‘sensation seeking’,
‘intelligence’, etc.) as an explanation for why a person behaves in a certain manner, it is
necessary to ensure that scores on the trait refect some fundamental process inside the
individual, and is not just an arbitrary attribution ‘in the eye of the beholder’ which does not
refect how people really behave. These fundamental processes might include determining
whether scores on the SSS are linked to the expression of certain genes or some maturational
or social infuence. This explains why Zuckerman has spent much time exploring the origins
of the sensation seeking trait. If:
l there is a close correspondence between sensation-seeking scores and levels of some

hormone, neurotransmitter, etc. and
l this relationship is so strong that scores on the sensation-seeking scale may be used as a
cheaper alternative to biologically assaying levels of these chemicals
then it may be reasonable to conclude that Sensation Seeking (which is really the behavioural
consequence of certain hormonal levels, or whatever) causes the individual to behave in
certain ways – for example, driving recklessly. This is the frst time we have explored the
possible origins of personality traits; it is an incredibly important issue because we can only
really say that we understand a concept (such as a personality trait) when we can explain how
it operates. Chapters 11 and 13 therefore follow a similar approach for the main personality
traits and abilities.
There is evidence that Sensation Seeking is linked to brain activity when viewing mildly
unpleasant emotional pictures (Deng and Zhang, 2019) – indicating that this trait is related
to brain activity and the processing of emotion. Sensation Seeking is related to low levels of
monoamine oxidases (MAOs). These are enzymes that destroy various types of neurotransmitter
176
in the synapse between neurones; monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) are chemicals
(some being well known as antidepressants) that reduce the depletion of these neurotransmitters.
A substantial literature shows that reduced levels of MAO are associated with increased motor
activity, social activity and antisocial behaviour (e.g., Klinteberg, 1996); male sex hormones
also reduce MAO levels. The behaviours associated with low levels of MAO certainly sound
as if they may be related to sensation seeking and this model even explains the sex difference
that is commonly observed in sensation-seeking behaviour. Indeed there is a signifcant
negative correlation between MAO levels and scores on sensation-seeking questionnaires
(Bardo et al., 1996) and some gene-variants which infuence MAO levels also infuence
Sensation Seeking (Thomson et al., 2013).
However, although frequently signifcant, this correlation is not large enough to suggest
that MAO levels are the sole determinant of sensation-seeking behaviour and so Zuckerman
has expanded the theory to look in more detail at the serotenergic, dopaminergic and
noradrenergic systems. Several of these seem to control behaviour relevant to sensation
seeking. For example, sertotonergic systems are related to behavioural inhibition and
dopaminergic systems to seeking out reward and novelty. Zuckerman also weaves in cortisol
levels and the interaction between these systems and stress to create a complex theory of the
biological basis of sensation seeking (Netter et al., 1996). There is evidence that sensation
seeking is linked to genetic makeup (Stoel et al., 2006) although this probably involves small
infuences from a very large number of genes; there is no single ‘gene for sensation seeking’
(Aluja et al., 2009; Powell and Zietsch, 2011).
Overview
Sensation seeking is a useful concept when it comes to predicting risky behaviour. However
when interpreting such studies, care must be taken to ensure that items in the SSS do not
themselves ask about the behaviour with which the SSS is being correlated. The factor analytic
results clearly show that sensation seeking is linked to Openness, Psychoticism and the
HEXACO factors of Honesty–Humility and Emotionality; they are also linked with
Extraversion and Openness in the NEO model because aspects of sensation seeking are used
as facets when defning the NEO facets. There is also good evidence for some association
between sensation seeking and levels of MAO and neurotransmitters. However, it is less clear
whether all these variables can be combined to predict a person’s level of sensation-seeking
behaviour accurately.
Morningness
Rumour has it that some people love to get up early, wake quickly and produce their best
work early in the day, whereas others are slow to wake up, prefer to stay up late at night and
work well in the late evening. These extreme personality types are sometimes known as ‘larks’
and ‘owls’, but most researchers believe that people fall along a continuum – a trait with
extreme morningness at one end and eveningness at the other. Unsurprisingly, this trait is of
particular interest to those working with circadian rhythms and there is a substantial literature
linking this trait of Morningness-Eveningness to various aspects of behaviour. For example,
a literature review by Cavallera and Giudici (2008) shows that questionnaire scores have been
linked to performance at shift work and various physiological variables such as the time at
which body temperature reaches its maximum (which is earlier for ‘larks’ than for ‘owls’) and
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so on. The 19-item Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (Horne and Östberg, 1976)

measures the trait by asking questions such as ‘If you got into bed at 11:00 PM, how tired
would you be?’ and ‘If you usually have to get up at a specifc time in the morning, how much
do you depend on an alarm clock?’ The items do not appear to be synonyms and seem to be
locally independent, as the way in which one answers one item does not determine how they
must answer another. Scores on this questionnaire are supposed to refect individual differences
in circadian clocks, which seem to involve neural oscillators in the ventral hypothalamus
(Saper et al., 2005).
One may therefore expect this trait to have substantial heritability, and it does (Toomey
et al., 2015). Interestingly, these authors also show that the very genes which infuence a
preference for Eveningness (staying up and working late) also infuence depression. It has long
been known that ‘evening’ people tend to experience depressed moods (e.g., Hidalgo et al.,
2009) and the work of Toomey et al. shows that the reason for this is partly biological; the
same genetic variants which make people ‘owls’ also tend to make them depressed. Much of
this Morningness-Eveningness literature is rather specialised and not particularly relevant for
this book, but it does seem that scores on the various questionnaires relate as expected to
physiological responsiveness and behaviour.
Several studies have explored the links between Morningness-Eveningness and personality;
Lipnevich et al. (2017) summarise these and show that the largest correlation is with
Conscientiousness (estimated r= 0.3; larks tend to be more conscientious). However the other
correlations are considerably smaller. Adan et al. (2012) provide an excellent summary of
research on the psychology and psychobiology of circadian rhythms, and its applications (e.g.,
jet lag, shift work).
Rather than just correlating scores on morningness-eveningness questionnaires and sleeping
habits with personality, Randler (2008) explored how scores on a morningness-eveningness
questionnaire related to sleeping behaviour and personality on weekdays and weekends. This
overcomes the problem that some would-be ‘owls’ may be forced to go to bed earlier than
they would wish in order to obtain enough sleep to function well at work or college. They
found a small albeit statistically signifcant correlation (r = 0.13) between Morningness and
the Big Five Agreeableness factor in adolescents; there was no signifcant relationship in
adults. Conscientiousness correlated signifcantly with Morningness in both adults and
adolescents. Several correlations between sleeping habits and personality reached statistical
signifcance, but as this study was based on a large sample (n > 1000) many of the signifcant
correlations are rather small and indicate only a very weak relationship between the variables.
The exception is once again Conscientiousness, which correlates 0.23 with hours of sleep
taken at weekends, and it also seems that there is a slight tendency for more conscientious
individuals to stay in bed for longer at weekends. But the most interesting fnding is probably
that there is no evidence at all for any relationship between Morningness-Eveningness and the
two main personality traits, Extraversion and Neuroticism. Morningness-Eveningness seems
to be a narrow trait that correlates somewhat with Conscientiousness, but which is otherwise
quite distinct from the main personality factors.
Time perception
Do we live in the past, present or future? Freud famously claimed that neurotics think too
much of their past experiences, Kelly argues that we focus on anticipating the future, whilst
models of mindfulness (discussed below) suggest that we should try to experience the present.
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Hence Zimbardo and Boyd’s (2008, 1999) work on time perception has recently become
popular. The Zimbardo Time Perception Inventory (ZTPI) claims to measure the extent to
which people reminisce about bad experiences in the past (‘Past Negative’), good experiences
in the past (‘Past Positive’), focusing on pleasure in the present (‘Present Hedonistic’), not
feeling in control of one’s life (‘Present Fatalistic’) and striving for future goals (‘Future’).
These look like narrow personality traits – though once again, inspection reveals that many
of the items in its ‘scales’ are virtual synonyms, making them ‘bloated specifcs’ rather than
personality traits. For example, one scale contains the items ‘I think about the bad things that
have happened to me in the past’ and ‘painful past experiences keep being replayed in my
mind’. The only scale which does appear to contain diverse items is ‘Present Hedonistic’ with
items such as ‘Taking risks keeps my life from becoming boring’, ‘I do things impulsively’.
However this scale correlates 0.74 with a measure of sensation seeking (Muro et al., 2015).
Neither scale has perfect reliability (coeffcient alpha) but it can be shown that if the traits
could be measured perfectly reliably (i.e., without measurement error) they would correlate
0.9. ‘Present Hedonistic’ orientation is virtually identical to sensation seeking.
Despite the narrowness of its scales, there are some correlations between ZTPI scores and
behaviour. For example, students who are future-orientated start their assignments earlier
than those who live in the present (Zimbardo and Boyd, 1999) which is perhaps hardly
surprising. The discovery that those who live in the present are more likely to have risky
driving habits is a necessary consequence of the correlation between the ‘present’ scale and
sensation seeking noted above; the effect practically disappears (a correlation of 0.35 turns
into a partial correlation of 0.17) once sensation seeking is allowed for. Other researchers
become strangely excited about the correlation between living in the present and other known
correlates of sensation seeking, such as drug use (e.g., Fieulaine and Martinez, 2010).
There is a substantial literature on time perception in other branches of psychology – for
examining neuropsychological correlates, the infuence of emotion on time perception and so
on; many of us will have experienced time appearing to slow down during a car accident, for
example. The methodology usually requires people to encode a particular time interval (such
as the time between two tones, sometimes whilst being given other tasks to do in order to
prevent them trying to count the seconds) and then reproduce it – for example, by pushing a
button when they think the same interval (or some fraction or multiple of it) has elapsed. Not
many such studies use the ZTPI, although Wittman et al. (2011) found quite a large relationship
(r=–0.58) between the future perspective score on the ZTPI accuracy at reproducing a time
interval; the quicker that people pushed a button when estimating a time interval, the lower
their score on future time perspective. The meaning of this correlation is unclear, however, as
Wittman et al. treat the ZTPI as if it were a measure of impulsivity. Others fnd no relationship
between time perspective scores and accuracy of time reproduction (e.g., Siu et al., 2014).
Likewise it is not obvious what the correlation between measures of brain activity and scores
on the ZTPI imply.
Although it is diffcult to be enthusiastic about the ZTPI, it is mentioned here for
two reasons; frst because it is widely used (Zimbardo and Boyd (1999) has been cited over
1000 times) and second because it shows the importance of critically examining the validity
of scales, and hence the concepts which they measure – even if you are a student and you read
the work of respected psychologists. Do the items appear similar to items measuring other
traits, and if so is there empirical evidence that the traits correlate so substantially that they
are essentially identical? Do the items appear to form a ‘bloated specifc’ rather than a broad
trait? It is worthwhile considering such issues whenever one uses a ‘new’ scale or tries to make
sense of the literature.
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Mindfulness
Mindfulness is another popular topic in personality psychology. It stems from some principles
of Buddhist philosophy and meditation and is the ability to pay attention to one’s current
perceptions, thoughts and feelings – recognising them without trying to evaluate or judge
them. Hayes (2003) describes it as achieving a state of ‘dispassionate calm’ where one is aware
of both internal feelings and perceptions, but without being distracted by worries, hopes, fears
or outside events. It is a state of mind which can be achieved through meditation; the extent
to which people are (or say they are) able to perceive their emotions without feeling forced to
reacting to them, accept themselves for who they are and so on is thus arguably a measure of
the trait of Mindfulness, if one makes the assumption that mindfulness is a characteristic of
the person which pervades their everyday life, rather than just happening during meditation.
Several questionnaires have been developed to measure mindfulness – the Freiburg Mindfulness
Inventory (Walach et al., 2006) is popular, though there are others, too. Some typical items
are shown in Table 9.1.
ExErCISE
Here are some guidelines for one widely used form of meditation which
supposedly enhances mindfulness, from Kabat-Zinn (1990). You may fnd it
useful to try the following. Sitting in a chair in a quiet room ‘we bring our
attention to our breathing. We feel it come in, we feel it go out. We dwell
in the present, moment by moment, breath by breath . . . And whenever we
fnd that our attention has moved elsewhere, wherever that may be, we just
note it and let go, and gently escort our attention back to the breath, back
to the rising and falling of our own belly.’
A meta-analysis shows that Mindfulness is related to Neuroticism (ρ=–0.58) and

Conscientiousness (ρ=0.44) from the Big Five model (Giluk, 2009) though somewhat
surprisingly its correlation with Openness to Experience is rather smaller (ρ=0.20). It is also
related to Trait Emotional Intelligence (Miao et al., 2018). Practising Zen meditators score
half a standard deviation higher on Mindfulness than matched controls (Brown and Ryan,
2003), a signifcant and fairly substantial effect.
Some authors have identifed fve facets of Mindfulness – for example, Baer et al. (2006)
factor analysed the items from a number of mindfulness scales and found the facets shown in
Table 9.1
Once again, the problem with this analysis is that many of the items are near-identical in
content; for example ‘I drive on “automatic pilot” without paying attention to what I’m
doing’ and ‘I drive places on “automatic pilot” and then wonder why I went there’ are
two separate (reverse-scored) items in the ‘acting with awareness’ facet. Some or all of the
facets may well be bloated specifcs, and so I would personally be more comfortable using the
general mindfulness factor than focusing on its facets.
The problem with mindfulness is that it is diffcult to be sure that what a person says about
their experiences actually matches their behaviour. It is possible that some individuals view
themselves as self-actualised, mindful, self-aware, and in touch with their emotions, and so
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Table 9.1 Five facets of mindfulness showing the items with the largest
factor loadings from Baer et al. (2006)
Facet Example items
Non-reactivity to inner experience I perceive my feelings and emotions without having

to react to them.
I watch my feelings without getting lost in them.
Observing/noticing/attending to I sense my body, whether eating, cooking, cleaning
sensations/perceptions/thoughts/ or talking.
feelings I notice how my emotions express themselves
through my body.
Acting with awareness I [do not] break or spill things because of
carelessness, not paying attention, or thinking of
something else.
I [do not] fnd it diffcult to stay focused on what’s
happening in the present.
Describing/labelling with words I’m good at fnding the words to describe my
feelings.
I can easily put my beliefs, opinions and
expectations into words.
Non-judging of experience I [do not] criticise myself for having irrational or
inappropriate emotions.
I [do not] tend to evaluate whether my perceptions
are right or wrong.
will choose to answer items in mindfulness questionnaires accordingly; though they view
themselves as being mindful, they may not actually be mindful at all. It is diffcult to tell
whether they really do behave in the ways they claim, as their experiences are entirely
subjective. That said, there is some evidence that scores on mindfulness questionnaires relate
to behaviour. Holzell et al. (2011) give an excellent and non-technical account of what some
of the psychological and physiological processes associated with mindfulness meditation may
be, and show that Mindfulness scores increase following meditation.
Interventions designed to enhance mindfulness in children seem to lead to a number of
positive educational outcomes, including self-reported empathy, mindfulness, emotional
control and social responsibility relative to a control group in a randomised control trial
(Schonert-Reichl et al., 2015). Peer-ratings also showed some positive outcomes (for
example, sharing, being more kind and rule-abiding) although school performance and
cortisol levels (an index of stress) did not seem to beneft. But worthy as this approach was,
it is possible that ‘demand characteristics’ were at work. Children in the ‘mindfulness’ group
also received interventions aimed at ‘changing the ecology of the classroom environment to
one in which belonging, caring, collaboration, and understanding others is emphasized to
create a positive classroom milieu’ as well as three sessions of meditation training per day.
Even if differences in behaviour were found, it is not obvious that these were due to
mindfulness training. The other interventions may have infuenced behaviour. In addition,
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the children may well have guessed that these strange new mindfulness activities were
intended to improve the outcome variables, and so rated themselves and each other
accordingly. Whilst studies like this may suggest that mindfulness may improve behaviour,
they are by no means defnitive.
The picture is somewhat clearer for clinical studies, where a range of mindfulness
interventions often seem to have a small-to-moderate benefcial effect on levels of self-reported
stress, anxiety and depression (e.g., Abbott et al., 2014; Hofmann et al., 2010) and (crucially)
also affect physical measures such as lowering blood pressure in patients with heart disease.
Mindfulness training can even be of some beneft when it is delivered over the internet
(Spijkerman et al., 2016) where it is particularly effective at reducing stress; it seems to operate
by reducing ‘rumination’ – focusing on negative feelings (Jain et al., 2007). Occupational/
organisational psychologists have also used mindfulness interventions to try to reduce work-
related stress and anxiety with some success (Bartlett et al., 2019) although this meta-analysis
was unable to determine whether performance at work beneftted from the intervention; once
again it is possible that any changes are due to demand characteristics which is a particular
problem as several of the studies lacked adequate control groups.
Is Mindfulness a trait, as many researchers seem to assume? The fnding that rather short
interventions can infuence scores on mindfulness questionnaires suggests that Mindfulness
may be more of a state than a trait; the modest correlations between measures of
mindfulness and other personality traits may also suggest that mindfulness varies over time.
Mindfulness seems to need to be trained rather than being an inbuilt characteristic of the
person in the way that (for example) Neuroticism, Extraversion or Conscientiousness is.
Mindfulness training seems akin to coping mechanisms or relaxation techniques in helping
people deal with stress, although the work of Jain et al. (2007) shows that mindfulness training
produces different results from relaxation training, as mindfulness training alone seems to
reduce rumination. Scores on mindfulness questionnaires may thus indicate the extent to which
people use this technique to protect against stress, rather than being a stable personality trait.
Self-Esteem re-visited
We mentioned self-esteem in Chapter 2. It is an enormously popular concept in social
psychology although Kline (2000) has observed that the most commonly used test that
measures self-esteem, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem (RSE) Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), is deeply
fawed by being a bloated specifc. We noted in Chapter 8 that the ten items essentially all ask
the same question over and over which causes problems.
In our experience, even when the RSE items are interspersed with items from other
scales, participants frequently write comments such as, ‘I have already answered this
question!’ Such reactions may lead participants to skip questions, respond randomly,
and engage in other test-taking behaviors that contribute to invalid protocols.
(Robins et al., 2001)
These authors go on to demonstrate that a single question – ‘I have high self-esteem’ – is

as effective as the longer Rosenberg scale for measuring self-esteem; it shows similarly sized
correlations with other variables, such as personality traits. It thus seems that self-esteem is a
‘bloated specifc’ – a single item re-phrased in multiple ways and there must therefore be some
question about whether Self-Esteem is a causal infuence. Can we ever say that a person acts
in a particular way ‘because they have low Self-Esteem’? If it is found that Self-Esteem is very
182
substantially correlated with other, broader, personality traits it might be safer to explain
behaviour using those traits instead.
Robins et al. (2001) report the correlations between the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and
personality as shown in Table 9.2; their results are broadly in line with other similar studies,
such as Watson et al. (2002). Some of these correlations are exceptionally large, and a
regression performed on the correlations shown in Watson et al. (2002) – on the companion
website – shows that over half the variation in scores on the Rosenberg inventory can be
predicted from the Big Five personality factors. After correcting for unreliability of
measurement, two-thirds of the variance in self-esteem scores can be explained by the Big Five
personality factors.
A generation of us were brought up with the idea that a person’s level of self-esteem caused
them to behave in particular ways (e.g., Nadler, 1987) and that certain interventions can boost
self-esteem. Put like this, self-esteem does not sound much like a stable personality trait as
defned in Chapter 1, as many simple interventions in laboratory and other tasks appeared to
boost its levels, whilst life events can apparently decrease it. The correlations with the Big Five
personality traits shown above however suggests that it stays reasonably constant.
Baumeister et al. (2003) argue that:
to show that self-esteem is itself important, then, research would have to demonstrate that
people’s beliefs about themselves have important consequences regardless of what the
underlying realities are. Put more simply, there would have to be benefts that derive from
believing that one is intelligent, regardless of whether one actually is intelligent.
These authors review the literature and identify several cases where self-esteem is not
causal, even though it appears to be at frst glance. For example, people with high self-esteem
rate themselves as being physically attractive (the correlation being as high as 0.85). Perhaps
seeing a beautiful face in the mirror each morning enhances one’s self-esteem. However this
is just not so. When attractiveness is rated by others, it shows a correlation of zero with self-
esteem. People with high self-esteem think they look wonderful, even when they do not;
having good looks does not boost self-esteem. Their analysis shows that the same sort of thing
applies to intelligence (people with high self-esteem think they are smart, but need not be),
weight (being overweight does not infuence self-esteem nearly as much as people think it
does) and so on. Thus self-esteem seems to behave rather more like a stable personality trait
than social psychologists sometimes suggest – a fnding which ties in well with the large
correlations shown in Table 9.2. For if self-esteem could easily be altered by life events, it
would not correlate substantially with personality.
Table 9.2 Correlations between self-esteem and personality (from robins

et al., 2001)
NEO Extraversion 0.41

NEO Agreeableness 0.23
NEO Conscientiousness 0.28
NEO Neuroticism –0.70
NEO Openness to experience 0.16
183
Does self-esteem infuence behaviour? To determine this it is obviously necessary to control

for the infuence of the main personality traits. Judge et al. (2002) demonstrated that it is very
diffcult to differentiate self-esteem from Neuroticism, and points out that Eysenck (1990)
viewed self-esteem as one of several components of Neuroticism – a view which is consistent
with the idea that scales measuring self-esteem are really just a single item blown up into a
trait by paraphrasing it several times. When writing this chapter I had expected to fnd studies
which administered a self-esteem scale alongside some measure of broad personality traits
(those from the Big Five, HEXACO or Eysenck models, for example) and some sort of
outcome measure which Self-Esteem might be thought to infuence, as with the studies of
emotional intelligence discussed in Chapter 7. Thus it would be possible to determine whether
Self-Esteem has any predictive power over and above that offered by broader traits, such as
Neuroticism. These studies are hard to fnd, though it is possible to re-analyse correlation
matrices which are published for some other purposes. A SPSS fle containing the correlation
matrix from Miciuk et al. (2016) may be found in the companion website; it shows that
when predicting people’s feeling that their life has some purpose, the incremental validity of
self-esteem is not signifcant. It does not add anything to the predictive power of measures of
the Big Five personality factors.
Many social psychologists feel that people’s self-esteem is important in determining how
they behave; the belief that one has a great personality, high intelligence, appalling social skills
or whatever is what causes us to behave in a certain way. It does not matter too much if one
actually has these characteristics. Personality psychologists instead argue that beliefs are
largely irrelevant, and our personality traits (based on behaviour) better explain our actions.
The evidence outlined above shows that the test which is widely used to measure general self-
esteem is substantially infuenced by personality; it is not a pure measure of belief and may
not always show incremental validity over the Big Five personality factors for predicting
behaviour.
Summary
I suggest that for any narrow personality trait to be valuable, it should:
l have a clear theoretical rationale; for example in the case of Sensation Seeking the trait
encompasses a number of different behaviours, thrill-seeking, lack of inhibition, seeking
out novel experiences, etc. In the case of some of the more clinically relevant traits to be
discussed in Chapter 10, the trait should cover all of the clinical characteristics identifed
in psychiatry.
l have an effective method of assessing each individual’s position along the trait, without
which it is impossible to test any hypotheses associated with the theory.
l be demonstrably distinct from the global personality models, such as those of Eysenck or
Costa and McCrae.
l have some literature exploring the processes that cause individuals to differ on their levels
of the trait, for example the links between MAOI and Sensation Seeking.
This chapter has considered some personality traits that have been developed for rather
specifc research purposes. The choice of what to include has inevitably been subjective: traits
such as Mindfulness and Morningness are increasingly cited in the literature and it would also
be possible to make a case for considering impulsivity, optimism, perfectionism, self-effcacy,
rumination and others. However, those that I have included seem to me either to have a
184
particularly interesting theoretical rationale or to have continued importance. The exception

is Self-Esteem, a concept that is hugely popular in social psychology and which is discussed
here because its advocates often do not appreciate the problems associated with this trait and
its measurement.

Breivik et al. (2019) give an interesting literature review of the importance of sensation seeking
in military psychology (risk perception, etc.) and Mann et al. (2015) show how sensation
seeking and other variables interact to predict delinquency. Adan et al. (2012) show how and
why it is important to study circadian rhythms and ‘morningness’ and the Baumeister et al.
(2003) review of the (non)-causal role of self-esteem in predicting behaviour makes some
important points. Finally, Van Dam et al. (2018) provide an excellent and very accessible
summary of mindfulness research.
SAQ 9.1
Identifying bloated specifcs is not easy. The frst stage should be to look at
the items and determine whether answering one item in a certain way forces
a respondent to give a particular answer to another question. If this is
widespread, then the scale is probably a bloated specifc. Second, if the scale
has unusually high reliability given its length (say reliability above 0.80 for a
ten-item test) this can be a warning sign that the test is a bloated specifc.
This is because if the test items are sampled from a wide domain (as they
should be) two items will only correlate because they share common variance
because of the trait they both measure: if they measure a bloated specifc,
they will share specifc variance, too, which will increase the reliability of the
scale. The next step is to determine how scores on this scale relate to other
source traits – locating the trait in factor space. It may be the case that scores
are closely related to one or more well-known source traits.
SAQ 9.2
‘Locating a trait within factor space’ means determining how this trait relates
to the main source traits described in Chapter 4. It involves administering
some measure of the trait alongside standard personality questionnaires,
such as the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (revised) to a good-sized,
representative sample of people. You then have several options: you could
factor analyse the responses to all of the items in the questionnaires together,
185
to fnd whether the items in the novel trait form a distinct factor that is
different from E, N and P; you could use confrmatory factor analysis to test
this hypothesis. Either way, this analysis will also show the correlations
between the standard personality factors and the novel trait. Or, if your
sample is not large enough for factor analysis, you could correlate scale scores
together: you might discover that the trait is moderately related to
Neuroticism (r = 0.4, for example), but not at all correlated with Extraversion
or Psychoticism. If sample size permits, you should use multiple regression
(using the novel scale as the dependent variable and E, N and P as independent
variables) to extend this analysis and show whether scores on the novel scale
are largely predictable from the well-known personality factors. This tells you
whether the trait is worth measuring – or whether it is just a mixture of well-
studied personality traits.
SAQ 9.3
Sensation Seeking involves individuals seeking stimulation in a variety of
ways – through aesthetics and lifestyle choices, avoidance of routine,
hedonistic activities such as casual sex and seeking out thrilling physical
activities.
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Chapter 10
Sub-clinical and antisocial

personality traits
Introduction
This chapter deals with some narrow personality traits where extremely high scores may have
some clinical or social signifcance. Once again the choice of traits is fairly arbitrary, and there
are many others which could have been included; the ones I mention in this chapter are
currently popular and/or of some theoretical and practical interest. There is also a fair amount
of critical evaluation, to encourage you to follow the same sort of approach yourself when
reading the research literature.
We start by looking at psychosis-like symptoms, as it has been found that the cognitive and
emotional processes which defne schizophrenia in extreme cases can also be found in a milder
form in those of us who do not have a clinical diagnosis. Other people have problems
identifying and using emotions (Alexithymia), and the topic of conservative/authoritarian
attitudes will be of interest of those studying fascism and other forms of extremism, as well
as individual differences. Finally we consider the ‘dark side’ of human personality looking at
how to identify the psychopaths who walk amongst us, understand how they came to behave
in this way, and exploring other traits (Narcissism and Machiavellianism) which are strongly
correlated with psychopathic behaviour.
Examples items from commonly used scales have been included wherever possible – to give
a feel for the nature of the traits being described, to ‘de-mystify’ some of the technical terms
used by researchers and to show where scales can be found, in case they are useful for research
purposes or general interest.
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Sub-clinical and antisocial personality traits
Learning outcomes
l Discuss the ‘continuity hypothesis’ and form an evidence-based opinion
of whether and why Schizotypy is linked to schizophrenia.
l Consider whether attitudes could be regarded as personality traits, and
discuss the nature and origins of the authoritarian personality.
l Describe Alexithymia and discuss its relationship to other personality
traits.
l Discuss the characteristic, origins and importance of Machiavellianism,
Narcissism and Psychopathy – the ‘dark side’ of personality.
Schizotypy
Several researchers (e.g., Claridge, 1985; Meehl, 1962) have argued that there is no real
discontinuity between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behaviour; for example those who have
depressive personalities may be more likely to suffer bouts of clinical depression than those
who do not. Likewise, those who have higher than average scores on anxiety inventories are
more likely to develop a full-blown anxiety disorder than are phlegmatic individuals. This
idea (sometimes known as the continuity hypothesis) becomes of particular interest to
personality theorists when applied to schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is a psychiatric condition that will affect about 1% of us at some time in
our lives. Its symptoms can include hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that are not
physically present, voices being particularly common), delusions (believing things that are
unlikely to be true; for example, that their thoughts are being stolen or that they are being
controlled by aliens via televisions), lack of emotion, illogical thought processes and inability
to concentrate. The person becomes increasingly more eccentric, isolated and apathetic. (The
idea that schizophrenia is anything to do with ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ or multiple personalities is
an unfortunate myth that is without foundation.)
If the continuity hypothesis holds true for schizophrenia as well as for conditions such as
anxiety and depression, it might be possible to fnd milder signs of these symptoms in the
general population. It might also be interesting to determine whether this predicts who will
develop schizophrenic symptoms in the future. For example, are normal people who believe
in fying saucers or conspiracy theories also more likely to show shallow emotional responses,
have problems concentrating and occasionally see or hear things that are not really present?
Schizotypy is the term that refers to people who function fairly normally, but show low levels
of the cognitive, emotional and attentional problems that are found in aggrandised form in
schizophrenics as discussed by Johns and van Os (2001).
The concept of Schizotypy therefore has much in common with Eysenck’s idea of
Psychoticism. Both of these traits are thought to predict risk of developing schizophrenia, but
researchers such as Claridge have tried to extrapolate all the main symptoms of schizophrenia
from the clinical to the non-clinical population. Eysenck focused more on impulsive, cruel and
solitary behaviours – with little mention of perceptual distortions or cognitive or attentional
problems. Thus although the traits are similar, they are not identical.
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Measurement of Schizotypy
Several scales have been developed to measure Schizotypy, generally by factor analysing the
responses that people make to a set of items that have been designed to measure the concept.
The problem is that researchers differ in the way in which they conceptualise it. For example,
it is common for researchers to use a ‘magical ideation’ scale (Chapman et al., 1980) as if
it measured Schizotypy – yet this really only assesses strength of unusual beliefs. Others
show better evidence of content validity, as they were developed by examining the
symptoms that constitute the clinical defnition of schizophrenia and generating items which
may tap milder versions of these symptoms. Tests that have been constructed in this way
include Raine’s (1991) Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ), the Schizotypal Trait
Questionnaire, Form A (Claridge and Broks, 1984) known as the STA, and the Oxford–
Liverpool Inventory of Feelings (the O-LIFE; Mason et al., 1995) which adds additional
items to the STA.
Several correlated facets are usually found when the items on these questionnaires are
factor analysed. For example, the 37 items of the STA questionnaire generally produce three
correlated factors; ‘unusual perceptual experience’, ‘paranoid ideas’ and ‘magical thinking’.
The 104-item O-LIFE questionnaire consists of four facets. One refects the ‘positive’ (unusual)
symptoms of schizophrenia such as strange perceptual experiences and magical thought.
Defcits associated with schizophrenia (withdrawal) form another facet, cognitive and
attentional problems a third and impulsive nonconformity a fourth. The correlations between
these facets are generally substantial and form a higher-order factor of Schizotypy (Mason et
al., 1995) as described in Chapter 5. The full test is printed in Mason and Claridge (2006),
with some sample items shown in Table 10.1
The items are not too extreme so that non-clinical groups show a good range of scores
when answering them, and factor analyses show that they form facets which in turn form a
trait, much as expected. There is thus good evidence that such ‘watered-down’ symptoms of
schizophrenia form a trait within the normal population. But is this trait related to
schizophrenia?
Table 10.1 Sample items from the O-LIFE measure of Schizotypy (Mason
and Claridge, 2006)
Facet Sample item
Unusual experiences Have you ever felt you have special, almost
magical, powers?
Cognitive disorganisation No matter how hard you try to
concentrate do unrelated thoughts always
creep into your mind?
Introvertive anhedonia Are you much too independent to really
(withdrawal) get involved with people?
Impulsive non-conformity Do you often feel like doing the opposite
of what people suggest, even though you
know they are right?
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Schizotypy and schizophrenia

A huge amount of research has been performed in this area and it is impossible to do it justice
in just a few paragraphs. It is made more diffcult because it is quite diffcult to locate people
with schizophrenia who do not receive anti-psychotic medication. This makes it diffcult to
tell whether people with high levels of Schizotypy show the same cognitive and emotional
functioning (albeit to a lesser degree) than those diagnosed with schizophrenia; any similarities
or differences might be due to the effects of medication.
There are two important questions that can be asked:
1. Are high scores on Schizotypy scales linked to schizophrenia – for example, via longitudinal
studies or studying the relatives of people diagnosed with schizophrenia? If schizophrenia
develops because of biological or family infuences, then relatives might have high scores
on Schizotypy scales if this trait really is linked to schizophrenia. If they are have different
origins, one would expect no such links to emerge.
2. Much is now known about which cognitive, attentional and other processes are affected
by schizophrenia and about which remain intact. Do individuals who score high on
measures of Schizotypy show similar profles of symptoms and defcits to those diagnosed
with schizophrenia?
Knowing the answers to these questions will indicate whether Schizotypy involves the same
psychological and physiological mechanisms as schizophrenia, or whether they are distinct.
Addressing the frst question, Nelson et al. (2013) review the literature showing that both
schizophrenia and Schizotypy tend to be inherited as described in Chapter 15, and that
families of those diagnosed with schizophrenia tend to have elevated scores on tests of
Schizotypy. Whilst this could indicate that either environmental or genetic infuences tend to
increase levels of Schizotypy and increase the probability of a diagnosis of schizophrenia being
made, Fanous et al. (2007) show that some of the genes which predispose people to developing
schizophrenia also infuence levels of Schizotypy. This is important evidence that the biological
mechanisms of Schizotypy resemble those of schizophrenia. Of course, environmental
infuences will also be vital, and Hatzimanolis et al. (2018) show that a stressful life event
(undergoing compulsory military training) can boost levels of Schizotypy, and that this is
purely an environmental effect; it is not a consequence of some individuals showing a genetic
predisposition for Schizotypy which is activated by the environmental stressor. Claridge
(1997) summarises much of the old research literature and Lenzenweger (2006a, 2006b) gives
an excellent overview of the development of the concept and the relationship between
Schizotypy and schizophrenia.
The problem with any longitudinal study to determine whether Schizotypy is linked to the
development of schizophrenia in later life is that initial testing would have to be performed
quite early (as schizophrenia commonly manifests itself in adolescence) and as less than 1%
of the population will ever develop schizophrenia, huge samples would have to be screened.
Thus most research uses less precise techniques for determining whether schizotypal personality
traits really do predispose people to developing schizophrenia. Kwapil et al. (2013) and
Chapman et al. (1994) describe a study in which 500+ individuals were assessed and followed
up 10 years later. Those showing unusually high scores on perceptual aberration and magical
ideation scales were more likely than controls to show signs of psychoses, have psychotic
relatives, show schizotypal symptoms and psychotic-like experiences. The study does provide
some suggestion that Schizotypy predicts later psychosis – although it does not show that it
predicts full-blown schizophrenia.
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Relatives of people diagnosed with schizophrenia (who will therefore have shared some
genes and the family environment with them) are sometimes found to have elevated scores on
measures of Schizotypy (Mata et al., 2003; Mata et al., 2000). More recent studies have also
been performed, but these tend to focus on biological (genetic) determinants and become
technical.
Turning to the second type of evidence, it is possible to measure eye movements and
therefore discover whether a person moves their eyes smoothly when following a moving
object with their eyes or whether the eyes make a number of jumps (saccades). It is well known
that people diagnosed with schizophrenia and their relatives fnd it harder to follow a smoothly
moving dot around the screen than do control groups and this has been used as a marker for
proneness to schizophrenia (Iacono et al., 1992). A substantial literature shows that poor
ability to follow a moving object smoothly with the eyes is also linked to Schizotypy (Gooding
et al., 2000), supporting the hypothesis that the neural processes of Schizotypy and
schizophrenia are similar. Those diagnosed with schizophrenia or who score high on Schizotypy
also fnd it diffcult to look away from a dot when it suddenly appears on a screen; they fnd
it diffcult to inhibit the saccade (Myles et al., 2017). Patterns of cognitive defcits (particularly
of memory) associated with schizophrenia are also found to a lesser extent in those with high
Schizotypy (Siddi et al., 2017), which once again may perhaps suggest that Schizotypy and
schizophrenia are related.
Men who are diagnosed with schizophrenia are poor at identifying odours though not at
discriminating between them – a fnding of some interest, as the brain pathways involved in
olfaction are reasonably well understood, and are known to involve brain areas (just behind
the eyes) which are also implicated in other tasks at which they perform poorly (Seidman
et al., 1991). Interestingly, men with high scores on Schizotypy questionnaires, together with
their relatives, also show impaired odour-naming performance (Rupp, 2010), which once
again suggests that Schizotypy and schizophrenia may share common neurophysiological
processes. Finally, it has recently been suggested that Schizotypy and schizophrenia are linked
to grey matter volume in parts of the brain, and a biochemical mechanism for this has been
proposed (Modinos et al., 2018). Taken together, several sources of evidence suggest that
Schizotypy and schizophrenia have a similar neurophysiological basis.
Cannabis use in adolescence is associated with a two- to threefold greater chance of
developing schizophrenia in later life (Moore et al., 2007; Ortiz-Medina et al., 2018), and the
more cannabis that is used, the greater is the risk. There is also a substantial literature which
also shows that cannabis use in adolescence is associated with higher levels of Schizotypy
(Cohen et al., 2011). The important question is what causes what. Does cannabis use cause
both Schizotypy and schizophrenia? Do high levels of Schizotypy develop into schizophrenia
only in those who have a particular genetic predisposition, or can it happen to any cannabis
user? Is it the cannabis or the Schizotypy which causes schizophrenia to develop? Are people
with naturally higher levels of Schizotypy more drawn to using cannabis – and if so, why?
These issues are diffcult to resolve, and older (but eminently readable) reviews such as
Compton et al. (2007) are still useful; more recent ones consider the biological (genetic and
physiological) mechanisms involved and become rather technical. However the fndings once
again suggest that Schizotypy and schizophrenia share common mechanisms.
It is well known that those diagnosed with schizophrenia fnd it hard to ignore irrelevant
information; unattended, irrelevant information is more likely to break through into
consciousness. This may result in some ‘positive symptoms’ – for example, they may
consciously recognise rhymes for words and say these, even when they are not appropriate or
relevant, whereas members of control groups will not consciously notice rhyming associations.
One common task (the Stroop task) asks people to read out words from a card as quickly as
195
possible: these words are all names of colours (e.g., ‘red’, ‘green’) but they are printed in
different colours: the word ‘green’, for instance, may be printed in red ink. Negative priming
involves two trials where the answer to one trial becomes the irrelevant stimulus for the next
trial: for example, ‘blue’ written in green ink followed by ‘red’ written in blue. The participant
should read out ‘blue, red’. Those diagnosed with ‘positive symptoms’ (delusions, etc.) show
reduced inhibition and so less of a negative priming effect than do controls (Williams, 1996)
and so do people with high levels of Schizotypy (Ettinger et al., 2018). There are other
similarities in cognitive and perceptual functioning between schizophrenia and Schizotypy
too, and Ettinger et al. (2014) provide a useful summary of this literature.

Why is it important to perform experiments such as those described in the
previous paragraphs?
Schizotypy and the Big Five personality traits

Is Schizotypy largely a combination of some of the Big Five personality traits? To answer this
question Asai et al. (2011) correlated scores on the O-LIFE with scores on a test measuring
the Big Five personality traits and performed a multiple regression. They found that the Big
Five personality factors explained over 40% of the person-to-person variation in Schizotypy
the largest correlation being with Neuroticism (r=0.43) followed by Agreeableness (r=–0.25)
Openness (r=0.25), Extraversion (–0.23) and Conscientiousness (r=–0.15) which tied in with
some early studies. It also generally agrees with a meta-analysis which examined differences
in levels of personality traits between patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and members of
the general population (Ohi et al., 2016). However the patients in this last study were generally
medicated whilst the control groups were not, and so although this work too suggests people
with high Schizotypy scores generally show a similar pattern of personality traits to those who
are diagnosed with schizophrenia, this fnding needs to be treated with caution as the anti-
psychotic drugs may have affected the scores of the patients. It is however clear from the work
of Asai et al. that there is some overlap between Schizotypy and the Big Five personality traits –
although Schizotypy also has some unique properties of its own.
Summary
Schizotypy is an important personality trait because of its association with a major psychosis –
schizophrenia – and because it shows that milder symptoms of schizophrenia can be identifed
in the general population. Rather than being qualitatively different from ‘normal’ behaviour,
this evidence suggests that schizophrenia forms a continuum – a trait, if you like – with some
of us who show rather low levels of functioning completely normally in society whilst others are
out of contact with reality and have delusions, hallucinations, paranoid beliefs, emotional
fattening and all the other debilitating symptoms of schizophrenia. The evidence outlined
above suggests that many of the cognitive, genetic and physiological mechanisms which are
associated with Schizotypy are also those which defne schizophrenia, although identifying
causal pathways (for example, determining which environmental factors turn a genetic
susceptibility towards developing schizophrenia into a full-blown psychotic episode) are
complex, though heavily researched areas of neuropsychology.
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Authoritarian and dogmatic attitudes

Should we regard strongly held attitudes as if they were personality traits? A case can be made
for treating frmly entrenched beliefs in much the same way as personality traits, if they can
be shown to be stable over time and to refect genuine internal characteristics of the person.
Thus a considerable amount of research has been performed to try to understand why and
how some people develop extreme conservatism and authoritarian beliefs. Much of this
research stemmed from trying to understand the rise in fascism before and during World War II
(‘right-wing authoritarianism’) and also the left-wing tyranny of Stalinist Russia. In addition,
terms such as ‘dogmatism’ and ‘religiousness’ have been coined; it is clear that factor analysis
is needed to determine whether any of these terms are identical, as well as experimental studies
to determine what causes people to hold frm, authoritarian beliefs.
Authoritarianism and conservatism

Adorno et al. (1950) developed the frst such scale, the items of which were based on common
themes which emerged from interviews and questionnaire studies of a wide variety of American
men and women. Questionnaires were used to screen people in various ways (e.g., anti-
democratic tendencies) and in-depth interviews with those with extreme low and high scores
led to the development of the scale some of whose items are shown in Table 10.2.
Table 10.2 Some items from the F-scale (Adorno et al., 1950)
Facet Description Example item
Conventionalism Rigid adherence to One should avoid doing things

conventional, middle-class in public which appear wrong to
values others, even though one knows
that these things are really all
right.
Authoritarian Submissive, uncritical Obedience and respect for
submission attitude toward idealized authority are the most important
moral authorities of the virtues children should learn.
ingroup
Authoritarian Tendency to be on the He is indeed contemptible who
aggression lookout for, and to does not feel an undying love,
condemn, reject, and gratitude, and respect for his
punish people who violate parents.
conventional values
Anti-intraception Opposition to the Although leisure is a fne thing, it
subjective, the imaginative, is good hard work that makes life
the tenderminded interesting and worthwhile.
Superstition and The belief in mystical Although many people may scoff,
stereotypy determinants of the it may yet be shown that astrology
individual’s fate; the can explain a lot of things.
disposition to think in rigid
categories
(continued)
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Table 10.2 (continued)
Facet Description Example item
Power and Preoccupation with No insult to our honor should ever

‘toughness’ dominance–submission, go unpunished.
strong–weak, leader–
follower dimension
Destructiveness Generalized hostility, No matter how they act on the
and cynicism vilifcation of the human surface, men are interested in
women for only one reason.
Projectivity The disposition to believe To a greater extent than most
that wild and dangerous people realize, our lives are
things go on in the world governed by plots hatched in
secret by politicians.
Sex Exaggerated concern with The sexual orgies of the old
sexual ‘goings-on’ Greeks and Romans are nursery
school stuff compared to some
of the goings-on in this country
today, even in circles where
people might least expect it.
A person who strongly agrees with such statements is thought to be highly authoritarian
or fascistic, and the items shown above also seem to imply highly conservative attitudes –
although it will be shown later that this is not necessarily the case. The scale was conducted
without using factor analysis, but it has been found that the items form a single factor, much
as expected (Krug, 1961). Of course some items now look extreme or dated and some (not
shown above) are downright offensive to minority groups. In addition, agreeing with an item
always implies authoritarian views whereas it is advisable to ensure that some items are
phrased in the opposite direction, as described in Chapter 8. Hence alternative questionnaires
have been developed by Wilson and Patterson (1968), Kohn (1972) and Ray (1979) amongst
others. Some of these scales expand the scope of the concept somewhat to include ‘Anti-
hedonism’ (the belief that enjoying oneself is somehow wrong), Militarism (for example,
supporting nuclear weapons) and Religiosity (belief in the importance of some form of
conventional religion, which is not necessarily the same as having religious faith oneself).
Authoritarianism is also near-identical to rigid thinking or ‘Dogmatism’ (Rokeach, 1956;
Plant, 1960) which is reluctance to admit that one has made a mistake, or to take corrective
action. An updated version of Rokeach’s Dogmatism scale may be found in Shearman and
Levine (2006); it contains items such as ‘People who disagree with me are usually wrong’.
Who could argue with that?

Consider whether Authoritarianism always indicates ‘right-wing’ political
attitudes. Is it possible to be an authoritarian anarchist, do you think?
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Correlates and origins of authoritarian attitudes

Social Dominance Orientation, the preference for unequal inter-group relations, has been
extensively studied by social psychologists and it plus Conservatism is a potent predictor of
‘generalised prejudice’ against outgroups (Hodson et al., 2016). It also found that correlations
between racist attitudes and the Big Five personality factors are entirely mediated by
authoritarianism (Duriez and Soenens, 2006). In other words, the only reason that
Conscientiousness and Openness correlate with racist attitudes is because both of these traits
also measure Authoritarianism to some extent.
Where do these attitudes originate? It has been found that the behaviour of preschool
children correlates substantially with their levels of Authoritarianism two decades later (Block
and Block, 2006). This suggests that authoritarian attitudes do not develop as a result of
prolonged exposure to family role models during development. Could they be passed on
through the genes? On the face of it this seems unlikely, yet several studies (e.g., Ludeke et al.,
2013) show clearly that this is the case. The heritability of authoritarian attitudes is about
0.57; infuences outside the family also affect it whilst the infuence of the family environment
is near-zero. Chapter 15 explains how we know this. Thus studying family dynamics may not
be useful if one wishes to understand the origins of authoritarian attitudes, which must come
as an unpleasant shock to students of sociology.
Still more surprisingly, Authoritarianism/Conservatism is also linked to rather low-level
aspects of brain function. Suppose that participants in an experiment are asked to press a button
every time that a cross appears on a screen. This is a very simple task to learn and soon becomes
automatic. However, suppose that a second condition is now introduced: for example, if a sound
is played when the cross appears, the person should not make any response. Most trials in the
experiment involve the cross appearing in the absence of sound (a ‘go’ trial) and just a few
involve the inhibition of this response, indicated by the sound (‘no-go’ trials). So from the
participant’s point of view, the ‘normal’ response is to push the button when the cross appears,
except when the presence of the sound indicates that no response should be made. This task is
quite diffcult to perform accurately and everyone sometimes pushes the button even though the
presence of a sound indicates that they should not do so. Amodio et al. (2007) recorded electrical
activity from the brain during this task and focused on the peak of electrical activity which
occurred approximately 50ms after the incorrect response (see Figure 10.1).
The voltage recorded 50ms after the incorrect response was correlated with authoritarian
attitudes (r=–0.59, N=43, p<0.001) with the more liberal individuals showing the largest drop
in voltage. The authors’ analyses suggest that this electrical activity originates in the dorsal
anterior cingulate cortex. This aspect of personality is surprisingly strongly linked to a rather
basic neural process – where more authoritarian individuals showed a smaller response than
liberals when they fail to inhibit a response. Other researchers have found similar results (e.g.,
Weissfog et al., 2013).
Authoritarian attitudes may be extremely important in everyday life. Norman Dixon’s
(1976) masterful review of military history shows that they lie at the very heart of military
incompetence. He shows that high-ranking army offcers from around the world have
consistently made bad decisions to which they stick rigidly, even when all the evidence shows
that they are making a terrible mistake. Their subordinates’ respect for authority seems to
stop them speaking out, and catastrophic loss of life is the frequent result. Furthermore, Dixon
argues that authoritarian young offcers are much more likely to be promoted to senior posts
(where they can do more harm) than young offcers who think for themselves.
Authoritarian attitudes are also associated with attitudes to out-groups, and because most
people identify with the conventional society, in the West authoritarian individuals show
199
Figure 10.1 Brain electrical activity of liberal (solid) and conservative

(dashed) personality types following an incorrect response
(adapted from Amodio et al., 2007)
negative attitudes towards those who seem to threaten the stability of society (e.g., freedom
fghters or demonstrators; Duckitt, 2006). Likewise ‘conventional’ authoritarian men belittle
women, tend to show higher levels of sexual aggression (actual self-reported behaviour, not
just attitudes), as well as believing that rape is a myth and showing other misogynistic beliefs
and attitudes (Walker et al., 1993). Authoritarian attitudes are also involved in developing
prejudiced views of minority groups – although social dominance is also important, as shown
by Ekehammar et al. (2004). Such issues fall within social psychology, however, and so are
not considered in detail here.
Authoritarian attitudes and the Big Five personality traits

It has been found that authoritarian attitudes are negatively correlated with Openness and
have a positive correlation with Conscientiousness and Extraversion; Heaven and Bucci
(2001) found the correlations to be –0.40, –0.32 and +0.17 respectively, a fnding which agrees
with later research (e.g., Nicol and De France, 2016). I cannot fnd a study which performed
a regression analysis, but as these relationships are quite modest, the amount of overlap
between personality and authoritarian attitudes is probably statistically signifcant but not
substantial. A little summing of squares shows that if we assume that the three personality
traits are uncorrelated, taken together they only explain a third of the variation in
Authoritarianism.
200
Conclusions
Conservatism/authoritarianism is an aspect of personality which is modestly related to
Conscientiousness and low Openness to Experience. It can be used to predict several aspects
of real-world behaviour, but for me the surprising thing is that it shows such a substantial
heritability (one of the largest that has so far been discovered) and clear links to neural activity.
It is clear that individual differences research can exorcise myths about the social origins of
this attitude, at least.
Alexithymia
Alexithymia is a term used to describe the problem which some people experience when
processing emotions. It originated in the study of clinical patients, but more recent research
has shown that it also shows up as a personality trait in ‘normal’ individuals. As with the
other traits we have discussed, people vary in the extent to which they show Alexithymia.
According to Taylor (1984) Alexithymia has four main characteristics:
l Problems identifying feelings, or recognising why one experiences a particular feeling

l Diffculty describing feelings to others. This is not unwillingness to describe feelings, but
the inability to do so
l External thinking, focusing on external facts rather than internal feelings, and (perhaps)
l A lack of imagination, fantasies, daydreams and suchlike.
These four aspects of Alexithymia can be assessed using a structured interview (Bagby
et al., 2006) though most researchers capture the frst three characteristics by the Toronto
Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) which is a 20-item questionnaire (Bagby et al., 1994). An earlier
version of this questionnaire also contained items measuring imagination, but these were
dropped as they did not load on the main Alexithymia factor.
Table 10.3 shows some sample items from the TAS-20.
Table 10.3 Six items measuring three facets of alexithymia (from Bagby
et al., 1994)
Facet Sample items
Identifying feelings I don’t know what’s going on inside me.

When I am upset, I don’t know if I am sad,
frightened, or angry.
Describing feelings It is diffcult for me to fnd the right words for my
feelings.
It is diffcult for me to reveal my innermost feelings.
even to close friends.
Externally oriented thinking I [do not] fnd examination of my feelings useful in
solving personal problems.
I prefer talking to people about their daily activities
rather than their feelings.
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Preece et al. (2018) have recently developed the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire which
taps the ability to differentiate between and describe positive emotions as well as the negative
ones (e.g., ‘when I’m feeling good, I can’t tell whether I’m happy, excited, or amused’, ‘When
I’m feeling good, if I try to describe how I’m feeling I don’t know what to say’). It forms the
same facets as the TAS and may supplant it in the future.
Vorst and Bermond (Vorst, 2001; Bermond et al., 1999) suggest that Alexithymia has an
emotional, as well as a cognitive aspect. They have developed an alternative questionnaire
which measures the three facets of Alexithymia shown above plus two others. These are
‘reduced fantasising’ (described above) and ‘reduced experiencing of emotional feelings’.
However whilst their two new facets correlate together modestly (0.24 in one sample and 0.37
in another) their correlations with the three original facets are small (all less than 0.25, and
frequently close to zero). Preece et al. (2017) found that these two new facets do not belong
to the same factor as the original three, and so argue that it is best to measure the trait using
the TAS or Perth scales.
Alexithymia and the Big Five personality traits

Is Alexithymia similar to other traits? According to a meta-analysis (Baranczuk, 2019)
Alexithymia scores are only feebly related to the Big Five personality traits. Its largest
correlations are with Neuroticism and Openness (ρ=0.27 and –0.27) followed by Extraversion
(ρ=–0.22), Conscientiousness (ρ=–0.20) and Agreeableness (ρ=–0.12), so overall there is rather
little overlap between Alexithymia and the Big Five traits (remember that a correlation of 0.25
implies that the two traits share 0.25 × 0.25 = 0.0625 or 6.25% of their variance). The two
emotional facets identifed by Vorst and Bermond (fantasy plus experiencing emotion) do not
show large correlations with the Big Five either – the only signifcant correlations being with
Openness (r=–0.26) and Neuroticism (r=–0.18). It is clear that Alexithymia is a narrow trait
which is rather different from the major personality factors.

What other trait with which you are familiar might be expected to have a
substantial correlation with Alexithymia?
Origins of Alexithymia
How does Alexithymia operate? One suggestion for processing emotions is as follows.
Emotions are considered to be generated via a valuation system where: an emotion

inducing stimulus is present (situation stage; e.g., a snake is in the room), the individual
focuses their attention on the stimulus (attention stage; e.g., looking at the snake), they
appraise the stimulus in terms of what it is and what it means for their goals (appraisal
stage; e.g., this snake in the room is bad for the goal of staying alive), and an emotional
response results (response stage; e.g., fear).
(Preece et al., 2017)
These authors suggest that the externally oriented thinking affects the ability of a person to
focus their attention onto an emotion generated by some event; ‘they follow a robot-like
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existence, going through life in a mechanical way, almost as if they are following an instruction
book’ (Taylor, 1984). Then problems with identifying and describing feelings affect their
ability to correctly appraise the emotion. Preece et al. call this the ‘attention appraisal’ model,
and further suggest that people who are high on Alexithymia only experience rather
undifferentiated emotions (good/bad) whereas those who are low on the trait can make more
nuanced distinctions – e.g., excited/anxious.
ExERCISE
How might you test whether the attention-appraisal model of Alexithymia

is correct?
Mechanisms of Alexithymia
Several authors have also tried to understand the mechanisms underlying Alexithymia by
using psychophysiological data. For example, Peasley-Miklus et al. (2016) measured the
extent to which heart-rate speeded up when participants imagined themselves in various
scenarios which were read out to them on headphones; these were designed to induce feelings
of joy, anger and fear together with a neutral control condition. Alexithymic individuals did
not show an increase in heart rate when imagining themselves in emotional situations, whereas
the hearts of individuals with low Alexithymia speeded up in this condition. This study also
found that the Alexithymic individuals were perfectly able to tell whether the various scenarios
should make them feel positive or negative emotions – they just did not seem to feel the
emotions physiologically. Perhaps low-Alexithymia individuals were able to pick up bodily
cues to alert them to the presence of emotional content which needs to be identifed, whilst
Alexithymic individuals focus on outer, rather than internal, cues.
If Alexithymics have problems ‘listening to their bodies’ (interoception), does this generalise
to non-emotional situations? For example, do they fnd it diffcult to tell when they are hungry,
or too hot/cold? A study by Brewer et al. (2016) suggests that they do, although there are
problems with one of the questionnaires used, and so this study should be treated with caution.
However work by Murphy et al. (2018) supports the link between Alexithymia and poor
interoception. In one task they asked participants to blow into a ‘peak fow meter’ which
measured the speed at which they could breathe out. Having established their maximum fow,
participants were asked to blow at various fractions of this rate (e.g., 30%, 50%) under two
conditions: normally, when they could hear their breath and wearing headphones which
played ‘white noise’ (a sound rather like the rushing of the sea) to prevent them using sound
to help them estimate how much they had exhaled. It was expected that Alexithymic
participants would rely more on external cues (sound) rather than internal cues (from the
lungs), and so would perform less accurately when wearing headphones. This is what was
found. A signifcant difference between conditions was found for the Alexithymic participants,
and no difference for those low on the trait.
They also gave volunteers a ‘standard’ bucket of rice to hold at arm’s length for a few
seconds. This was replaced with an empty bucket, and rice was poured in until the person
said ‘stop’ when they believed that the bucket weighed the same as the standard. Performance
correlated –0.3 with Alexithymia. (An obvious problem with this design is that memory is
involved; why not just use both hands?) In another task, participants were asked to identify
which of seven concentrations of salt-water tasted the same as a standard solution. Once
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again, Alexithymic individuals underperformed – presumably because they could not

accurately remember what the ‘standard’ tasted like. These experiments are important because
they seem to show that inability to pay attention to one’s bodily state is a key element of
Alexithymia. For if one cannot recognise that one’s heart is pounding (perhaps indicating fear
or excitement) then obviously one cannot tell whether one is feeling either of these emotions,
let alone naming which one it is. Another paper by Murphy et al. (2017) shows that
interoceptive ability increases with age, and suggests that it may be related to a number of
problem behaviours in adolescence and beyond.
Defcits in interoception may not be the whole explanation for Alexithymia. It has been
found that Alexithymics have problems recognising emotions (e.g., from pictures) or imagining
how they (or others) would feel in a particular situation (Lane et al., 1996; Lewis et al., 2016).
Unfortunately, however, this type of research becomes complicated because Alexithymia
frequently occurs in conjunction with autistic-like traits; these involve not being able to
understand or describe which emotions other people experience, together with a lack of social
and communication skills. Thus in experimental work (such as Murphy’s) it is normal to
measure autistic traits as well as Alexithymia, to ensure that individual differences in
performance are related to Alexithymia, and not autistic traits.
It has been found that oxytocin (a hormone and neurotransmitter) can help Alexithymic
individuals to recognise emotions in others (Lewis et al., 2016) – although it seemed that only
negative and intense emotions showed this effect, and these authors did not control for autistic
traits. Nevertheless they suggested that oxytocin may have some therapeutic potential.
Interestingly, a literature review by Quattrocki and Friston (2014) suggests that oxytocin
operates by affecting interoception in many modalities, and suggesting a biological theory
which might explain individuals in interoception and hence, perhaps, Alexithymia. Samur
et al. (2013) outline some other therapeutic approaches.
Conclusions
Alexithymia is an interesting condition which appears to be related to, but distinct from,
Emotional Intelligence, and which has rather little in common with the Big Five personality
traits. It is perhaps surprising that it is so closely related to a general lack of awareness of one’s
bodily state.
The Dark Triad

This is the term coined by Paulhus and Williams (2002) when describing three personality
traits which had been identifed and researched some years previously. The Dark Triad of
personality traits consist of Machiavellianism (manipulating others for one’s own beneft),
Narcissism (grandiose pride; grossly over-valuing one’s abilities or personal qualities) and
Psychopathy (remorseless aggression). Each of these will be considered separately, and then
some common features and links with behaviour will be outlined.
Machiavellianism
It is necessary . . . to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and
so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always fnd someone
who will allow himself to be deceived.
(Machiavelli, 1532/1927, Chapter XVIII)
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Niccolò Machiavelli wrote ‘The Prince’ in 1532 to give advice as to how to seize political
power and maintain it at all costs. Deceit, murder, threats, fattery and manipulation all
feature prominently; in short, the book contains advice on how best to advance oneself and
make others do what you want – especially when it does not beneft them. Of course we all
sometimes need to persuade others to do things, and we have all sometimes been manipulated
into doing things which beneft someone else; few people would want to teach a frst-year
statistics course or lend money, for example.
If some people are consistently more manipulative than others, then Machiavellianism
might be a personality trait. Christie and Geis (1970) summarised their research programme
which saw them explore historical treatments of persuasion from many cultures. Based on
this they hypothesised that highly manipulative individuals would have four characteristics.
1. They would show little warmth or emotion in interpersonal relationships, as manipulation

of others would be easier if they were regarded as ‘things’ rather than people. Having
little empathy for one’s victims makes it easier to use them for one’s own purposes; having
a relationship with them might make one sympathetic to their point of view, which would
make their manipulation more diffcult.
2. They would not be authoritarian, in that they would have no great concern about right
and wrong, or respect for conventional morality. Given that their aim is to manipulate
and use others, moral concerns would become a hinderance.
3. They would not show gross psychopathology. For example, they would not be out of
touch with reality (diagnosed with schizophrenia, or high on Schizotypy) as they need to
be able to calculate how best to use other people to achieve their goals. Likewise, someone
who was extremely anxious or depressed might make cognitive errors which would
impair their ability to manipulate others.
4. They would focus on short-term goals, rather than having a grand ideological commitment.
Taking advantage of every opportunity which presents itself might be more effective than
trying to reach some long-term objective.
As part of this research they developed several scales which encapsulated many of the
policies suggested by Machiavelli and others. Several questionnaires were developed, of which
the most popular are the 20-item Mach-IV for adults and the Kiddie Mach scale for children,
some items from which are shown in Table 10.4. It has been suggested that these fall into
three facets: interpersonal tactics, cynical views and utilitarian morality as shown – although
the utilitarian morality facet consists of only two items in the Mach-IV.
The Mach-IV is widely used, and a good modern description of its history, factor structure
and applications is given in Monaghan et al. (2016). These authors identifed the ‘interpersonal
tactics’ and ‘cynical views’ facets from a factor analysis of the items, found little evidence that
the ‘morality’ facet was viable and developed a 10-item scale to measure the tactics and views
facets. They also found that, contrary to Christie and Geis’s predictions, highly Machiavellian
individuals had above-average scores on scales measuring depression, anxiety and thought
dysfunction. This last fnding makes sense with hindsight; after all, holding cynical, suspicious
views seems rather similar to being paranoid.
Machiavellianism scales sometimes predict everyday behaviour – for example bullying in
the workplace (Pilch and Turska, 2015) and cheating on one’s sexual partner (Brewer and
Abell, 2015) which would seem to be a consequence of a lack of empathy. Whilst
Machiavellianism is linked to acceptance of morally dubious business activities (Mudrack and
Mason, 1995), it is not a particularly good predictor of how well one performs at work. This
might be because Machiavellian tactics are only effective if others do not realise that they are
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Table 10.4 Some items from the Mach IV and Kiddie Mach question-
naires (Christie and Geis, 1970)
Facet Scale Item
Interpersonal Mach IV The best way to handle people is to

tactics tell them what they want to hear.
Kiddie Never tell anyone why you did
something unless it will help you.
Cynical views Mach IV Most people forget more easily the
death of a parent than the loss of
their property.
Kiddie Most people can be easily fooled.
Utilitarian Mach IV People suffering from incurable
morality diseases should have the choice of
being put painlessly to death.
Kiddie Sometimes you have to hurt other
people to get what you want.
being manipulated; political candidates, for example, need to appear trustworthy even though
they are probably not. Fehr et al. (1992) summarise a number of early studies which show,
amongst other things, that highly Machiavellian individuals are convincing liars who are good
at persuading others in bargaining situations, more aggressive (punishing a confederate of the
experimenter who stole money from them), more likely to enter business than ‘helping professions’
such as social work . . . in short, people often seem to behave as predicted by the theory.
Machiavellianism, the Big Five and other traits

Machiavellianism can be very substantially (negatively) correlated with Agreeableness when a
Big Five questionnaire is administered to students (r=–0.62; DeShong et al., 2017). It also
shows a substantial negative correlation with Conscientiousness (r=–0.44) and smaller, but
signifcant, correlations with Neuroticism (r=0.34) and Extraversion (r=–0.29), and taken
together a regression analysis shows that the Big Five personality factors explain a sizeable
amount (67%) of the person-to-person variation in Machiavellianism. Some researchers (e.g.,
Paleczek et al., 2018) report much smaller correlations in employees, perhaps because of
workers’ reluctance to admit to manipulative behaviour, low conscientiousness, etc. Intelligence
also correlated signifcantly with Machiavellianism (though not with the other two Dark Triad
traits) in Polish school students (Kowalski et al., 2018) which makes sense, as plotting how to
advance oneself at others’ expense requires a certain degree of abstract thinking. Machiavellianism
may also be associated with Alexithymia (Wastell and Booth, 2003). They explain this fnding
by arguing that Alexithymic individuals (who cannot identify emotions) cannot recognise that
other people have feelings, and so see nothing wrong in manipulating them.
Machiavellianism was ‘rediscovered’ in the early 21st century, and is now often studied
alongside Narcissism and Psychopathy as part of the ‘Dark Triad’ of personality traits
described below.
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Narcissism
Narcissism is excessive interest in oneself – being self-absorbed, having ‘infated, grandiose,
or unjustifed favorable views of self’ (Bushman and Baumeister, 1998). Such a person will
regard themselves highly, but will also be fragile and highly sensitive to threat. For example,
Bushman and Baumeister’s study showed that those high on Narcissism lash out aggressively
when criticised. Most attempts to measure Narcissism use items designed to capture the main
features of the clinical ‘narcissistic personality disorder’, but in a somewhat milder form so
that they apply to normal individuals. These include items designed to measure:
l a grandiose sense of self-importance and uniqueness

l preoccupation with fantasies of success
l demanding constant attention and admiration
l expecting special treatment, as a right
l exploiting others.
The 40-item Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-40; Raskin and Hall, 1981) is widely
used, and researchers have suggested that it forms anything between two and seven facets
(Grijalva et al., 2015b) although as the items in facets tend to have very similar meanings it
may be safest to consider just the overall score. The items in Table 10.5 show the three facets
of the NPI-40 identifed by Ackerman et al. (2011).
Some researchers have drawn a distinction between ‘grandiose’ and ‘vulnerable’ forms of
Narcissism – vulnerable Narcissism representing the sensitivity to criticism and threat
mentioned above (Campbell and Miller, 2011). Vulnerable Narcissism is absent from scales
such as the NPI-40 but can be measured by items such as ‘I am misunderstood, mistreated,
and deserve a break’ and ‘I am jealous of people who look better than I do’ (Derry et al.,
2019). These researchers are amongst many who found that grandiose and vulnerable
Table 10.5 Six items from the NPI-40 (Raskin and Hall, 1981)
Facet Item no, in NPI-40
Leadership/Authority 1 I have a natural talent for

infuencing people.
5 If I ruled the world, it would
be a much better place.
Grandiose Exhibitionism 4 I know that I am good
because everybody keeps
telling me so.
7 I like to be the centre of
attention.
Entitlement/ 13 I fnd it easy to manipulate
Exploitativeness people.
14 I insist upon getting the

respect that is due to me.
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Narcissism are uncorrelated, and so it is not sensible to combine scores on these two traits.
However most research uses scales which just measure grandiose Narcissism. It shows a
number of correlations with everyday behaviour; high scorers show aggression and conduct
disorder at school (Barry et al., 2003; Washburn et al., 2004). The problems are not confned
to school, as university students (particularly the younger ones) with high scores say that they
are more likely to cheat in examinations and assignments (Brunell et al., 2011). In the
workplace Narcissism is related to leadership as rated by both self and others (Judge et al.,
2006) although interestingly this is limited to ratings of leader emergence (‘who you would
want to lead you’) and not to the effectiveness of leadership. People high on Narcissism
think they are wonderful and so self-promote, but do not perform particularly well. Grijalva
et al. (2015a) show that high-scorers appear as leaders because they are just more extraverted;
they also show that a moderate level of Narcissism is best for effective leadership in
organisations. Judge et al. also show that Narcissism accompanies ‘workplace deviance’, for
example stealing or playing cruel pranks. This presumably stems from their self-confdence,
sense of entitlement and their need to exert authority.
Narcissism and other personality traits

Narcissism correlates 0.46 with Extraversion (Lee and Ashton, 2005) and Ackerman et al.
(2011) also found a correlation of –0.35 with Agreeableness but not with the other Big Five
traits. It also correlates substantially (r=–0.53) with the HEXACO Honesty-Modesty scale, a
fnding which excites Lee and Ashton (2005). However it can hardly be otherwise; the
‘Modesty’ facet of the HEXACO Honesty-Modesty scale correlates 0.62 with Narcissism, but
it contains items such as ‘I think that I am entitled to more respect than the average person
is’, which is almost identical to one of the NPI-40 items shown in Table 10.5. It is surprising
that the correlation between Narcissism and this facet is not even larger, given the similarity
of the items. The correlation between Narcissism and the other HEXACO facets range from
–0.22 to –0.48. Narcissism seems to strongly resemble the HEXACO Honesty-Modesty scale.
It too is part of the ‘Dark Triad’ of personality traits discussed below.
Psychopathy
Psychopathy is a personality trait which is thought to lie behind serious criminal offending,
the prototypical psychopath being someone (usually male) who is impulsive, cares only about
themselves, is indifferent to the feelings of others and who does not feel that society’s rules
apply to them. It was frst studied by Hervey Cleckley (Cleckley (1985) being the most recent
edition of a book originally published in 1941). It can be downloaded freely from https://
cassiopaea.org/cass/sanity_1.PdF. Cleckley was a psychiatrist, and the book presents numerous
case studies giving a fascinating insight into the habits and behaviour of these anti-social
individuals.
More modern research is based on the defnition of ‘antisocial personality disorder’ as laid
down by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 (‘DSM-III’) which shows psychiatrists
which behaviours indicate a particular psychiatric diagnosis. Hare’s (1991) Psychopathy
Checklist (Revised) is a 20-item rating scale designed for use by trained professionals with
male prisoners which was based on the DSM-III defnition. This is a commercial test and so
the items cannot be shown here; however Brazil and Forth (2016) reproduce items such as
‘Callous/lack of empathy’, ‘Juvenile delinquency’, ‘Parasitic lifestyle’ and ‘Short-tempered/
poor behavioral controls’ from an earlier version of the scale. Ratings are made by a trained
psychologist on the basis of an interview, and scrutiny of case-notes.
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Hare’s Self Report Psychopathy scale attempts to measure the same characteristics by self-
report; although it too is a commercial test, the items are paraphrased by Neal and Sellbom
(2012) whose work supports Hare’s claim that the scale measures four facets of Psychopathy –
interpersonal behaviour, affective reaction, lifestyle and antisocial behaviour. Boduszek and
Debowska (2016) make the sensible point that some of the behaviours measured by these
instruments are outcomes of Psychopathy (having a criminal record, etc.), and not indicators
of psychopathic traits. This is important, because it is hardly surprising to fnd that scores are
higher in young offenders than the general population given that the Psychopathy Checklist
includes items that explore whether the individual has a history of crime. If they had not
committed crimes, they probably would not be in prison! One needs to be careful when
interpreting studies which compare levels of Psychopathy in various groups.
The Levenson Self Report Psychopathy Scale (Levenson et al., 1995) is designed for use
with groups such as students or community samples, and is freely available. It has been revised
several times, most recently by Christian and Sellbom (2016), whose 36-item questionnaire
measures three facets of Psychopathy as shown in Table 10.6.
Scores on Psychopathy questionnaires have many real-life correlates summarised in an
excellent review by Dhingra and Boduszek (2013). Scores tend to be high in prisoners for
whom it also predicts re-offending, and violent behaviour – both inside and outside prison.
Specifcally those who carry out premeditated murders (rather than murdering when feeling
some strong emotion), rapists and sexual murderers and those who attack strangers may have
high scores, whilst paedophiles and those who sexually assault family members tend not to.
The link between Psychopathy and re-offending is very substantial. Five years after their
release 35% of low-Psychopathy offenders had re-offended, as compared to 78% of those
with high scores (Serin and Amos, 1995) and these relationships are explored further in
Chapter 17.
Psychopathy also helps to predict which psychotic patients are likely to behave violently
(Nolan et al., 1999; Rund, 2018). Although schizophrenia and Psychopathy may appear to
have some elements in common (for example, poor impulse control) which explains why there
is a relationship between scales measuring Schizotypy and measures of Psychopathy (Raine,
1992), it seems that the basic neural processes which underly impulse control are rather
different for the two groups.
Table 10.6 Three facets of psychopathy and some sample questionnaire

items (Christian and Sellbom, 2016)
Facet Sample items
Egocentric I enjoy manipulating other people’s feelings.

Success is based on survival of the fttest; I am not
concerned about the losers.
Callous I [do not] make a point of trying not to hurt others in
pursuit of my goals.
People are too emotional at funerals.
Antisocial Getting into trouble doesn’t bother me.
I know rules are there, but I don’t tend to follow them.
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There is a substantial literature which explores whether Psychopathy is related to brain

structure and/or function: for example, determining which parts of the brains of psychopaths
and controls are active when processing pictures of criminal or other ‘wrong’ activities
(Harenski et al., 2010). This literature suggests that activity in the amygdala may be linked
to Psychopathy, but it is fairly biological and beyond the scope of this chapter; a review by
Wahlund and Kristiansson (2009) is mercifully non-technical. Individual differences in the
structure and function of some parts of the frontal cortex may also be linked to Psychopathy
(Yang and Raine, 2009) but it is not always obvious what causes these individual differences
in brain structure or function (environmental trauma or genetic makeup, for example) or what
implications they have for understanding, treating or controlling these most violent and
callous individuals. Is the brain damaged as a result of the psychopath getting into fghts, or
does the brain structure cause the person to behave psychopathically?
To answer this, biological and genetic studies are arguably more useful than correlational
analyses. Do some children show any of the signs of Psychopathy at an early age, and if so
does this behaviour continue into adulthood? Several studies show that psychopath-like
behaviour in young children (e.g., cruelty, extreme lying, lack of guilt) frequently continues
into adulthood (e.g., Lynam et al., 2009) but it is important to stress that although this is a
strong and statistically signifcant relationship which may be of some practical importance, it
is far from perfect. Many children who show psychopathic behaviours will not turn into
criminals, whilst many who are not diagnosed in childhood will do so. Thus it would be quite
wrong to propose screening children or making decisions about their likely future behaviour
on the basis of childhood assessments (Hawes et al., 2018).

If children who show psychopathic symptoms also show high scores in
adulthood, do you think that this implies that there is a genetic basis to
psychopathy?
Psychopathy and other personality traits

One cannot correlate scores on scales measuring Psychopathy with those measuring the Big
Five traits, as some items are very similar in each questionnaire. When this issue of overlapping
items is addressed, the results are quite consistent; Psychopathy is associated with low
Agreeableness, low Conscientiousness, high Neuroticism and (sometimes) low Openness. The
Big Five personality factors explain 43% to 63% of the variance in Psychopathy in adolescents
(Lynam et al., 2005).
The Dark Triad: one trait or three . . . or four?

Paulhus and Williams (2002) observed that mild versions of Psychopathy, Narcissism and
Machiavellianism can be found in the general population. Do these three traits, which they
term the ‘Dark Triad’, form a single factor? Although some of the correlations between the
NPI and Mach-IV SRP were substantial (e.g., 0.5), scores on these questionnaires seemed to
have somewhat different correlations with measures of the Big Five personality traits, although
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these authors did not test whether the correlations were signifcantly different. (Just because
Narcissism correlates signifcantly with Extraversion, and Psychopathy does not, it does not
follow that the difference between the correlations is signifcant.) However all three traits
showed a signifcant negative correlation (~ –0.4) with Agreeableness. They concluded that
the Dark Triad consists of three distinct traits, all of which are characterised by disagreeableness.
Jonason and Webster (2010) developed a 12-item questionnaire (the ‘Dirty Dozen’) to
provide a quick measure of the ‘dark triad’ in the general population. The items are shown in
their paper, along with evidence for the validity of the scales. They show that the three scales
do not all measure a single ‘dark triad’ factor, although a hierarchical model with a ‘dark
triad’ factor at the top and factors of Psychopathy, Machiavellianism and Narcissism beneath
it ftted the data rather well. However signifcant problems have been identifed with the
Psychopathy scale, which seems not to capture the full richness of the concept, as discussed
below. There are other measures too, such as the SD3 (Jones and Paulhus, 2014).
Koehn et al. (2019) give a useful summary of the Dark Triad literature from an evolutionary
perspective, and like Paulhus and Williams make the case that although they are sometimes
highly correlated, the Dark Triad traits often show different correlations with other variables,
and so are distinct – in much the same way that anxiety and depression are distinct but highly
correlated traits which involve rather different physiological mechanisms, but which correlate
together to form a factor of Neuroticism.
The term ‘dark triad’ may be particularly appropriate, as people with high scores truly are
creatures of the night, as shown by their ‘owlish’ chronotype (Jonason et al., 2013). Preferring
to stay up late is signifcantly (albeit weakly) associated with Machiavellianism, and facets of
Narcissism and Psychopathy. These authors conclude ‘those high on the Dark Triad traits like
many other predators (e.g., lions, African hunting dogs, scorpions), are creatures of the night’ –
a comment which won them an Ig Nobel award for unlikely research in 2014.
Muris et al. (2017) performed a meta-analysis, and questioned whether the three elements
of the Dark Triad are equally important in predicting behaviour. They suggested that
Psychopathy is the ‘active ingredient’ which causes antisocial or criminal behaviour; the
reason that Machiavellianism and Narcissism may correlate with such behaviour is that they
may each measure Psychopathy to some extent. To test this it would be possible to perform
regressions (or structural equation modelling), determining whether the usual mixture of
Psychopathy, Narcissism and Machiavellianism predicts behaviour signifcantly better than
psychopathy alone.
Support for Muris’s idea also comes from some genetic analyses; details of how these are
performed are covered in Chapter 15. Psychopathy and Narcissism are largely inherited,
though factors outside the family also infuence them to a smaller extent (Vernon et al., 2008).
The picture is different for Machiavellianism which is infuenced almost equally by genes, the
family environment and other factors. Furthermore the genes which infuence psychopathy
also infuence both Machiavellianism and Narcissism, which makes Muris’s thesis plausible
at the genetic level.
Muris et al. also make some good comments about the scales used to measure the various
traits, observing that the Dirty Dozen ‘Psychopathy’ scale really only measures callousness. It
also shows much smaller correlations with other scales measuring Psychopathy than does (for
example) the Levenson scale (Miller et al., 2012), and so although the Dirty Dozen
questionnaire is widely used, short and convenient to administer, its Psychopathy scale, at any
rate, should be interpreted with caution. Alternatives such as the 27-item Short Dark Triad
(Jones and Paulhus, 2014) may be preferable.
More recently the ‘dark triad’ has turned into the ‘dark tetrad’ by adding a trait of sadism
to the mix (Mededovic and Petrovic, 2015) but this trait has not yet attracted as much
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attention as the original three. For the Dark Triad is currently a very popular topic in
psychology. The trait of Psychopathy certainly seems to explain why some people behave
violently, without remorse or regard for the rules of society. A literature search will also
show that the Dark Triad has also had some success in explaining a number of critical
outcomes (evolutionary and otherwise) including longevity, lifetime sex partners, lifetime
offspring, career success and relationship outcomes. That said, the concept has received
some criticism.
Furnham et al. (2013) point out that using the term ‘dark triad’ (or tetrad) over-simplifes
our view of people by suggesting that people can be positioned along a ‘good personality’ vs
‘evil personality’ axis. It should be clear from the above that this is an oversimplifcation, and
Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy are really rather different traits, involving
different psychological mechanisms and affecting different aspects of behaviour. People can
be ‘bad’ in many different ways! Another problem they term ‘construct creep’ where scales
are designed which are just too broad in content – for example, one long scale which
supposedly measures psychopathy appears to include items which also measure several rather
different aspects of personality (Miller and Lynam, 2012). In addition Persson (2019) shows
that the trait of Machiavellianism may be redundant, as Psychopathy and Narcissism together
do an equally good job of predicting behaviour, and that Machiavellianism is rather too
similar to Psychopathy. This is echoed by Watts et al. (2017) who found that there was little
empirical evidence that items measuring the Dark Triad formed factors as they should. Facets
of a Dark Triad trait frequently showed very different correlations with other personality
scales, making it diffcult to claim that they all measure the same dark trait, and different
questionnaires may measure different things. Perhaps the Dark Triad is an oversimplifcation
of some rather complex issues.
Summary
This chapter introduced some important theories which are of considerable clinical or social
importance. Many of the fndings also seem counterintuitive. For example, it is surprising to
fnd that authoritarian attitudes are not infuenced at all by the ethos of the family in which
one is brought up, but are infuenced by our genetic makeup and factors outside the family.
Likewise it is counterintuitive to learn that axe-wielding psychopaths and people diagnosed
with schizophrenia are not qualitatively different from the rest of us. We can tell this partly
because the questionnaires used to measure them overlap (often substantially) with
questionnaires measuring the ‘normal’ personality traits discussed in Chapter 6, and also
because the cognitive, biological and genetic processes found in the general population seem
to be much the same in clinical and anti-social groups. They differ in the degree to which these
processes operate, not the nature of the processes. This shows why exploring the basic
mechanisms underlying traits is essential for a proper scientifc grasp of personality. Without
understanding how and why people develop particular levels of a trait, and which biological,
cognitive, cultural and/or social mechanisms operate together to cause a trait to emerge in the
frst place, all we can do is describe personality – not explain it.
Further reading
Lenzenweger (2006a, 2006b) gives a good account of the nature of Schizotypy and its
relationship to schizophrenia and discusses a model for genetic and environmental infuences,
212
whilst Aaron et al. (2015) discuss some links between Schizotypy, Alexithymia and autism.
Brewer et al. (2016) give an accessible account of the link between Alexithymia and sensitivity
to physical feedback from one’s body. A good account of the older Conservatism/
Authoritarianism research is given by Altemeyer (1998), Choma and Hanoch (2017) explore
some interesting correlations between Authoritarianism, intelligence and presidential voting
behaviour and Jonason and Krause (2013) discuss some emotional defcits associated with
the Dark Triad, whilst Furnham et al. (2013) give a good overview of the real-life correlates
of the Dark Triad, as well as highlighting some problems with the topic.
SAQ 10.1
Only by studying the mechanisms which underlie traits can we develop a
proper scientifc understanding of how and why they develop and operate,
and the reasons why they may correlate with other traits and behaviours. If
Schizotypy is essentially a milder form of schizophrenia (rather than
qualitatively different) one would expect the underlying mechanisms to be
similar.
SAQ 10.2
Whilst high scores on conservatism scales are often thought to be related to
right-wing politics, it can be argued that it all depends on which group one
identifes with. If you see yourself as a law-abiding member of your
community, then submitting to the laws of society, cynicism, projecting, etc.
will lead to a dislike of radicals/anarchists, a belief that they are trying to
seize power to better themselves or that they try to undermine the structure
of the state. But what if one is an anarchist? Here the norm would be to try
to overthrow the state – so ‘submitting to the laws’ would involve rebellion,
‘cynicism’ = a belief that existing politicians are only there to better themselves,
‘projecting’ = the government manipulates people to stay in power, and so
on. So authoritarianism does not necessarily equate to right-wing attitudes.
SAQ 10.3
Several studies have found that trait Emotional Intelligence has a substantial
negative correlation with Alexithymia. Alexithymic individuals fnd it diffcult
to name or describe their emotions, and so it is hard to see how they could
possibly use them intelligently, as described in Chapter 7. The correlation
213
between the two traits is about -0.6 (Baughman et al., 2013) and interestingly,
the genes which infuence Emotional Intelligence also tend to infuence
Alexithymia. Part of the reason for this correlation between the two traits is
that a set of genes infuences both of them.
SAQ 10.4
Finding that the behaviour of quite young children can sometimes predict
Psychopathy in adulthood might at frst glance suggest that environmental
infuences in mid- and late childhood are not the sole reasons for such
behaviour. However it is possible that labelling a child as ‘high on Psychopathy’
at an early age will make others expect them to behave cruelly, etc. and so if
they do show high levels of the trait in adulthood this may be because the
child has been encouraged to behave in the way which others expect – a
‘self-fulflling prophecy’. Finding that early childhood behaviour is linked to
adult behaviour is not a sure-fre way of discovering whether Psychopathy is
passed on genetically, although it is consistent with this possibility. Likewise
it is quite possible that genes which infuence Psychopathy only become
activated in later childhood – so even if there was no relationship between
childhood behaviour and adult Psychopathy, genetic factors might still be an
important infuence on adult behaviour.
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Chapter 11
Biological, cognitive and social

bases of personality
Introduction
At the start of Chapter 6, we stressed that merely identifying the main factors of personality
does not imply an understanding of the underlying concepts and that trying to use such
factors as explanations for behaviour is dangerously circular. We suggested that in order to
use factors to explain behaviour it is necessary to show that the traits are much broader in
scope than the specifc questions posed in the questionnaires – for example, to show that a
trait measured by a particular personality questionnaire is just one manifestation of some
rather fundamental biological or social process that also affects other aspects of our
behaviour. This is why we delved into some biological mechanisms when exploring some
narrow traits in Chapters 9 and 10. The treatments given there were rather brief, as those
narrow traits, interesting though they sometimes are, do not form the main basis of modern
personality theory. In this chapter we therefore explore some theories that might explain
why we each show the personality characteristics that we do, according to the Eysenck and
Big Five models.
Learning outcomes
Having read this chapter, you should be able to:
l Show an understanding of Hans Eysenck’s biological theories of
personality.
l Demonstrate familiarity with studies which test these theories by
examining brain structure and function.
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Biological, cognitive and social bases of personality
l Outline the principles of reinforcement sensitivity theory and show an

understanding of how and why measuring BIS, BAS and FFFS (concepts
originally stemming from work using rats) may help us understand
individual differences in human behaviour.
We have seen in Chapter 6 how there is now quite good agreement between theorists about
two of the main personality factors (Extraversion and Neuroticism) – few would now disagree
that these are the two main personality traits. However, merely establishing the structure of
personality is only the frst step in any scientifc study of individual differences. Doctors have
known a lot about the structure of the human body (the location of the main organs) for
millennia, but it is only fairly recently that medical science has begun to understand how the
organs operate and interact. So it is with personality. The main dimensions having been
identifed, the really interesting questions involve trying to understand:
l what causes certain behaviours to vary together to form these traits

l what causes an individual to develop a particular personality.
One possible answer to the second question is that personality traits (or rather the potential
to show certain patterns of behaviour in certain situations) may, to some extent, be inherited
from our parents. Because exactly the same techniques are used to fnd the extent to which
intelligence is typically infuenced by genes, the family environment or other aspects of our
environment, or an interaction between genes and environment, these issues are considered
together in Chapter 15.
What, then, are the obvious possible determinants of personality? There are two main types
of theory. Social theories stress the importance of the environment in personality development.
For these theories, the prime determinant of the child’s adult personality is the nature of the
home in which children are raised. Such theories assume that newborns really are fairly similar
in their biological makeup and potential for personality development. They also have to
suggest that the environment (including social processes) is all important in maintaining adult
personality. Biological theories, by way of contrast, suggest that all children are not equal at
birth because of variations in their genetic makeup which lead to individual differences in the
structure and function of their brains and nervous systems. They stress the importance of
genetic factors and biological mechanisms (sometimes directly related to the amount of
activity in certain regions of the brain) in determining behaviour. Finally it is important to
consider the interaction between biological and social factors, for any biological predisposition
to behave in a certain way can only show itself given an appropriate environment; for example,
a child brought up in social isolation is unlikely to show many signs of Extraversion, even if
they are genetically predisposed to do so.
The problem with genetic analyses is that the biological mechanisms they identify are
not very specifc, unless we start looking at the effects of individual genes (and their
interactions) on personality – a feld known as molecular genetics. However most of the
literature addresses a much more general question – the extent to which our genetic makeup
as a whole infuences each personality trait. We will see in Chapter 15 that Extraversion is
moderately heritable – which basically just tells us that some aspect of our biological
makeup is linked to how extraverted we are. We can guess that the genes which are involved
are likely to infuence our brains – but as we know that many genes are involved and each
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gene affects a great number of brain and other systems, we cannot use this approach to
pinpoint exactly what is going on at the cortical level to cause some people who experience
some environments to become extraverted.
Studying brain damage presents similar problems. We can easily discover that personality
changes following damage to various parts of the brain (e.g., Leonhardt et al., 2016) but
although this may perhaps tell us which parts of the brain infuence personality, it does not reveal
what the underlying processes are – for example, whether a personality trait is linked to levels
of a particular neurotransmitter, or which neural circuits are involved. Much the same is the
case with studies of links between brain electrical activity and personality, which show that each
personality trait is lined to activity in a number of areas of the brain, and one area of the brain
is frequently associated with levels of more than one personality trait. For example, the amygdala
seems to be involved in both Neuroticism and Extraversion (Pang et al., 2016) and Extraversion
involves activity in a number of different brain regions (Adelstein et al., 2011). If these studies
have taught us anything it is that there is no single part of the brain which is responsible for a
personality trait. Matters are much more complicated than that. Identifying areas of the brain
which are more active for people with high scores on a trait than those with low scores (or vice
versa) is a useful frst step, but it is clear that identifying how the networks which connect
various brain areas are infuenced by personality is also likely to be important.
Social determinants of personality

Perhaps childhood experience is all important, as Freud, Rogers and Kelly (and also theorists
such as Bandura and Skinner) maintain. Freud would argue that the child’s psychosexual
development (overindulgence or frustration at a particular developmental stage) will lead to
the emergence of certain adult personality traits, as might the particular pattern of defence
mechanisms used, degree of Oedipal confict, degree of identifcation with a parent, as well
as specifc childhood experiences. Thus the personality characteristics that we observe in
adults may simply refect the adult consequences of different childrearing practices. The
problem is, of course, that these concepts are diffcult or impossible to assess, and so it is
diffcult or impossible to test this theory. Attempts to assess the main adult psychosexual
personality types by means of questionnaires such as the Ai3 (measuring the ‘anal personality’)
have only limited success and attempts to tie in adult personality types to critical events during
children’s psychosexual development have foundered, possibly (but not necessarily) because
of the diffculties encountered in obtaining good, clear data about how individual children are
weaned, potty trained, etc. (Kline, 1981).
For Rogers, the person’s view of their self, ideal self, etc., their self-consistency, congruence
and the extent of self-actualisation is all important. If a child is brought up in an environment in
which it feels that it is loved unconditionally by its parents (when bad behaviour is followed by
the message ‘I don’t like what you have just done’, rather than ‘I don’t like you’), then the child
will view itself as lovable and will grow up congruent and self-actualising. Thus it seems reasonable
to ask whether the main personality traits are themselves affected by parental attitudes.
At frst glance, the evidence seems to suggest that they are. For example, Coopersmith
(1967) found that children’s self-esteem depended on unconditional, loving acceptance of
the children by their parents, control using reward rather than punishment and clear
indications of what was and was not acceptable behaviour. It seems clear that self-esteem
is affected by the parents’ behaviour and since scales measuring self-esteem correlate with
extraversion and neuroticism (Kline, 1993), these two personality factors may also affected
by such social processes.
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Of course, there is a faw in these arguments. Suppose that self-esteem has a substantial
genetic component. In that case it is possible that children of parents who have high self-
esteem will also grow up to have high self-esteem because a predisposition to behave in this
way has been transmitted genetically and not because of the way in which parents with high
self-esteem behave towards their children. Contrariwise, if the family environment is all
important (as assumed in Coopersmith’s interpretation), then a social explanation is entirely
appropriate. Unfortunately, this is a problem which bedevils virtually all studies that attempt
to assess the impact of parental behaviour on personality or ability. It is vital that they should
consider the possibility that genes can infuence both the parents’ behaviour and the eventual
behaviour or personality of the children, and so they are discussed in Chapter 15.
Kelly’s theory is less than explicit about how and why a particular individual develops a
particular set of constructs and comes to construe him- or herself in a particular way. We
know that children’s construct systems become more complex and differentiated as they age
(Honess, 1979), but how and why children develop rather different construct systems does
not seem to be at all well understood – although I would be surprised if this was unrelated to
the variety of people and events to which the child were exposed (a stimulating environment)
and the perceived consistency of the behaviour of others (so allowing useful predictions to be
made). Truneckova and Viney (2015) give some excellent suggestions about how and why
constructs may develop – although as this work is based on case studies, it is not obvious how
it can be shown to be incorrect, and so it is not scientifc.

What is the main problem with any experiment that seeks to determine the
effects of upbringing on behaviour – for example, by using surveys to
determine whether certain forms of childrearing (e.g., loving acceptance of
children by their parents) lead to certain personality traits (e.g., high self-
esteem) in childhood or later life?
It is clear that determining the social infuences on personality is a remarkably diffcult

research question, for the following reasons:
l It is often very diffcult to collect accurate, quantitative information about the types of
social interaction experienced by children.
l Some theories (e.g., that of Kelly) never really attempt to explain how personality develops.
The notion that this is a social process is more of an assumption than a testable proposition.
l Just because certain parental behaviours accompany certain personality characteristics in
the offspring, it cannot be assumed that the parental behaviour causes the personality
characteristic to emerge. It is possible that some genetically transmitted personality traits
might generally lead to certain types of parenting behaviour, but that the genes, rather than
these behaviours, will cause similar traits to emerge in the children. Which of these
explanations is the correct one can only be determined by the experiments discussed in
Chapter 15.
l Quantifying social infuences is a particularly diffcult process. Those that will have most
effect on personality will (presumably) be those that take place over a long period of time
with the parents and other members of the family – in young children, at any rate.
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Fortunately, the methods of behaviour genetics allow us to determine the extent to which
the ‘family ethos’ infuences personality without having to assess the interactions in detail.
If it is assumed that parents generally treat their children fairly equally (an assumption
that research does show to be reasonably true), then the ‘family ethos’ should cause all
children in a family to develop similar personalities. By assessing the similarity of the
personalities of children within a family and comparing this with the similarity of
personalities between families it is possible to estimate the extent to which the family ethos
moulds personality.
However, there is another way of quantifying the effect of social variables, namely by
attempting to determine the extent to which biological variables can account for individual
differences in personality and assuming that the remainder is due to various types of
social infuence.
Biological bases of personality

The biological approach suggests that all nervous systems are not the same – there may be
individual differences in the structure and function of people’s nervous systems and this can
account for the emergence of personality traits. That is, any group of behaviours that vary
together (and are identifed as traits by factor analysis) do so because they are all infuenced
by some brain structure(s) or other physiological factors. The useful thing about such an
approach is that it is much easier to test empirically than are social theories. With modern
psychophysiological techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it is
easier to check whether individual differences in personality are reliably associated with
individual differences in structure and function of the nervous system than it is to attempt to
analyse social interactions that may have taken place years previously.
Of course, this begs the question of how and why individual differences in nervous system
structure and function themselves come about. It is quite possible that environmental factors
may affect the development of the nervous system, as they are known to do in the case of
malnutrition, premature birth or exposure to environmental insults such as prenatal alcohol
or drugs. In such cases environmental factors might affect the development of the nervous
system and hence personality and cognitive abilities later in life. The factors which can infuence
the structure and function of the developing nervous system are extensively researched, and
can include maternal diet, activity level and stress in addition to the more obvious ones listed
above (Marques et al., 2015). This is an important issue, but these are really two separate
research questions with neuropsychologists and developmental psychologists studying why
brains and other aspects of the nervous system vary, and individual difference psychologists
exploring how these variations relate to personality, intelligence, etc.

What I have painted here is a fairly ‘reductionist’ view of personality and
one with which some readers may feel uneasy. What are the objections to
looking for the roots of personality in the physiology and biochemistry of
the nervous system?
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Hans Eysenck (1967) put forward a general biological theory to explain the origins of
extraversion and neuroticism, deftly summarised and evaluated by Revelle (2016) with a more
detailed account being given by Mitchell and Kumari (2016). These sources can be strongly
recommended as additional reading.
Biological basis of extraversion

Eysenck’s theory of extraversion involves another structure at the base of the brain, known as
the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS). This fearsome-sounding structure simply
controls the amount of electrical activity that takes place in the cortex. It should also be
mentioned here, for completeness, that there are nerve fbres linking the ARAS with the limbic
system, so the two systems are not entirely neurologically independent. Perhaps as a consequence
of this, most workers fnd a correlation of about –0.3 between the Extraversion and Neuroticism
scales of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ). Eysenck proposed that:
l the ARASs of introverted and extraverted people operate at different levels, as a result of
which the cortices of introverted individuals are habitually much more electrically active
(‘aroused’) than those of extraverted people
l a moderate degree of cortical arousal is experienced as being pleasurable, whereas very
high or very low levels of cortical arousal are experienced as being unpleasurable.
Figure 11.1 shows the (hypothetical) levels of cortical arousal of extreme introverts and
extreme extraverts as the environment goes from unstimulating (e.g., sitting in a dark quiet
room doing nothing) to stimulating (e.g., listening to loud, complex music, with lots of
conversation and visual activity). When the environment is entirely unstimulating (point A on
the graph), introverted and extraverted people both dislike it and feel under-aroused (though
the Introverts are more aroused than the Extraverts). When the environment is a little more
stimulating so that the more introverted individuals feel at their best (at point B), the
extraverted individuals still feel under-aroused. As the environment becomes more and more
stimulating, those who are more extraverted enjoy it more and more, whilst introverted
individuals enjoy it less and less until Extraverts reach their preferred level of arousal at
point C. If environmental stimulation increases beyond this point, both Introverts and
Extraverts start to feel unpleasantly over-aroused.
Eysenck argues that, under quiet conditions (e.g., working in a library), extraverted
people – whose cortices are normally not very highly aroused – may experience unpleasurable
feelings since their level of cortical arousal is considerably below the point that is felt as
pleasurable. Therefore they do something about it – talking to others, listening to music on
headphones, taking frequent break for caffeine and conversation, and generally behaving in
ways guaranteed to infuriate their introverted colleagues. For the more introverted people are
naturally highly aroused and any further increase in arousal level is distinctly unpleasurable.
Extraverted individuals need a constant environmental ‘buzz’ to arouse their cortices to
pleasurable levels, whereas their introverted colleagues would fnd any such stimulation over-
arousing and hence unpleasurable.
It has been found that drugs that increase or decrease the level of arousal in the cortex also
affect the ease with which animals learn a conditioned response. This suggests another
extension of the theory and Eysenck claims that introverted people should therefore condition
more easily than those who are extraverted because of their higher levels of cortical arousal.
For example, if someone with low levels of extraversion has several unpleasant emotional
experiences in a particular setting (e.g., turning over an examination paper and not knowing
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Figure 11.1 Pleasantness of arousal at various levels of stimulation for

Introverts (broken line) and Extraverts (solid line)
any of the answers), he or she should be more likely than an extraverted individual to develop
feelings of fear, depression or anxiety when entering that room or to show avoidance behaviour.
These symptoms are conditioned emotional responses, which naturally suggests that behaviour
therapy is the technique of choice for removing them.
This is Eysenck’s theory of extraversion and it is clearly empirically testable. Measuring
electrical activity in the ARAS is admittedly diffcult (because of its position at the base of the
brain), but it is straightforward to measure the electrical activity of the cortex and the ease
with which classical or operant conditioning takes place, as will be seen later.
Biological basis of neuroticism

Eysenck viewed neuroticism as a factor of ‘emotionality’ – highly neurotic individuals will
tend to give extreme emotional responses (tears, fear) to life events that may well leave more
stoic, low-neuroticism individuals emotionally unmoved. Thus if some brain structure is
known to control the extent of such emotional reactions, it is possible that neuroticism may
229
simply refect individual differences in the sensitivity of this system to external stimuli. For
highly neurotic people, a small increase in negative stimulation (e.g., an unkind word from a
friend) is enough to trigger a full emotional response. For stable individuals, the emotional
response is activated only in response to a much larger change.
The limbic system is one of closely linked structures (including the hippocampus,
hypothalamus, amygdala, cingulum and septum) towards the base of the brain – Eysenck
sometimes refers to this system as the visceral brain. It has long been known to be involved
in the initiation of emotional activity. It affects the sympathetic branch of the autonomic
nervous system, which is often known as the ‘fight or fght’ mechanism, since its activation
can be viewed as preparing the organism for either of these two behaviours. Activation of
the sympathetic nervous system results in faster heart rate, increased respiration rate,
increased blood fow to the limbs, increased sweating and a closing down of the blood supply
to the gut and other organs that are not involved in urgent physical activity. Unpleasant
emotional feelings, such as fear, anxiety or anger, are also experienced. The terms Anxiety
and Neuroticism are closely linked, with Anxiety being a mixture of Neuroticism and low
levels of Extraversion (Eysenck, 1973). However, in this chapter I use the terms Anxiety and
Neuroticism interchangeably, since the correlation between them is about 0.7 (Eysenck and
Eysenck, 1985).
We know that anxiety can be assessed by questionnaires and that activity in the autonomic
nervous system can be assessed by a number of techniques. These include the psychogalvanic
response (PGR), in which the skin resistance is measured on a part of the body that is well
endowed with sweat glands. The burst of sweating that follows increased activity of the
autonomic nervous system leads to a decrease in electrical resistance, which can be measured.
Thus it is possible to test this theory directly, as people with high levels of anxiety should
produce more emotional physiological responses to moderately stressful stimuli (unpleasant
pictures, perhaps) than individuals with low anxiety levels.
Biological basis of psychoticism

Psychoticism is much less well understood and some researchers have suggested alternatives
to this trait: for example, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness in the fve-factor model
(Chapter 6) and the discussion of Sensation Seeking in Chapter 9. However, Eysenck noted that
levels of psychoticism were much higher in males than in females and that criminals and people
diagnosed with schizophrenia (both of whom tend to have high P scores) also tend to be male.
Therefore Eysenck suggested (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1985) that Psychoticism is linked to levels
of male hormones (e.g., androgens) and perhaps to other chemicals (e.g., serotonin and certain
antigens). Again, this theory (albeit rudimentary) is clearly testable.

How might one test whether Eysenck’s theory of psychoticism is correct?
An evaluation of Eysenck’s theories

Eysenck suggests that his three main personality dimensions may be directly linked to the
biological and hormonal makeup of the body. We may display certain patterns of personality
230
because our nervous systems work in slightly different ways and it is these individual
differences that are picked up by factor analysis and interpreted as personality traits. It is
tempting to argue that certain people ‘just are’ more extraverted because of the level of arousal
which their ARAS imparts to their cortex and that there is no need to consider any
environmental explanations at all.
However, even if individual differences in cortical activity were found to explain completely
the individual differences in Extraversion, this begs the question of why one person’s ARAS
works at a rather different level from that of another. Could this be infuenced by life events?
This is where genetic studies of personality (discussed in Chapter 15) are so useful, as they
can indicate the relative importance of biological and environmental determinants of
personality at any age.
Our understanding of brain structure and function has changed considerably since
Eysenck’s book was published in 1967. The theory also fails to take into account other
important phenomena, e.g., lateralisation. Zuckerman (1991) points to a huge body of
evidence from brain-damaged patients showing that personality change following damage to
the cortex depends on whether the left or the right hemisphere is affected and it seems that
Neuroticism is modestly related to difference in activation between the mid portion of the left
and right frontal lobes (Minnix and Kline, 2004). However, Eysenck’s theories do not
distinguish between the left and right hemispheres.
The great advantage of the biological theories is that they can be shown to be incorrect.
This is in stark contrast to many (one is tempted to say ‘most’) of the mechanisms suggested
by other theorists – terms such as self-actualisation, id processes, defence mechanisms, self-
congruence and so on are diffcult to defne and assess, and belong to models that are so
complex that they cannot easily be verifed. The simplicity of Eysenck’s model probably
means that it will be unable to explain the origins of personality perfectly, although one
should arguably prefer a simple but empirically verifable model to a complex model that
cannot be falsifed.
Research tools
Up until the 1990s the only tools which were available to explore individual differences in
brain structure were X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission
tomography (PET) scans. They showed the individual differences in brain structure and
activity (e.g., the amount of glucose which was being metabolised by various areas of the
brain), but could not show changes in activity over time, such as when a person viewed a
picture, completed a cognitive task or anticipated an electric shock.
In those days the only way of measuring change in brain activity over time was by the
electroencephalogram (EEG). This measures the electrical activity from several electrodes
which were placed onto the surface of the scalp. The hope was that these signals refected
electrical activity in the parts of the cortex directly below the electrodes. The EEG records
signals continuously, and so can be used when people perform different tasks; a technique
known as ‘Fourier analysis’ is often used. The best analogy for this is musical. If the sound of
a musical chord1 is analysed using Fourier analysis, the technique can decompose it and
identify how many notes are in the chord, and the pitch and loudness of each of them. When
applied to data from the EEG, Fourier analysis might show the rate of fring of neurones in
various functional areas of the brain (‘systems’) under various conditions. These days
functional MRI (fMRI) scans can explore how brain activity changes over time – although by
‘time’ we do not mean the thousandths of a second which can be picked up by the EEG, but
231
Figure 11.2 Recording EEG. Note how the rubber net holds the electrodes
in place
every few seconds. Some recent research focuses on the links between personality and the
connections between various brain structures
It is a straightforward (albeit expensive) matter to also measure people’s personality and
discover whether there are any systematic associations between brain structure and function –
either habitually (PET, MRI) or whilst participating in some experiment (fMRI, EEG).
Eysenck’s biological theory of personality:

empirical results
Extraversion
Studies of the genetic basis of Extraversion may be valuable for testing the broad idea that it is
linked to the biology of the nervous system. This does not, of course, test the specifc arousal
hypothesis already discussed. However, if Extraversion could be shown to be determined entirely
by the way in which children are brought up, then it is pointless looking for neuropsychological
correlates unless it can also be shown that the way in which children are reared infuences their
brain structure/function. This issue is covered in Chapter 15, which concludes that there is
evidence that individual differences in Extraversion have a substantial genetic component, and
so it is possible that it has links to the structure and/or function of the nervous system.
Extraversion and the electroencephalogram (EEG) By comparison with extraverted

people, one would expect introverted individuals, who show higher levels of arousal, to have:
l greater habitual levels of cortical arousal

l stronger responses to novel stimuli.
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The EEG is usually shown as a graph of voltage (Y-axis) against time (X-axis), and
Figure 11.3 (a) shows regular low-amplitude, high-frequency electrical activity. ‘Low
amplitude’ means that the changes in voltage from peak to trough in the graph are fairly
small, of the order of 25 to 100 microvolts (millionths of a volt). ‘High frequency’ means
that the voltage changes direction quite often. Low-amplitude brainwaves that change
direction with a frequency of between eight and 13 cycles per second are known as alpha
activity, and Fourier analysis can be used to determine the amount of alpha activity
which a person shows at a particular electrode. Alpha activity is typically found when
people are wide awake and alert, so the simplest possible test of Eysenck’s cortical arousal
hypothesis would merely involve assessing how cortically aroused people were (as indicated
Figure 11.3 Two EEG traces: (a) high-frequency, low-amplitude EEG trace,
indicative of alertness; (b) low-frequency, high-amplitude EEG
trace, indicative of relaxation
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by the EEG) and correlating this with their scores on a scale measuring Extraversion
when they are sitting quietly.
When careful studies are performed, relationships between EEG activity and Extraversion
can be found (Hagemann et al., 2009), although there are some negative results too. Gale
(1983) summarises the old literature. When sitting quietly doing nothing, people high on
Extraversion show lower levels of alpha activity than do those with low scores, which suggests
that they are less aroused, just as Eysenck predicted. When the experimental condition is made
more stimulating (e.g., solving a cognitive puzzle), the more extraverted individuals become
more cortically aroused, and the introverted ones less so (Fink and Neubauer, 2004), which
again supports Eysenck’s theory.
Extraversion and brain scans When people are shown ‘positive’ pictures (puppies, couples,
sunsets, etc.) whilst having their brains scanned in an fMRI machine, their levels of
Extraversion seem to infuence the amount of activity in areas such as the frontal cortex,
which ties in well with the EEG literature (Canli et al., 2001). There is also evidence that
Extraversion levels are linked to grey matter (brain cell) volume in the caudate nucleus. This
is a structure deep inside the brain (and so hard to explore using the EEG) which is known
to be involved in a great number of functions including reward and punishment, and which
is part of the dopamine system (Li et al., 2019) and there plenty of other studies too relating
the structure and function of other areas of the brain (e.g., the frontal cortex just behind the
eyes) to Extraversion. Many of these are summarised by Mitchell and Kumari (2016) who
conclude that the studies provide ‘compelling support that, as proposed by Eysenck,
individual differences in Extraversion and Neuroticism are related to the functioning and
structure of various brain regions’.
Sedation thresholds One rather crude way of assessing the activity of a cortex involves
determining the amount of a sedative drug required to make individuals unconscious (as
assessed by the EEG or lack of responsiveness to words). As the more introverted people are
more cortically aroused, they may require higher doses to make them unconscious (although
many other factors may also affect the required dosage). This is so – but only for people with
moderate or high Neuroticism scores (Claridge et al., 1981).
Extraversion and the dopamine system Researchers other than Eysenck have suggested
that Extraversion is linked to brain structures which use the neurotransmitter dopamine
(Depue et al., 1994). This is exciting, as it means that drugs which affect levels of dopamine
might behave differently according to whether people have high or low scores on an
Extraversion scale. Although Depue et al. unfortunately used a scale measuring ‘positive
emotionality’ and sensitivity to reward rather than Extraversion, it correlated substantially
with Extraversion (r=0.62). They studied a dopamine agonist (a drug which increases the
availability of dopamine to one type of receptor in the brain) and measured two outcomes:
blink rate and levels of prolactin (a hormone). Both of these are known to be sensitive to
dopamine levels, although by two different chemical pathways.
Positive emotionality had a very substantial infuence on how the drug worked. The drug
affected the blink rate and prolactin levels of everyone in the study as expected. However the
participants’ levels of positive emotionality/Extraversion had a huge infuence on both the size
of the effect (the amount that prolactin levels reduced) and the amount of time they took to
do so, the correlations being 0.75 and 0.89 respectively. The amount of time to reach ‘peak
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eye-blink rate’ following administration of the dopamine agonist was also signifcantly
correlated with Extraversion (r=0.83). It is clear that positive emotionality/Extraversion is
related to activity in parts of the brain which use dopamine.
Since that early work a host of other studies have come to much the same conclusion, using
different methodologies (see Wacker and Smillie, 2015). Scores on questionnaires measuring
Extraversion are linked to levels of dopamine activity in the brain, and areas of the brain
which are associated with Extraversion are frequently those which use dopamine (Mitchell
and Kumari, 2016). All these studies show that Extraversion has a substantial biological basis.
This is important, as it shows that Extraversion truly is a source trait, which refects individual
differences in our physical makeup. Scores on a simple questionnaire refect some rather
fundamental biological processes in our brains.

Why is it important to discover the processes that cause personality?
Neuroticism
There are several problems with Hans Eysenck’s (1967) biological theory of neuroticism.
1. First, the genetic component is not nearly as large as for Extraversion, which suggests
that a purely biological model may be inappropriate (see Chapter 15). That said, as
Neuroticism involves responses to threat and negative emotions, individual differences in
Neuroticism might be related to individual differences in the size of parts of the brain
which are known to process such material. Several studies suggest that it is. The amygdala
is a part of the brain which is known to process reactions to threat, and anxiety/depression
is related to the size of the amygdala in autistic children (Juranek et al., 2006), and those
with social anxiety (Machado-de-Sousa et al., 2014) although some studies fnd zero or
even negative correlations. This might be because these results are usually from small and
atypical samples of people whose brains are scanned for some other reason, or it might
be because a simple biological model is inappropriate. There are also some fMRI studies
which show that certain areas of the brain are active when people process negative
images, such as angry or crying people, spiders, guns and a cemetery and that the amount
of activity there is related to Neuroticism (Canli et al., 2001)
2. Second, empirical evidence now suggests that ‘arousal’ in the autonomic nervous system
is not nearly as simple as was previously thought. Different individuals express signs of
autonomic arousal in different ways. When frightened, some people may sweat, others
may show muscle activity (twitching or trembling), some will show increased heart rate
and others may show an increase in pupil size. Very few individuals show all these
responses at once (Kreibig, 2010). Thus, although almost all neurotic people claim to feel
sweaty hands, churning stomachs, pounding hearts and so on, when this is studied
empirically, the psychophysiological measures do not form a factor. Consistent differences
between the EEG measures (etc.) of low- and high-Neuroticism individuals are rarely
found (Fahrenberg et al., 1987).
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3. The literature shows that people with high Neuroticism scores sometimes tend to have
smaller physiological reactions to stress than emotionally stable people, as shown by
cortisol and heart-rate changes (Bibbey et al., 2013; Chida and Hamer, 2008). This is
counterintuitive and runs counter to Eysenck’s theory. However Bibby’s study measured
change in physiological reactions after a supposedly stressful laboratory task. If highly
neurotic individuals were stressed by the very prospect of taking part in the experiment,
their baseline scores might have soared as soon as they entered the laboratory, and so the
experimental task itself might not have been able to make them much more stressed. This
would lead to the fndings reported by Bibbey. As the study does not report the correlation
between baseline scores and Neuroticism this is mere speculation, however.
4. Another problem with Eysenck’s theory of Neuroticism is that it ignores cognition. As
Anxiety is a highly unpleasant emotion, it seems reasonable to suppose that people will
develop strategies for dealing with warnings of threat or danger and there is a substantial
literature on the use of coping mechanisms to deal with stress. Thus an information-
processing theory (rather than a biological one) might be more appropriate. Michael
Eysenck (Hans Eysenck’s son) has developed such a theory and there is now good evidence
that highly anxious people are hypervigilant. They explore the environment with their
senses and so show more eye movements, look out for threat-related stimuli in the
environment and, when they fnd them, process them more deeply. For example, Eysenck
and Byrne (1992) gave their volunteers a button to hold in each hand. They were shown
stimuli consisting of three words. One of these words was always ‘left’ or ‘right’ and the
participants were simply asked to look for this word (ignoring the others) and press the
appropriate button. The dependent variable was the time taken to press the button.
A range of distractor words was used. As well as various control conditions, various types
of threatening words (‘failure’, ‘murder’) were also shown. Highly anxious individuals
(a) responded more slowly overall to words (indicating that they were processing them
more deeply than the stable individuals) and (b) were particularly badly distracted by
physically threatening words. In another experiment, Byrne and Eysenck (1995) found
that highly anxious individuals were better able to search through a screenful of faces and
detect the threatening (angry) ones. There was no difference between the groups’
performance when searching for happy faces. Other theories have been developed too;
see Van Bockstaele et al. (2014) for a good review of the literature and experimental
evidence supporting such theories.
5. Weinberger et al. (1979) highlighted a major diffculty with assessing Anxiety/Neuroticism
using a questionnaire: what should be inferred if a person shows a low score? They found
that some people who obtained low scores on a Neuroticism questionnaire actually
showed quite marked physiological and behavioural signs of anxiety. They seemed to
experience anxiety, but denied this when completing the questionnaire. Their questionnaire
scores would thus be too low. Derakshan and Eysenck (1999) show that these individuals
seem to be genuinely out of touch with their emotions (alexithymic) rather than
consciously trying to mislead the experimenters. This paper was published before the
alexithymia literature was developed but nowadays it would seem sensible to screen
participants for alexithymia before involving them in such experiments.
Studies of the fve-factor model

Several researchers have explored whether size or activity in different areas of the brain are
linked to the Big Five personality traits – with generally encouraging results. For example,
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DeYoung et al. (2010) found that Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness and

Conscientiousness were linked to the size of various brain structures; Extraversion’s link to
the frontal cortex is in line with the other evidence discussed above, and Neuroticism was
linked to the size of areas which are sensitive to punishment and threat. They argue that
Agreeableness is linked to areas of the brain involved in the processing of social information,
whilst Conscientiousness was associated with areas involved in working memory and
executing planned action. Openness did not feature anywhere. The frst three of these
fndings (at least) make good sense, and suggest that a simple structural model of personality
may have merit.
Hsu et al. (2018) performed a two-part experiment which frst of all used fMRI techniques
to determine whether patterns of associations between various areas of the brain (‘functional
connectivity’ in participants who just rested quietly in the scanner) were linked to personality,
which they were. They then tested a different sample of people, measured the same features
of brain activity and tried to predict from this what their levels of Extraversion and Neuroticism
would be when they completed the NEO personality questionnaire. The correlations were
signifcant (r=0.22, and r=0.27). However this sort of work is complex, but whilst it is not yet
obvious how it translates into a theory of personality, it is clear that brain function, as well
as brain structure, is related to these two personality traits, at least.
Resting-state functional connectivity

More recently, techniques such as resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) have been
developed to determine how activity in one area of the brain infuences activity at another; in
other words how the various networks of activity in the brain interact. Van den Heuvel and
Hulshoff Pol (2010) give a fairly accessible account of the technique which involve a person
resting inside a fMRI scanner. It identifes neural networks which operate when people are at
rest. Individual differences in the strength of some of these connections have been linked to
personality. For example, previous literature had identifed six replicable networks in the
brain. Simon et al. (2020) determined whether scores on personality tests were linked to
individual differences in the strength of these networks, using a large sample with a wide range
of ages (age, intelligence, gender and other variables were statistically controlled for during
the analyses), and discovered that there were some statistically signifcant associations –
although the effect sizes were not large. Dubois et al. (2018) performed similar analyses and
discovered that only Openness and Extraversion seemed to be linked to individual differences
in network activity; they and Nostro et al. (2018) found rather different patterns of connections
were linked to personality for males and females, which is puzzling to say the least. Once
again, Mitchell and Kumari (2016) offer a reasonably accessible account of this literature,
which can get highly technical. Although they can so far only explain small amounts of
variation in some personality traits, these techniques can, for the frst time, allow us to relate
individual differences in personality to individual differences in neural network activity. This
must surely be the way forward.
Reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST)

Reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) is a modern, biologically based theory of personality
that stems from the work of Jeffrey Gray in the 1960s, and which tries to explain personality
by means of an individual’s reinforcement history. The biological basis of this work comes from
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three sources: observations of animals, examination of the effects of drugs on animal behaviour,
and examining the effects of brain stimulation or damage on animal behaviour.
Eysenck initially proposed that Extraversion and Neuroticism were independent
(uncorrelated) and so they were often represented as shown in Figure 11.4 (a).
Gray proposed that instead of placing the axes as suggested by Eysenck, they could be
spun round slightly as shown in Figure 11.4 (b) to give two main personality factors: one
indicating sensitivity to reward, the other sensitivity to punishment. Why? Gray’s background
was in animal psychology and by positioning the axes as shown, they better described how
animals (rats) behaved; RST is an animal model that has been extrapolated to people. As the
axes are just rotated (rather than introducing other dimensions of personality), it is easy to
transform scores from Eysenck’s questionnaire measures of Extraversion and Neuroticism
into scores on Gray’s two dimensions, using a little elementary trigonometry, although this
does not seem to be done in practice. (See the section on factor rotation in Chapter 19 if
these ideas seem a little strange.)
Rather than relating scores on personality tests directly to physiological measures, Gray
suggested that individual differences in the physiology of the nervous system, together with
the individual’s reinforcement history and their level of arousal, may determine the way in
which the components of the ‘conceptual nervous system’ (cns) operate. (CNS in capitals is
the abbreviation for the central nervous system, as usual.) According to Gray (1982), the cns
consists of various neurological systems that lead to three sets of behaviours shown by many
animals and by humans. The basic principle is very simple. How an animal or person reacts
to some entity (e.g., a dish of food, snake, person, statistics textbook) depends on (a) whether
the entity is perceived positively or negatively, (b) its proximity and (c) whether it is possible
to physically get away from it. Gray suggested that there are three main elements of the
conceptual nervous system, the Behavioural Approach System (BAS), the Flight-Fight-Freeze
System (FFFS) and the Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS). Humans are thought to differ in
Figure 11.4 Eysenck’s and Gray’s models of personality
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the level of environmental stimulation as each of these systems are activated and this shows
up as personality traits as discussed below.
The second source of evidence for the cns comes from the effects of drugs on animal
behaviour. For example, some drugs will stop animals from showing any interest in food and
inhibit the normal ‘cautious approach’ behaviour when encountering a novel object. Some
drugs alter the behaviour of rats after they have been given an electric shock; they do not avoid
the area/object in which the shock was delivered, neither do they run away as vigorously
following shock. Anthropomorphically, one might speculate that they feel less fear. Other
drugs cause animals to ‘freeze’, apparently unable to make decisions about what to do.
The third source of evidence comes from physiological studies, where the brains of
animals are stimulated or damaged. Their behaviour is then examined to determine which
brain areas seem to be associated with which aspects of the cns. This literature is discussed
by Corr (2008).

What are two main differences between Eysenck’s and Gray’s personality
theories?
The key point is that the various components (Gray calls them ‘systems’) of the cns each
produce their own distinctive behaviours and subjective feelings, such as pleasure or anxiety
or fear. These are states – they come and go in response to environmental events – but the
important thing about RST is that the various physiological systems that infuence our
responses to interesting or potentially dangerous objects are thought to ‘kick in’ at different
levels of environmental stimulation for different people. Take a social situation. Some people’s
approach behaviour (BAS) will be easily triggered and they will explore the room, interact
with everyone and show the behaviours which typify high Extraversion. Others will only
approach if there are strong environmental cues that it is safe to do so, for example, being
called over to join a group of others which implies there is no danger of being rejected. Yet
others are more likely than others to show the state anxiety response. Such a person will
therefore show a high score on a test measuring trait Anxiety, as they experience anxiety much
of the time, in response to life events that would leave some others unaffected. The habitual
sensitivity of the various parts of the cns should hence effectively determine a person’s
personality. In order to describe how an individual will behave in a particular situation, it is
also possible to consider the effects of particular stimuli on the various cns systems: the same
systems can explain both personality (how the person generally behaves) and mood/emotion
(resulting from the sensitivity of the components of the individual’s cns and the particular
stimuli being evaluated).
Gray’s theory has evolved considerably since it was frst proposed. The initial ideas
appeared in Gray (1970), were developed more fully in Gray (1982), revised by Gray and
McNaughton (2000) and then modifed again by McNaughton and Corr (2004, 2008b). The
differences are sometimes quite subtle but sometimes quite far reaching. To avoid confusion
this book will deal with only the most recent version of the theory.
In the latest versions of the theory, and for humans, it is thought that unexpected non-
reward is equivalent to punishment and that unexpected non-punishment is equivalent to
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reward. For example, if you are used to being given a birthday present by a relative, if s/he
does not give you a gift one year you will experience this in much the same way as you would
a punishment. Likewise, if you expect negative consequences from an action and these do not
happen, you will experience this in much the same way as reward. For example, if every time
you play a video game your character is killed at the same spot, you will feel a surge of
pleasure on an occasion when your character survives. These issues may sound obvious, but
strict behaviourists would make a distinction between non-reward and punishment; the rest
of us (and Gray) would be happy to talk in cognitive terms about people’s (and perhaps
animals’) expectations.
Behavioural approach system (BAS)

The BAS motivates people or animals to seek out potential sources of reward and also focuses
attention on signs of reward, making it more likely that new stimuli will become conditioned
onto the rewarding stimulus. If a cat has an unusually active BAS, she will focus on fnding
‘fun’ things to do (e.g., searching out leaves to play with, people to interact with, looking for
food) rather than sitting or sleeping. She will also learn which things are associated with
rewards (e.g., the rattling ham wrapper, or a word that means that she will be fed) more
readily than cats which show little activity their BAS. Pickering et al. (2008) discuss this
system in some detail.
The BAS is thought to be linked to the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain
(Schultz, 1998) and drugs that reduce the amount of dopamine available to brain cells (e.g.,
leva-dopa) lead to reduced motivation, reduced feelings of pleasure and weaker approach
behaviour. Volkow et al. (2002) show that drugs that increase the availability of dopamine in
the brain (e.g., haloperidol, Ritalin) have the opposite effect and lead to greater levels of
motivation and approach behaviour. All this ties in nicely with the discussion of links between
Extraversion and dopamine in humans, for if interactions with other people are rewarding,
one would expect people whose BAS is easily triggered by environmental events to socialise,
be impulsive (doing things because they think there is a chance that this may lead to a reward)
and be optimistic (forever looking out for signs of reward). It may also make them more
susceptible to rewarding events (e.g., the effect of recreational drugs, which may lead to an
increased chance of addiction). Thus the theory leads to clearly testable hypotheses, assuming
that we can measure individual differences in the strength of the BAS in humans.
As Extraversion and the BAS are both infuenced by dopamine, it is unsurprising that
questionnaires designed to measure them show a substantial overlap between the two traits
(Rebernjak and Busko, 2017). However there are many different brain structures which use
dopamine, and it seems that Extraversion and the BAS are somewhat physiologically distinct.
Neurophysiological evidence suggests that the ventral striatum is involved in the BAS. This is
a small area deep down underneath the cortex at the front of the brain, tucked cosily against
the basal ganglia. In one study (Pessiglione et al., 2006) some human participants were given
drugs to reduce dopamine levels, some were given drugs to increase dopamine levels and some
were given a placebo. They then took part in a task where they could choose one of two
stimuli on a computer screen, only one of which was a fairly strong predictor of a monetary
reward (p=0.8). Dopamine levels affected performance at this task exactly according to
expectations. Those with increased dopamine levels won more money because they were more
sensitive to the sign of reward. Crucially, the fMRI analysis showed that activity in the ventral
striatum and their afferents were related to task performance; it seems probable that the BAS
is essentially located here. Pickering et al. (2008) review other evidence that leads to much the
same conclusion.
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The Flight-Fright-Freeze system (FFFS)

The FFFS is activated by the presence of aversive stimuli – for example, predators or other
threats. Blanchard et al. (1990) studied the responses of rodents at various distances from
predators. When they encountered a predator very close up, the rodents attacked it violently.
If the predator was a little further away, the rodent made threatening sounds and signs towards
it. If the predator was still little further away, the rodent ran away if there was an escape route
or froze if not.
Humans behave in the same way. Imagine that you were to encounter a dangerous wild
animal when walking in the countryside. What would you do? Perhaps you would take no
special action at all – for example, if it is so far away that it poses no threat. However if it is
thought to pose a threat there seem to be three options:
l escaping (running away)

l moving towards it, attacking it and trying to scare it away or kill it
l staying very still (in case it mistakes you for a rock or thinks that you are dead, or you just
cannot decide what to do).
ExERCISE
These systems may also link in directly to the experience of emotion. What
emotion would you feel when you saw the savage animal? What emotion
would you feel as you decide whether to run, freeze or confront the animal?
One might perhaps expect there to be one system to explain escape behaviour, another for
freezing behaviour and a third (perhaps connected to the BAS, as it involves approaching the
threat) to explain approach/fghting behaviour. However based on behaviour and physiological
evidence just two systems have been proposed: the fght-fight-freeze system (FFFS) and the
behavioural inhibition system (BIS).
The behaviour of the animal should depend on its cognitive evaluation of the severity of
the threat and the physical proximity of the threat. ‘Defensive distance’ is a term used to
describe the perceived strength of the threat to which the animal is exposed. Once the FFFS
is activated, the behaviour of the animal depends on the defensive distance of the threat. If
you see a rat walking along the road several hundred metres away you are unlikely to do
anything; your FFFS will not be activated, as it is too far away to be a threat. If a rat suddenly
appeared between you and the door to the room you are in (a small defensive distance in
which escape is impossible), this would lead to ‘explosive attack’ (Corr, 2008), you would
probably try to kill it. If the rat appears on the other side of the room, because the defensive
distance is greater, avoidance becomes a possibility. You are likely to run out of the door and
feel fear, or perhaps freeze and stay as still as possible, and hope it goes away. Thus the
‘defensive distance’ is thought to determine whether the FFFS leads to a ‘fght’ response, a
‘fight’ response or a ‘freeze’ response.
The purpose of the FFFS is to keep the animal alive by escaping from the situation, or
confronting the threat if the threat is at, or close to, the defensive distance. Fear and anxiety
are two separate emotions that may be felt during this process – anxiety being thought to
occur as the animal approaches something which may or may not turn out to be dangerous,
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and fear being experienced as the animal leaves the area of danger. The important point about
defensive distance is that it activates selective neural modules and therefore specifc defensive
behaviours. Fear and anxiety reducing drugs do not affect all behaviours, but can be
understood only by reference to changes in perceived defensive distance and its effects on
selective modules/behaviours.
If the theory is correct, you would expect to fnd that the defensive distance changes if
animals are given drugs which reduce anxiety in humans. The rat would approach a possible
threat more closely before the escape response is triggered. McNaughton and Corr (2008a)
summarise the considerable literature showing that behaviour does change in this way, and
that anxiety reducing drugs infuence a number of brain structures such as the amygdala
and cingulate cortex – areas that are also implicated in Eysenck’s biological theory of
personality. Perkins et al. (2009) also demonstrate that in humans, fear and anxiety are
pharmacologically distinct (i.e., are affected by different drugs, and so involve different
brain processes). They found that a drug which reduces anxiety infuenced behaviour when
humans approached a threat. However a drug which reduces fear did not infuence their
‘escape behaviour’ as expected.
If a person has a FFFS which is easily triggered by environmental events, they will react
strongly to more-or-less any negative event – for example, being sensitive to criticism, easily
frightened, etc. – behaviours which we would term ‘anxiety’ (or a mixture of Neuroticism and
Introversion in Eysenck’s model; see Figure 11.2). A person whose FFFS is not easily triggered
will be blind to signs of danger.
The Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS)

Like the FFFS, the BIS helps us to deal with threatening or negative events; unlike the FFFS it
is only activated when there is confict between competing goals. There is often no confict,
and so the BIS will not be activated. For example, the BAS will make an animal approach if
it is offered food without any obvious risk. The FFFS will make the animal either escape,
freeze or confront a threat. However very often, we are motivated to approach a danger, and
in this case there are costs and benefts to be weighed. What if the potential ‘food’ is alive and
has teeth? Here the BAS will be activated (‘food’) as well as the FFFS (‘potential danger’)
and so the BIS will swing into action to determine the best course of action. Is it better to
approach the prey to satisfy hunger, but risk injury, or to avoid it completely? According to
Corr and Cooper (2016):
In terms of cognitive aspects, BIS activation leads to: (a) worry and rumination about
possible danger; (b) obsessional thoughts about the possibility that something unpleasant
is going to happen (especially when the threat is oblique and cannot be immediately
avoided); and (c) behavioral disengagement, especially when the threat is unavoidable
and no amount of risk assessment and worry helps resolve the confict.
The BIS thus involves evaluating the signs of danger and possible benefits of
approaching the object, gathering more information (perhaps studying its behaviour or
thinking about previous encounters) until eventually a decision is taken whether to approach
the object or fee. Anyone who has watched a cat encounter a new toy will have seen this
in action.
The precise mechanisms involved in the BIS are uncertain, though it is thought to raise
levels of arousal according to Corr (2008). If the level of threat is perceived to be high, then
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the FFFS-mediated escape/avoidance kicks in, otherwise the level of threat is lowered and
behaviour reverts to BAS mediated cautious approach, to determine whether the object
really is dangerous.
As far as personality is concerned, Corr (2008) suggests that if the BIS is not easily activated
the animal will approach threat when it probably should not. The BIS will fail to inhibit the
approach behaviour when it needs to do so. In people, this may translate into someone who
cannot see danger when it exists and indulges in risky behaviours (sensation seeking,
impulsivity, etc.). By the same token, someone whose BIS activates too easily may spend far
too much time dithering and weighing up various possible courses of action.
The BIS does more than determine whether to approach or fee from a single potential
threat (weighing up the demands of the BAS and FFFS). There may be conficts between
several FFFS outputs or between several BAS outputs, for example, weighing up whether
the negative consequences of missing a coursework deadline (penalty marks, tutor’s
disapproval, etc.) outweigh the benefts of a weekend away playing sport (socialising,
exercising, etc). Corr (2013) gives a good account of the biological mechanisms underlying
these three systems.

Which system(s) are likely to be activated in the following situations?
a. Someone makes a spur-of-the-moment decision to steal a chocolate bar
from a shop.
b. The shopkeeper appears unexpectedly.
c. Someone thinks long and hard about whether to steal a chocolate bar,
and decides against it.
Measuring BAS, FFFS and BIS in humans

This is all very theoretical, and we have not yet considered how we can measure individual
differences in these systems, which is essential if we are to determine the level at which
individual humans’ BIS, BAS and FFFS are triggered by the environment. Several questionnaires
have been proposed, the most recent being Corr and Cooper (2016). These authors suggest
that the BAS is not likely to be a unitary system – at least at the cognitive level. Some people
or animals may be more active than others at seeking out rewards and new experiences. Some
may put a lot of energy into achieving their goal(s) and have a clear set of goals and targets
in mind whilst others may not plan in much detail. Some may be more impulsive than others,
and this might affect their approach behaviour. Some may get more of a ‘boost’ for achieving
a reward than others; the same objective reward (achieving a good mark for an essay or
assignment) may mean more to some people than others. And fnally, some may be more
impulsive than others. They argue that all of these behaviours have been identifed as possible
components of BAS and developed a scale (the ‘Response Sensitivity Theory Personality
Questionnaire’ or RST-PQ) to measure these four aspects of approach behaviour which they
term reward interest, drive persistence/goal planning, reward reactivity and impulsivity. Some
sample items are shown in Table 11.1.
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Table 11.1 Items measuring BAS factors from the RST-PQ (Corr and
Cooper, 2016)
BAS factors
Reward interest I am always fnding new and interesting things to do.

Drive persistence/goal planning I put in a big effort to accomplish important goals in
my life.
Reward reactivity I get very excited when I get what I want.
Impulsivity I fnd myself doing things on the spur of the moment.
Corr and Cooper argue that several, quite distinct BAS factors are to be expected, as:
the primary function of the BAS system is to move the animal . . . from a start state,
towards the fnal biological reinforcer, this primary function must be supported by a
number of sub-processes . . . This process consists of (a) identifying the biological
reinforcer, (b) planning behavior, and (c) executing the plan (i.e., ‘problem solving’) at
each stage of the temporo-spatial gradient. It is not assumed that the dedicated
machinery of these complex functions are performed by the BAS; it is more plausible
to assume that the operations of the BAS interface with, and are supported by, other
systems (e.g., working memory, executive control, etc.). However, it is assumed that
the BAS has specifc processes that coordinate these functions as they relate to approach
behaviors. For the above reasons, BAS behavior may be expected to entail a series of
sub-processes, some of which sometimes oppose each other, for example impulsivity
and restraint.
(Corr and Cooper, 2016)
These four BAS factors correlate modestly together (except for impulsivity and goal
persistence) but the authors caution against combining them to derive a single BAS score, as
this model did not ft the data well. Thus Table 11.1 shows four separate BAS factors – not
four facets of a single factor. Items were written to identify facets of the FFFS and BIS as shown
in Table 11.2.
The questionnaire is designed to measure the extent to which people report behaviours
which are relevant to reinforcement sensitivity theory, and may thus show whether they
generally show strong BAS, FFFS or (perhaps) BIS systems in most situations. It tries to bridge
the gap between animal behaviour, pharmacological and human studies.
These factors also seem to align fairly well with Eysenck’s traits, as shown in Figure 11.3,
although as many of the items are very similar in meaning to those in scales measuring
Neuroticism etc., this should come as no great surprise. For example, Corr and Cooper found
that BIS correlated >0.7 with three measures of neuroticism and anxiety, and –0.41 with the
Extraversion scale of the EPQ. BAS-RI BAS-RR and BAS-IMP correlated 0.61, 0.46 and 0.5
respectively with the Extraversion scale of the EPQ and –0.30, –0.18 and –0.01 with its
Neuroticism scale.
To my mind there are two problems with this work. The items forming facets of the BIS
and FFFS are frequently rather similar and so it may make little sense to interpret the facets
individually. Second, whilst the idea of defensive distance makes intuitive sense in determining
244
Table 11.2 Items measuring FFFS and BIS from the RST-PQ (Corr and
Cooper, 2016)
System Facet
FFFS Flight I would run fast if I knew someone was

following me late at night.
Active avoidance There are some things that I simply cannot go
near.
Freezing I am the sort of person who easily freezes up
when scared.
BIS Motor planning interruption When nervous, I fnd it hard to say the right
words.
Cautious risk assessment I worry a lot.
Obsessive thoughts My mind is dominated by recurring thoughts.
Behavioural disengagement I often fnd myself ‘going into my shell’.
whether the FFFS leads to attack, freezing or retreat in the face of threat, how can an
individual’s defensive distance in a certain setting can be ascertained other than by observing
whether they attack, freeze or run? It might seem that the same term is being used to both
describe the person’s behaviour and to explain it.
RST is an important attempt to link a model of animal behaviour to psychopharmacological
and physiological structures, and thence to human personality. Suggesting how anxiety, fear
and obsessional thinking are linked, but distinct emotions seems to me to be one of the major
achievements of this approach to understanding personality. The great advantage of RST is
that it tries to do more than point to correlations between scores on personality variables and
activity in parts of the brain; identifying correlations really does not say much, other than to
show that certain brain systems are somehow likely to be related to personality for reasons
which are unknown. Instead it suggests a model which tries to explain performance in a
particular situation, and argues that personality represents individual differences in the ease
with which each of these systems may be activated. It sets out to be a true process model of
personality, and one which is being actively developed.
Summary
This chapter has examined theories that view personality as either a social or a biological
phenomenon and it should be clear by this stage that neither of the views is exclusively correct.
Chapter 15 will reveal that the main personality factors have a substantial genetic component,
which suggests that purely social explanations of behaviour are unlikely to be adequate.
However, when we delve into the psychophysiological literature, it is equally clear that
relatively few experiments provide unequivocal evidence in support of Eysenck’s model of
Extraversion. However, the fact that several of the studies do show signifcant correlations
seems to suggest that there may be some underlying truth in the premise that Extraversion is
245
related to the degree of arousal in the cortex, although two studies that correlate personality
with resting metabolic rate in the cortex do not support the theory.
Perhaps this is to be expected. The biological theory of Extraversion essentially assumes that
the only determinant of whether a person is lively, sociable, optimistic and impulsive is the
amount of electrical activity in their ARAS and it really does seem fairly likely that myriad other
social, cultural, motivational, cognitive and time-of-day variables that are diffcult to assess will
also affect people’s behaviour. These uncontrolled variables will, of course, all tend to reduce
the strength of the correlation between psychophysiological measures and Extraversion, so the
fnding that some measures can explain up to about one-seventh of the variability in people’s
levels of Extraversion is, perhaps, about as good as could reasonably be expected.
Gray’s theory is growing in popularity, although it is not always easy to grasp the nuances
of the interactions between the various cns systems and how these may relate to behaviour and/
or brain functioning. The basic question is whether one should relate personality directly to
neural functioning (Eysenck) or instead identify various systems of behaviour (which form the
cns) and develop models of how these relate to both personality and neural functioning. RST
is dauntingly complex – as it arguably needs to be – and there are certainly plenty of problems
with older versions of RST, as shown by Matthews and Corr (2008). However it seems to be
an important way of linking physiology and psychological processes to personality

There is no shortage of good texts and papers on the biological basis of personality. The
main problem is that some of them are very technical, while others go into such detail that
it is diffcult to keep sight of the broad picture. Revelle (2016) and Mitchell and Kumari
(2016) can be strongly recommended, whilst Sampaio et al. (2014) spell out the principles
of resting state functional connectivity clearly for those with a good biological background.
Kanai and Rees (2011) give an excellent and accessible summary of studies which link brain
structure to personality (and intelligence). As far as RST is concerned, there are several good
summaries of the theory with links to the neuropsychological literature (Corr, 2013; Corr
and Cooper, 2016), and Collins et al. (2017) also relates RST to a model of self-regulation
which may become important in the future.
SAQ 11.1
There is generally no control group (or sophisticated statistical analysis) to
guard against the possibility that the child might have developed in much
the same way had it been brought up in a completely different family
environment – the child may show certain patterns of personality because of
its genetic similarity to its parents. The genes may infuence the parents to
bring up the child in a certain way and also infuence the child’s personality
and there may be no causal link between parental behaviour and personality
at all. One way round this would be to perform such studies using only
adopted children.
246
SAQ 11.2
Several objections to reductionism can be entertained. First, it may be unwise
to point to brain structures as explanations for behaviour unless one knows
why, precisely, these brain structures developed in the way that they did. For
it is possible that life events (e.g., childrearing practices) can infuence the
brain structures. In this case, a ‘biological’ theory of personality could be
explained by social processes! There is a tendency to assume that the biology
of the nervous system is fixed, immutable and thus somehow more
fundamental than social theories, although the evidence for this is not always
clear. Second, the theories clearly fail to take into account the importance of
interactions between personality types and certain environments. It seems
quite likely that certain life events will have a profound impact on those who
are biologically disposed to react in a certain way. If this is so, then any
attempt to explain personality by purely biological (or purely social) processes
will clearly be unsatisfactory. Contrariwise, it may be sensible to explore how
adequately simple (e.g., purely social or purely biological) models can predict
personality before beginning the much more complex task of developing
models that are based on interactionism.
SAQ 11.3
There are several possible approaches. The most obvious would be to measure
the levels of male hormones, etc., in a sample of ‘normal’ male volunteers
and to correlate the levels of such chemicals with their scores on the P scale
of the EPQ(R) (or else use a statistical technique called ‘multiple regression’
to determine how much of the variation in the P scale can be predicted by
individual differences in the levels of several such chemicals). Consideration
could be given to the feasibility (and ethicality) of an intervention study in
which some individuals’ levels of such hormones are increased, while a control
group would receive a placebo. A one-between and one-within analysis of
variance could then establish whether P scale scores increase more in the
experimental group. However, this design is probably not feasible (even if it
were ethical) because it would presumably need to be carried out over a
period of days or weeks. Another approach might be to compare the P scale
scores and hormonal levels of normal controls and violent criminals, in the
expectation that the group with higher P score would also have higher levels
of hormone. However, this approach does not show the size of the relationship
between hormones and the P score in the general population and for this
reason the frst design is probably the better.
247
SAQ 11.4
We have not had space to discuss this in much detail, but many of the reasons
should be fairly clear. First, it allows us to answer two criticisms that are
levelled at personality theory by social psychologists, namely that personality
theories are ‘circular’ (inferring personality from behaviour and then trying
to explain the behaviour by invoking a personality trait) and that they are
not genuine properties of the individual, but rather the results of stereotyping,
attributional biases, etc. If it can be shown that the main personality traits
are linked to behaviour in quite different domains (e.g., patterns of electrical
activity in the cortex), then it will be clear that the personality questionnaires
are measuring some rather broad property of the organism. Neither can they
merely refect attributional biases, etc. The second reason for studying
processes is, of course, scientifc curiosity – a desire to understand how and
why certain individuals come to display characteristic patterns of personality.
Finally, such work may have some important applications. For example, if a
‘negative’ adult personality trait such as neuroticism or psychoticism could be
shown to be crucially dependent on some kind of experience during infancy,
society might well want to ensure that all children receive special attention
at this stage.
SAQ 11.5
a. Eysenck studied the personality dimensions of Extraversion–Introversion

and Neuroticism–Stability, whereas Gray studied personality factors that
are mixtures of the two, as shown in Figure 11.2.
b Eysenck sought to relate personality directly to brain physiology (e.g.,
correlating Extraversion with electrical activity in the cortex). Gray
suggested that the various structures of the conceptual nervous system
(cns) mediate this relationship. The cns refects ways in which animals
behave – e.g., approach or avoidance of novel objects.
SAQ 11.6
a. BAS (impulsivity plus seeking out positive rewards).

b. FFFS (whether the chocolate thief attacks the shopkeeper, runs or freezes
will depend on how close the shopkeeper is, and whether there is a clear
passage to the door).
c. BAS, FFFS, BIS (desire for chocolate bar being balanced against fear of
getting caught leads to activation of the BIS).
248
Note
1 Assuming it is a simple sine wave.
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Chapter 12
Structure and measurement

of abilities
Introduction
The study of individual differences in ability is one of the very oldest areas of psychology and
is certainly one of the most applicable. Tests assessing individual differences in mental ability
have been of great practical value in occupational, industrial and educational psychology, as
will be seen in Chapters 17 and 18. The psychology of ability is one of the four main branches
of individual differences (the others being personality, mood and motivation) and the present
chapter outlines what is now known (and generally accepted) about the nature and structure
of human abilities.
Learning outcomes
l Outline Spearman’s contribution to the study of mental abilities.
l Discuss how and why Thurstone’s model differed from Spearman’s, and
how a hierarchical model solves the apparent confict between them.
l Interpret what an IQ of 130 (for example) means.
l Show an appreciation of how abilities may be measured using tests.
l Discuss and critically evaluate Gardner’s and Sternberg’s theories.
Howard Wainer (1987) reminds us that ability testing has a history stretching back
4000 years to when the Chinese used a form of ability testing to select for their civil service.
He also notes a biblical reference to forensic assessment of ability (Judges 12:4–6). This is
253
Structure and measurement of abilities
hardly surprising, for few areas of psychology have proved of such practical usefulness as the
capacity to measure human abilities. The accurate identifcation of which individuals will best
be able to beneft from an advanced course of education or which job applicants are likely to
perform best if selected (rather than selecting randomly or on the basis of time-consuming
and potentially unreliable procedures, such as interviews) brings important fnancial and
personal benefts. Tests of ability are also useful for identifying other forms of potential and
problems, for example to identify outstanding musical talent or to help in the diagnosis of
dyslexia and some types of brain disease.
We will start by defning some terms. The term ‘mental ability’ is used to describe a
person’s performance on some task that has a substantial information-processing component
(i.e., that requires thinking, sound judgement or skill) when that person is trying to perform
that task as well as possible. For example, writing a sonnet, adding the numbers 143 and 228,
designing a building, reading a map, structuring an essay, inventing a joke and diagnosing a
fault in a computer are all examples of mental abilities if (and only if) they are assessed when
individuals are really trying to do their best. Some other abilities (e.g., pruning a rosebush,
running a race) do not require vast amounts of cognitive skill for their successful completion
and so are not usually regarded as mental abilities.
Neither are tests of attainment, which (as discussed in Chapter 3) are designed to assess
how well individuals have absorbed knowledge or skills that have been specifcally taught.
For example, an attainment test in geography might take a sample of facts and skills that
pupils should have learned, for example by sampling items from the syllabus. Tests of ability,
by way of contrast, involve thinking rather than remembering and use test items that the
individual will not have encountered previously. Or at least the individual will not know that
they are to be tested on them. Thus mental abilities should be measured by assessing a well-
motivated person who is asked to do their best in performing some task with a substantial
cognitive component, the exact nature of which is unfamiliar to them, but for which they have
the necessary cognitive skills (e.g., being able to read).
Mental abilities, then, are traits that refect how well individuals can process various types
of information. They refect cognitive processes and skills and since one of the functions of
the education system is to develop some of these (e.g., numeracy, literacy), it is diffcult to
defne what is meant by an ability without taking individuals’ educational backgrounds and
interests into consideration. Individual differences in the speed of solving differential
equations might be regarded as an important ability for physics students or engineers, but
not for many others. Thus it is not really possible to defne ability independently of cultural
and educational background.
For this reason, it is conventional to consider only those mental abilities that everyone
can be assumed to have acquired as part of a basic education or which are not formally
taught at all. Performance in solving cryptic crossword puzzles, evading income tax, thinking
up novel uses for objects, assembling jigsaws or performing simple arithmetic would be
regarded as mental abilities. Those abilities that refect specialised knowledge or training or
that are noncognitive in nature would be excluded from the list. Hence being able to identify
fungi, sprint, play the sitar, grow championship onions, recite the capitals of the states of
the USA or call a touch of Belfast Surprise Major (a very esoteric mental skill involving
church bells) would not generally be regarded as mental abilities within the general
population.
But how many abilities are there? After all, the number of ‘tasks with a substantial cognitive
component, the exact nature of which is unfamiliar’ (our putative defnition of a mental ability)
is potentially enormous. In fact, it is almost infnite, meaning that it would be impossible in
practice ever to understand fully a person’s abilities simply by measuring all of them.
254
The alternative is to examine the correlations between mental abilities using factor analysis.
This might show that there is some overlap between all these tasks measuring mental abilities
and with luck this might reduce the number of distinct abilities to a manageable level. So, just
as with the psychology of personality, psychometric studies of mental ability attempt to
achieve two objectives:
l to establish the basic structure of abilities

l once there is some consensus about the number and nature of the main abilities, to try to
understand the nature of the underlying social, biological, cognitive and other processes
that cause these individual differences to emerge.
This chapter deals with the basic structure of abilities, and Chapters 13 and 15 address some
of the underlying processes.
Structure of human mental abilities:

general principles
You will already be familiar with most of the research techniques that are used in the study
of mental abilities, as most authorities agree that factor analysis of the correlations between
ability test items can reveal the underlying structure of abilities. Therefore, precisely the same
techniques that showed up personality characteristics such as Extraversion and Neuroticism
should also be able to reveal the structure of abilities. If we measure individuals’ performance
on a very wide range of tasks that seem to require thought for their correct solution, correlate
their scores on the items (or tests) together and factor analyse this table of correlations, the
factors that emerge should represent the main dimensions of ability.

Think creatively for a few minutes about how you might draw up a list of as
many abilities as possible.
Which abilities should we analyse?

When studying personality, Cattell used the ‘personality sphere’ concept in an attempt to
ensure that all possible descriptions of behaviour were included in factor analyses that were
designed to reveal all of the main personality traits. No similar approach has been followed
for abilities, presumably because it is recognised that the dictionary may not contain very
accurate descriptions of ability. For example, I can think of no commonly used word that
describes ability to solve anagrams, sing in tune or show prodigious powers of memory.
(Phrases are not really helpful, since they will not be turned up by a search through the
dictionary.)
This can present problems, since the personality sphere at least offered a starting point for
psychologists wishing to map out the whole area of personality. Without any such guidance,
it is diffcult to ensure that all possible abilities have been considered when trying to develop
tests to cover the whole gamut of mental abilities. This can mean that certain mental ability
factors will simply not be discovered. For example, if no tests of mathematical performance
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are given to a group of people, it is clearly impossible for any sort of mathematical ability
factor to emerge when individuals’ responses are intercorrelated and factor analysed.
Cattell’s Ability Dimension Action Chart (ADAC)

Cattell (1971) therefore attempted to develop a taxonomy of abilities, by means of a chart
showing what types of ability could logically exist. A simplifed version of this Ability
Dimension Action Chart (ADAC) is shown in Table 12.1. It views abilities as consisting of
three main components.
The action domain specifes which aspect of the task is ‘hard’ for the individual. This
might be at the input level – that is, the task may require someone to make a fne perceptual
discrimination. For example, in a test individuals may be asked to match various extremely
similar colours or attend to speech presented to one ear while ignoring speech presented to
the other ear. The vast majority of conventional tests of ability instead rely on internal
processing and storage – or thinking – to make the items hard. This is the second possible
aspect of the action domain. Some tasks primarily require skilled performance (e.g., singing
a note in tune, tracking a moving object on a computer screen using a joystick) and so these
Table 12.1 A short form of Cattell’s Ability Dimension Action Chart

(ADAC)
Action – involvement of
• input
• internal processing and storage
• output
Content – various areas such as
• verbal
• social
• mechanical
• knowledge
• sensory modality
Process – including
• complexity of relations
• complexity of processing
• amount of remembering required
• amount of knowledge required
• amount of retrieval from memory required
• flexibility/creativity vs convergence
• speed
• fine use of muscle
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would fall into the output category. The other two domains are content (the type of material
given to the individual, e.g., a mental arithmetic problem or an anagram) and process
(which defines which mental processes the individual is supposed to perform in order to
solve the problem).
The content of the test items can vary considerably, from verbal, mathematical and
mechanical problems to social and moral issues, to pitch perception. The processes involved
in performing the task can also take a huge number of values. Since it is highly unlikely that
many tasks will involve a single process, it is necessary to categorise the degree to which each
of them requires the use of memory, the degree of background knowledge needed, speed, the
detection of relationships between objects (e.g., ‘cat is to kitten as dog is to ???’) and the
amount of information that needs to be processed (e.g., drawing a circle as opposed to drawing
a mural). There could be a vast number of these processes, but a list could perhaps be drawn
up on the basis of the main findings of cognitive psychology.
The problem is, of course, that the categorisation of tests according to this model will not
generally be straightforward. How can one know (without performing myriad experiments)
how great the memory requirement of a task is relative to its speed? Likewise, as some of the
processes are very broad and do not always reflect modern research, we would now need to
modify the list considerably – for example, using ‘working memory’, ‘long term storage’,
‘visuo-spatial scratchpad’, etc. rather than just ‘memory’.

Try to classify each of the following tasks in terms of the ADAC chart in
Table 12.1:
a. singing the same note as that played on a piano
b. identifying a piece of music
c. learning a part in a play
d. solving a riddle
e. inventing a pun
f. solving this SAQ.
This chart can be useful in that it reminds us that most of the abilities identified so far
require an action of ‘internal processing’ – we know rather less about those in the input and
output domains. However, the problems arise because it has no clear theoretical rationale
(e.g., not drawing the list of processes from cognitive psychology) and it is almost impossible
to be sure just by looking at a task which processes are involved in its solution. Thus it is
probably safest to conclude that there is no single obvious, automatic technique for discovering
all of the behaviours that may be influenced by ability.
Factor analysis and the structure of abilities

There is an important difference in the way in which factor analysis is generally used in the
study of personality and ability. Surprisingly, this is one which does not seem to have been
explicitly recognised in the literature. It relates to what precisely goes into the factor analysis.
You will remember that in the case of personality psychology, the responses to individual test
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items are usually fed straight into the factor analysis. Thus, if one factor analyses the
correlations between the items in a particular personality questionnaire, the main personality
factors that correspond to the scales of the questionnaire should emerge.
It is extremely rare to fnd a study in the area of human abilities that calculates and factor
analyses the correlations between individual test items. Almost all studies instead factor
analyse the correlations between subscales (as facets of ability scales are usually called)
consisting of several items – for example, individuals’ scores on subscales (each consisting of
20 or so items) measuring verbal comprehension, non-literal comprehension of proverbs and
‘odd word out’ (some examples taken from Thurstone, 1938 who pioneered work in this
feld). These items differ in diffculty and must therefore use different cognitive processes, so
are arguably not synonyms or ‘bloated specifcs’ as discussed in Chapter 3. Most ability
researchers factor analyse the correlations between groups of items, rather than between the
items themselves. How these items are grouped together in the frst place has important
consequences for the results that are obtained.
Suppose that a researcher wants to examine the structure of ability, which will include some
arithmetical problems. He or she will have to decide whether it is better to include several
different, separately timed and separately scored subscales measuring arithmetical ability (e.g.,
one for addition, one for subtraction, one for multiplication, one for division, one for geometry,
one for algebra, one for long multiplication, one for long division, another for set theory, etc.)
or whether to make the assumption that these skills all go together and so calculate a total score
from a mixture of these items, hoping that it will be a reliable measure of a single ability. In the
former case, the researcher determines empirically that these various types of problem will group
together to form an ability factor, whereas the latter simply assumed that they did.
Thus the factor that is obtained when the correlations between the subscales are analysed
is often essentially the same as the score on the scale that is obtained when all of the items are
simply put into the same test. If we factor analyse the correlations between a number of
subscales, calculate individuals’ scores on this factor and correlate these factor scores with the
sum of their scores on the subscales, the correlation would be very high (probably well above
0.9), showing that the factor is almost identical to the simple sum of scores.
The point to note is that by factoring subscales one might well end up with factors that are
different from those that are obtained by factoring correlations between scales. We shall return
to this distinction when we examine the work of Spearman and Thurstone.
Empirical results
Having decided (rather arbitrarily) whether to factor the correlations between scales or sub-
scales, determining the basic structure of ability is rather straightforward and is fully
described in Chapters 5 and 19. All that is necessary is to:
1. administer the test(s) to a large, representative sample of the population

2. score the tests
3. add up individuals’ scores on the various scales or subscales
4. correlate these scores together
5. factor analyse these correlations
6. identify the factor(s) by looking at the variables that have appreciable loadings on them
7. validate the factor(s), e.g., by establishing their predictive and construct validity
8. examine the correlations between the factors – if any are appreciable, repeat steps 4 to
7 to produce ‘second-order’ factors, ‘third-order’ factors, etc., repeating the process until
either the factors are essentially uncorrelated, or just one factor remains.
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Spearman and Thurstone: one ability or 12?

Charles Spearman (1904) was one of the frst to perform an empirical study of the structure
of abilities – indeed, he invented the technique of factor analysis for this very purpose. He
constructed some rather primitive tests that, he thought, would probably assess children’s
thinking ability, and administered these to a sample of Hampshire schoolchildren. He gave
them tests of vocabulary, mathematical ability, ability to follow complex instructions,
visualisation, matching colours and matching musical pitch.
With hindsight, it seems likely that some of the tests would be infuenced by formal
education and were thus tests of attainment rather than of aptitude; however, the remaining
three tests did not measure skills that were explicitly taught in school. He then added up
children’s scores on these six scales, correlated their scores together and factor analysed these
correlations. Note that Spearman factored the scores between quite different scales, not
different subscales.
He found just one factor, which he called g (for general ability). This result implied that,
if a child performed above average on one of the tests, it was more likely than not that she
would perform at an above average level on all the other tests as well. It is as if there is some
basic ‘thinking ability’ that determines performance in all areas – some children seemed to
excel at everything, some performed poorly at everything, but few excelled in one area and
performed poorly in another. Spearman’s work turns out to be incredibly important, and is
discussed at length in Chapter 13.

On the basis of this analysis, is it legitimate to say that general ability causes
someone to perform at similar levels on all tests?
Thurstone (who was based in the USA) soon formed a different opinion, but this is largely
because he analysed subscales rather than scales. He administered a much larger selection of
tests (60 subscales in all) to a sample of just over 200 university students (Thurstone, 1938).
When the intercorrelations between these 60 test scores were factor analysed by hand,
12 distinct ability factors were extracted and rotated orthogonally. Thurstone termed these
factors ‘primary mental abilities’ and most of them made good psychological sense. For
example, one factor had large loadings from all subscales that involved spatial visualisation,
one had large loadings from all the subscales involving the use of language, while yet another
subsumed all the subscales requiring numerical skills and so on.
Thurstone’s primary mental abilities (PMAs) are listed in Table 12.2. Variants of the tests
that Thurstone used to measure these abilities (the Test of Primary Mental Abilities) are still
in print and are sometimes used to this day. Thus while Spearman found just one factor,
namely general ability, Thurstone seems to have identifed a dozen quite independent ability
factors. How many ability factors are there?
I ought to mention another diffculty with Thurstone’s experiment that more or less
guaranteed that he obtained results different from Spearman’s. The problem in using students
is that they have most probably been selected on the basis of high levels of general ability. It
is unlikely that many would have below average ability. Thus the range of ability in Thurstone’s
sample was almost certainly much less than that in the general population. We now know
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that one of the effects of this will be to reduce the correlations between the subscales, which
will reduce the likelihood of fnding a single, all-pervasive factor of general ability.
The debate that resulted from Thurstone’s work was hot and furious and many
psychologists were convinced that factor analysis was useless because it seemed to produce
such inconsistent results. However, you should be able to understand precisely why the
results were so different. The difference arises because Thurstone analysed correlations
between subscales, while Spearman analysed correlations between scales. Indeed, some of
the ability factors that were extracted from Thurstone’s factor analysis (numerical ability,
verbal ability and deductive reasoning/following instructions) look remarkably similar to the
scales that Spearman put into his analysis. Thurstone’s analysis was just performed at a lower
level than that of Spearman.
When Thurstone’s subscales are examined in more detail, it can be seen that some of them
are virtually identical. For example, ‘Reading 1’ and ‘Reading 2’ both measure understanding
of proverbs and are identical in format and diffculty; it looks as if a set of items was written
and arbitrarily divided between these two subscales. The subscales are thus bound to correlate
substantially and bound to form a factor – a fnding of little or no psychological interest. No
one appreciated at the time that it was important to ensure that the variables being factor
analysed were different.
The obvious next step is to examine the correlations between Thurstone’s factors, since, if
they correspond to Spearman’s scales, they may correlate together to give g.
The problem is, of course, that Thurstone forced his factors to be at right angles to each
other (‘orthogonal rotation’) for ease of computation. Since all correlations between these
factors are zero, it is not possible to factor analyse these correlations between the primary
abilities. There is another problem, too. Even Thurstone’s work, involving 60 subscales,
appeared to miss out some areas of ability. For example, there was nothing that measured
how quickly people could come up with ideas, nothing that measured what Sternberg (1985)
was to call ‘social intelligence’ (e.g., ‘what’s the “smart” thing to do if your potential father-
in-law forbids you to marry his daughter?’), nothing that measured musical skill, judgement,
coordination or a whole host of other abilities that may prove to be important.
Table 12.2 Thurstone’s primary mental abilities (Thurstone 1938)
Code Factor Brief description
S Spatial ability Visualising shapes, mental rotation

V Verbal relations Words in context: comprehension, analogies, etc.
P Perceptual speed Searching for letters
N Numerical facility Addition, subtraction, etc., algebra
W Word fuency Tasks dealing with isolated words, e.g., anagrams, spelling
M Memory Paired-associate learning and recognition
I Induction Finding rules given exemplars, e.g., number series
R Restriction Mechanical knowledge, spatial and verbal skills
D Deduction Deductive reasoning: applying a rule
. . . plus three factors that could not be easily interpreted
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Hierarchical models of ability

Later evidence shows that Thurstone’s analyses were fawed in one important respect. Whereas
he believed that the primary abilities were essentially uncorrelated, most subsequent research
has revealed that these factors are correlated together to varying extents. It is therefore possible
to factor analyse the correlations between the primary abilities.
In addition, several investigators extended the range of subscales that were entered into
factor analyses and so discovered more and more primary mental abilities. Cattell’s (1971)
contribution is still useful here. His review of the literature identifes some 17 frst-order
factors that recur in several independent studies and that seem to be acceptably broad
in scope. Hakstian and Cattell (1976) later published a test designed to assess 20 primary
abilities – the ‘Comprehensive Ability Battery’. The ‘Kit of Factor-Referenced Cognitive Tests’
(Ekstrom et al., 1976 which may be downloaded free of charge) is very similar and there is
good reason to believe that these tests measure many of the most important primary mental
abilities. These include abilities as diverse as originality (thinking of creative uses for objects),
mechanical knowledge and reasoning, verbal ability, numerical ability, fuency of ideas (being
able to produce many ideas quickly), perceptual speed (speed in assessing whether two strings
of characters are the same or different), spelling and aesthetic judgement (for works of art).
Thus Cattell’s analyses confrm and extend Thurstone’s results.
When the correlations between these primary ability factors (‘primaries’) are themselves
factor analysed, a number of ‘second-order’ ability factors (‘secondaries’) emerge, rather as
shown in Figure 12.1. The lines in this diagram show ‘signifcant’ factor loadings (those above
0.4, say). The raw data on which the analysis is performed are the scores on a number of
subscales, represented by squares at the bottom of the fgure. The lozenges at the next level show
the factors that emerge when the correlations between these subscales are factor analysed – these
are the primary mental abilities. The next level up shows what happens when the correlations
between the primary mental abilities are analysed. In this example, verbal ability (V), numerical
ability (N) and mechanical knowledge ability (Mk) all have substantial loadings on a second-
order factor called Gc, the meaning of which will be discussed shortly. Note that none of the
other primary ability factors shown in the fgure has a substantial loading on Gc. It might even
be possible to factor analyse any correlations between the second-order factors in order to
obtain one or more third-order factors. As we move towards the top of the fgure, we can see
that each factor has an increasingly broad infuence. For example, V (the verbal ability primary)
affects performance on just three subscales, while Gc affects performance on ten subscales.
While there is generally good agreement about the nature of the main primary ability
factors, opinions do differ somewhat about the number and nature of the second- and higher-
order abilities. Vernon (1950) proposed that there were two main secondaries – one essentially
corresponding to verbal/educational ability (‘v:ed’) and the other representing practical/
mechanical abilities (‘k:m’). Both of these were thought to correlate together, giving general
ability (Spearman’s g) at the third level. Vernon’s v:ed factor had signifcant loadings from
primaries such as verbal ability and numerical ability and k:m loads primaries dealing with
visualisation and spatial abilities.
Horn and Cattell (1966) and Hakstian and Cattell (1978) identifed not two but six second-
order factors, a fnding essentially replicated by Kline and Cooper (1984) and Undheim
(1981), among others. The two most important factors in this model are known as fuid
intelligence (Gf) and crystallised intelligence (Gc). Fluid intelligence is the raw reasoning
ability that should develop independently of schooling, covering areas such as memory, spatial
ability and inductive reasoning, while crystallised intelligence requires knowledge as well and
infuences primaries such as verbal comprehension and mechanical knowledge. The other four
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Figure 12.1 Part of a hierarchical model of ability, showing one third-order

factor (general ability (g)), which infuences two second-order
factors (crystallised ability (Gc) and retrieval (Gr)), which, in
turn, infuence primary abilities such as verbal ability (V),
numerical ability (N), mechanical ability (Mk), ideational
fuency (Fl) and word fuency (W). At the bottom of the
pyramid, the squares represent various subscales, e.g., those
measuring comprehension, knowledge of proverbs and
vocabulary, ability to solve simultaneous equations
second-order factors are retrieval (Gr), which is concerned with the speed with which creative
ideas are produced, visualisation (Gv), which had been identifed as a primary by Thurstone,
speed (Gps – a ‘perceptual speed’ factor that measures the speed with which individuals can
compare two strings of letters or fgures) and memory (Gm). Once again, these factors seem
to make good sense.
Further support for this hierarchical model of abilities comes from Carroll (1993) who
conducted a massive reanalysis of all published sets of data in the area of cognitive abilities
using the most modern statistical techniques then available in order to draw up a comprehensive
list of ability factors. The ‘three stratum model’, which he identifed as best describing the
data, is extremely similar to those discussed, though with the addition of more primary
abilities and some more second-order abilities.

With which of Horn’s second-order factors would you expect the following
measures to correlate?
262
a. Locating one’s whereabouts by map reading when lost in the country.

b. Speed of thinking what can be cooked from two eggs, an onion and
a slice of bread.
c. A child’s school examination marks.
d. Proofreading a complicated equation in a nuclear physics journal
(i.e., checking whether the printed version is the same as the author’s
original typescript).
The main reason for the differing numbers of second-order factors probably lies in the
nature of the abilities being measured, although differences in the factoring procedure may
also have some effect. If a test battery contains less than two subscales measuring creativity
or memory skills, then of course no primary or secondaries such as Gv or Gm can emerge,
since the creativity or memory tasks would not show a substantial correlation with any other
tasks. The other main point to remember is that fuid intelligence (Gf) bears a very striking
resemblance to Spearman’s g and so it is encouraging to see that when a third-order factor
analysis was performed (by factoring the correlations between the secondaries), a third-order
factor affected all three secondaries (Gf, Gc and Gv) that emerged when a sample of primary
abilities was factored (Gustafsson, 1981). Interestingly, Gustafsson’s analysis showed that
there was a very large correlation (approx. 0.9) between g and Gf and there is an interesting
debate about whether these two factors are identical (Blair, 2006).
It is thus possible to conceptualise ability in several ways. First, and working our way down
the hierarchy, the positive correlation between all of the primary abilities and between all the
secondaries suggests that Spearman’s factor of general ability (or something very like it)
infuences all aspects of cognitive performance. This means that it is legitimate to say that
‘Martha is more intelligent than Archie’ for example. Some theorists have suggested that
general ability may even be linked to the speed and/or effciency with which the nervous
system operates and some evidence for this claim will be scrutinised in Chapter 13.
There are also some ‘clusters’ of abilities that tend to rise and fall together – these are
identifed by the half-dozen or so main second-order ability factors. It is perhaps unsurprising
to fnd that one of these factors (Gc) is related to school-based knowledge and skills. However,
the rest seem to refect pure thought processes. Then at the next level down there are the
individual primary mental abilities, over 20 of which have been discovered. These are thought
to be the most basic mental skills.
Measuring abilities
There are two types of ability tests. Group tests are administered via computer or paper-and-
pencil are generally quite short (typically 30 minutes, sometimes much less) and are designed
to give a reasonably accurate estimate of one or two abilities. They tend to be used by
researchers, employers and others where some measurement error is acceptable. If a test is
used to screen applicants for a clerical post it does not matter too much to the employer if a
few individuals’ scores are over-estimated slightly whilst a few people’s scores are
underestimated (though of course it will matter to the individuals concerned). On the other
hand there are some settings where accuracy is all-important. A test which determines whether
an individual can understand a criminal charge, and hence whether they are competent to
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instruct a solicitor/attorney, clearly needs to be very accurate indeed. Tests used in this context
are generally administered by a trained psychologist in a one-to-one situation. This allows the
psychologist to motivate the participant to do their best, will ensure that they have properly
understood what they are being asked to do for each part of the test, will ensure any special
needs are taken into consideration and will allow rest-breaks to be given when necessary. This
may well be necessary, as such individual assessments usually last at least an hour.
Group tests commonly assess measure general intelligence, primary or second-order
abilities, or abilities related to work (such as computer-programming or clerical aptitude).
There are several freely available tests to measure primary mental abilities, including the
Ekstrom-French-Harman (1976) ‘Kit of Factor-Referenced Cognitive Tests’ and its
accompanying manual which contains details for administering and scoring it. It measures
23 primary abilities, and the whole test takes several hours to complete. The test and its
manual can be downloaded from https://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/Kit_of_Factor-
Referenced_Cognitive_Tests.pdf. The International Cognitive Ability Resource (Condon and
Revelle, 2014) is a 60-item test measuring fve ability traits. Their paper also includes a short
(16-item) test which can be used to measure general ability. There are many commercial ability
scales, including ‘Raven’s Matrices’, a series of tests developed initially by John Raven, and
which are available in versions for children (‘Coloured Progressive Matrices’), the general
adult population (‘Standard Progressive Matrices’) and more intelligent adults, such as
university students (‘Advanced Progressive Matrices’) although these are still commercial
copyrighted tests (Raven et al., 2003) which are only available for use by professionals.
Choose the shape which completes the sequence

both down the columns and along the rows.
a b c d
Figure 12.2 An item similar to those used in the Raven tests
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When constructing a test to measure general ability there are two options. The frst (used
in the International Cognitive Ability Resource) involves using a variety of different items, to
capture the full breadth of the abilities infuenced by g. The second option (used by the Raven
tests) identifes one scale which has a very large correlation with g and uses just this format.
Thus the Raven consists of puzzles rather like the one in Figure 12.2. One advantage of this
item format is that it does not use language, so can possibly be used internationally.
An alternative involves choosing items representing all the second-order abilities, or all the
primary abilities. Such a test will therefore involve a variety of different types of items, which
are sometimes grouped together into subscales. Because general intelligence infuences
performance on all tasks that require thought for their successful completion, devising items
to measure g is fairly easy. Table 12.3 shows some examples of items which I wrote for the
‘Test the Nation’ IQ test (Cooper, 2003) which were validated by correlating them with a
standard intelligence test.
Table 12.3 Some typical items measuring cognitive abilities
Item Text Problem
1 The answer is one of the letters If the last letter of this sentence is c then the
‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ or ‘d’ answer is b, if it is d the answer is a and if it is
anything else it is c.
2 Which is the odd one out litre, metre, pint, kilogram
3 Jon is twice as old as Paul. In ten How old is Jon?
years he will be one and a half
times Paul’s age.
4 Rearrange the letters in ‘opera
lane’ to spell one word
5 The gloomy student sulked and What five-letter word whose second letter is
*o*** as he drove his *o*** to ‘o’ fills both gaps?
college.
6
7 This clock has no numbers on the What time is it?

dial and is viewed in a mirror.
265

What do you think are the advantages of measuring g using items that are
of a similar format (as with the Raven items)? What are the advantages of
using a mixture of formats (as in Table 12.3)?
Individual tests can only be used by psychologists who have been trained in their
administration. They usually consist of 10–20 sets of items, each set measuring a different aspect
of ability. Some involve the use of language, and others (e.g., solving jigsaws) do not. This makes
it possible to compare a person’s ability on the scales which use language to their performance
on the scales which do not; a substantial difference in scores may suggest dyslexia.
The advantage of testing people individually is that it is possible to build up a good
rapport to encourage people to perform their best, schedule breaks (where this is permitted
by the test instructions) and use some types of items which are diffcult to administer in group
format – for example, putting together coloured blocks to form a particular shape. Examples
of widely used tests include the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Wechsler et al.,
2016), the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Wechsler, 2010), the British Ability Scales (Elliott
and Smith, 2011) or the Kaufman ABC (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2004). Such tests are widely
used by educational and clinical psychologists and some researchers who need particularly
accurate assessments.
IQ
In the early years of ability testing, it was necessary to devise a scale of mental ability that
could be easily understood by parents and teachers and so the concept of ‘intelligence quotient’
(IQ) was adopted as an operational defnition of general intelligence, g. Confusingly, this term
has two quite distinct meanings. Since most psychological testing was originally performed
on schoolchildren, it was initially thought sensible to determine how a child’s performance
compared with the average performance of children of other ages. For example, Table 12.4
shows the average scores obtained on an early intelligence test by children of six age ranges.
Suppose that a particular child is aged 74 months (this is their ‘chronological age’ or CA) and
they score 30 on the test. Part (a) of Table 12.4 shows that a score of 30 is generally obtained
by children aged 77 months, so the child’s mental age is 77 months.
The old defnition of IQ (sometimes known as the ratio IQ) is:
mental age
IQ = × 100
chronological age
In this example, the child’s IQ is:
77
× 100, or 104
74
An IQ of 100 shows that a child is performing at an average level for their age, an
IQ greater than 100 shows that they are performing better than average and an IQ less than
100 shows that they are performing below average.
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Table 12.4 Hypothetical scores on an ability test at various ages
(a) Test scores of children aged 72 to 80 months

Age (months) 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80
Average score 23 24 25 27 28 30 31 33 35
(b) Test scores of adults aged 15 to 60 years
Age (years) 15 16 17 18 25 30 40 50 60
Average score 62 64 65 66 65 66 65 64 64
There are several problems with this defnition of IQ, which led to its demise. The most
obvious drawback is related to the fact that performance on ability tests ceases to increase
with age after the late teens. Suppose that someone aged 18 years scored 70 on the test. Since
none of the higher age groups has an average score of 70, it is not possible to calculate this
person’s mental age or IQ using Table 12.4(b).
The ratio IQ was therefore abandoned 40 years ago. It should never be used. Instead, a new
term called the ‘deviation IQ’ was introduced. By defnition deviation IQs have a mean of 100
for any particular age group and a standard deviation that is almost always 16 (although two
test constructors adopt standard deviations of 15 and 18, respectively). Deviation IQs also (by
defnition) follow a normal (bell-shaped) distribution and the manuals of many ability tests
contain a table showing which scores on the test correspond to which level of IQ.
Since deviation IQs follow a normal distribution, it is relatively straightforward to work out
how extreme a particular IQ score is. One simply converts the IQ to a z score by subtracting
the mean IQ and dividing by the standard deviation – these fgures are 100 and 16, respectively,
by defnition. One then consults the table of areas under the standard normal distribution which
can be found in any statistics text. For example, an IQ of 131 corresponds to a z score of
(131 − 100 ) = 1.94

16
and the table of the standard normal integral shows that only 2.5% of the population will
have scores above this level. An IQ of 110 corresponds to a z score of 0.625; 26% of the
population will have scores above this level.
It is only necessary (indeed, it is only statistically legitimate) to convert scores on ability
tests into IQs to interpret the meaning of one individual’s score on a test. Most of us will
simply calculate t-tests, correlations, etc. based on the raw scores from ability tests.
a. What is the difference between ratio IQ and deviation IQ?

b. How would you respond if a member of the government berated
schoolteachers because, despite a supposedly huge increase in schools’
resources, a recent study showed that 50% of children still have IQs below
100 (the same figure as 10 years ago)?
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Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences

Howard Gardner had doubts about the adequacy of factor analysis as a method for revealing
ability traits and so he performed an extensive literature search in order to try to fnd groups
of behaviours that varied together regularly. For example, he looked for behaviours that:
l tended to develop at similar ages

l were similarly affected by drugs or damage to a particular part of the brain
l appeared (or disappeared) together in geniuses and people with learning disabilities
l interfered with each other when people were asked to perform two tasks at the same time
l use common sets of symbols (e.g., music, mathematical notation)
l transfer, so that training on one task leads to good performance on a second.
Gardner (1983) identifed seven ‘intelligences’ that met most of these criteria. These were
linguistic intelligence, musical intelligence, logical/mathematical intelligence, spatial
intelligence, bodily/kinaesthetic intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence (self-knowledge) and
interpersonal intelligence (quality of interactions with others). ‘Naturalistic intelligence’
(being in touch with nature) and ‘existential intelligence’ (spirituality) have more recently been
added to the list. Some of Gardner’s ‘intelligences’ seem to correspond closely to ability traits
identifed by Cattell, Gustafsson and others; intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence
sound like emotional intelligence discussed in Chapter 7 and where there is not good agreement
(e.g., bodily/kinaesthetic or naturalistic intelligence) it may be because these are not generally
regarded as important cognitive abilities under the hierarchical model.
There are two diffculties with this approach. First, Gardner assumed that these ‘intelligences’
would be uncorrelated with each other: ‘[T]here exists a multitude of intelligences, quite
independent of each other’ wrote Gardner (1993). Amazingly, he had no evidence for making
this claim, which fies in the face of a century’s research on the structure of abilities. Second,
using Gardner’s defnition of ‘intelligence’ at the start of this section, it is clear that the list
cannot be complete. For example, sexual behaviours have symbols, appear (and decline)
together with age, are all affected by drugs, brain damage, etc. – so why is there no factor of
sexual intelligence? It seems to me that this theory does little more than back up what is
already known about the structure of abilities, but it has been marketed as something new
and radical, which in my view it is not.
There is also the question of how one should best assess Gardner’s intelligences to test his
claim that the intelligences are independent of each other and unrelated to g. Several tests have
been published that claim to measure Gardner’s intelligences.
ExERCISE
Think how you might assess one of Gardner’s intelligences – e.g., musical
intelligence or interpersonal intelligence.
You might have suggested measuring musical intelligence by measuring how well someone
can remember a tune or rhythm, perhaps testing their musical knowledge, asking them to sing
in tune, write a tune, identify which of two notes is of higher pitch, analyse a piece of music
(e.g., to identify the various components of sonata form) and so on. To measure interpersonal
268
intelligence you could perhaps ask others to rate how easy a person is to talk to, assess how
clearly they can express a viewpoint at a meeting, test how well they can see things from
another person’s perspective and so on. If so, you are thinking like a psychologist (which is
meant to be a compliment).
Unfortunately, tests to measure Gardner’s multiple intelligences are often not so
sophisticated. According to the author’s website, the Teele Inventory for Multiple Intelligences
‘is used in 8,000 school districts throughout the nation and in twenty-fve other countries’;
one would perhaps expect it to be state of the art. This measure simply shows children or
adults pictures of several activities, supposedly representing seven of the intelligences proposed
by Gardner (e.g., skateboarding for bodily/kinaesthetic intelligence, listening to music for
musical intelligence) and asks them to choose the one that they would prefer to do. There is
no evidence whatsoever that the participants are any good at the activities that they claim to
prefer; if it measures anything, it may be motivation or interest.
The Multiple Intelligences Development Assessment Scales (MIDAS) developed by C. B.
Shearer is a commercial test which (according to the author’s website) ‘has been translated
into Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Korean and has been completed by over 25,000 people
world-wide. It is being used in schools from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Portland, Oregon
and from Vancouver, British Columbia to Jakarta, Indonesia and beyond’ and is viewed
favourably by Gardner. It too fails to assess level of performance objectively, but simply asks
people to rate their liking for various activities (and sometimes to self-assess their level of
performance) as shown in Table 12.5. It is unsurprising that scores on tests such as these show
small correlations with conventional intelligence tests, but that can hardly be taken as good
evidence for Gardner’s theoretical model, as personality tests (or random numbers) would
show small correlations too.
Two studies have been performed to test Gardner’s theory. Visser et al. (2006a) chose two
fairly conventional ability tests to assess each of Gardner’s intelligences: Gardner himself
(Gardner, 2006) thought that these authors made ‘a reasonable effort to choose tasks that are
central to the domains under examination’, although he complained that the tests that were
used were too logical/scientifc, a point rebutted by Visser et al. (2006b). Visser et al. (2006a)
Table 12.5 Sample items from the Shearer’s MIDAS test of multiple
intelligences (Akbari and Hosseini, 2008)
Intelligence Sample item. Each is answered on a fve-point scale plus a ‘do not know’
option.
Musical Do you spend a lot of time listening to music?

Kinaesthetic Are you a good dancer, cheerleader or gymnast?
Linguistic Do you enjoy telling stories or talking about favourite movies or books?
Interpersonal Are you ever a ‘leader’ for doing things?
Intrapersonal Do you have a clear sense of who you are?
Naturalistic Are you good at recognising breeds of pets or kinds of animals?
Spatial How are you at finding your way around new buildings or city streets?
Math/Logic Do you have a good memory for numbers such as telephone numbers or
addresses?
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found that many of Gardner’s supposedly independent ‘intelligences’ correlated substantially

together, and that a clear g factor was found when these tests were factor analysed, although
musical and kinaesthetic intelligences did not load on this.
The second study (Castejon et al., 2010) is noteworthy because it used ratings of eight
aspects of behaviour which were recommended by Gardner – for example, looking at children’s
art portfolios (!) as a measure of their spatial intelligence, and assessing variables such as their
level of representation and degree of exploration. This paper, too, found that Gardner’s
intelligences are substantially intercorrelated and that a hierarchical model (with g at the top)
ftted the data far better than Gardner’s model of six uncorrelated intelligences. These studies
which test Gardner’s claim that there are six to eight quite independent domains of intelligence
seem to show that the whole theory is simply not based on fact.
Gardner’s work has been enthusiastically promoted to teachers and educationalists with
children being categorised into ‘types’ on the basis of their scores on these so-called tests of
intelligence; school curricula are designed to embrace diversity in that some children are
thought to have strengths in interpersonal learning (group work), some learn better through
the medium of music or using bodily movement. Is this new or surprising? I remember having
a wide variety of lessons (including music, dance, art, ‘nature walks’ and group work) in the
1950s – long before Gardner’s theories developed. What Gardner seems to be advocating is
(a) that a diverse curriculum is desirable, and (b) that it is desirable because many children
perform markedly better in some areas than others. My problem is that there seems to be no
evidence to support Gardner’s second assertion – and several studies which suggest that it
quite wrong. We will return to this in Chapter 18.
Sternberg’s triarchic theory of ability

The fnal theory to be considered here is that of Sternberg (1985). Sternberg argued that
conventional ability tests were rather narrow in scope when compared to laypersons’ views
of what constituted ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ behaviour. He accordingly developed three ‘sub-
theories’ of intelligence and suggests that any defnition of intelligence should take into
account the following three things:
1. The context in which ‘intelligent’ behaviour takes place – the result of neglecting this
variable is that the only behaviours seen to be relevant to ‘intelligence’ as measured by
psychometric tests are those that are important (and can be easily measured) in a
classroom testing situation. It is argued that real-world intelligence involves solving ill-
defned problems such as how to schedule a busy social life, revise effectively, win when
gambling or fnd a partner. This is known as the contextual subtheory.
2. The experiential subtheory explicitly considers the role of novelty, experience and
automaticity in solving the task. (Automaticity is the smooth performance of cognitively
complex operations as a result of considerable experience, e.g., driving a car or reading.)
It is thought to be linked to creative intelligence, as it involves deciding what problem is
to be solved.
3. The componential subtheory considers the underlying mechanisms (processes) of intelligent
behaviour, which include ‘metacomponents’ (planning of actions and cognitive strategies
for solving tasks) and knowledge acquisition. The more cognitive part of this subtheory will
be introduced in Chapter 13. It is thought to be linked to analytical intelligence.
Sternberg’s triarchic theory is an attempt to explain intelligent behaviour in terms of these

three subtheories.
270
A real-life example may help here. Some years ago my neighbour had a large, savage
Rottweiler that lived in his garden, lunged against the hedge and barked at (and thoroughly
terrifed) anyone in our garden. As far as the contextual subtheory is concerned, ‘intelligent’
responses to this situation might include changing the environment (moving house), modifying
the environment (persuading the neighbour to take the dog into the house or letting the dog
loose in the hope that it will run away) or adapting to it (wearing earplugs when working,
becoming friends with the dog, not using the garden so that the dog would not pose a problem,
or just realising that after a few months it might not appear to be so scary).
The experiential subtheory seeks to understand the novel demands of the situation – both
the nature of the situation itself and the possible solutions. The former may include a lack of
experience of ferce dogs and less-than-considerate neighbours. The latter may include a lack
of experience of confrontational situations. If I had substantial previous experience in any of
these areas, my responses would be more automatic (e.g., knowing precisely how to obtain
the desired result when approaching the neighbours), so my overall behaviour would appear
more polished and more intelligent and would probably be more successful.
The componential sub-theory would explain how I planned to solve the problem, perhaps
gathering relevant information (e.g., legal advice sites, realtors, sources of earplugs), planning
a strategy, monitoring the success of this strategy and so on.
The problem is that by defning intelligence so broadly, Sternberg is stepping into the realm
of personality and performance. Style of behaviour (which presumably includes problem
solving) was, after all, how we initially defned personality. Thus it comes as no surprise that
Sternberg’s focus turned to understanding the relationship between (his theory of) intelligence
and personality (Sternberg, 1994), which all seems rather circular. Whether I murder or release
the dog, shout at or reason with my neighbour, abandon or defend my right to use the garden,
plan my response to the Rottweiler problem or rush straight to a solution, these different
approaches certainly sound like personality traits.
Sternberg’s theories therefore suggest that that as well as the ‘analytic intelligence’ considered
in the early parts of this chapter, ‘practical intelligence’ or common sense may be at least as
important for predicting behaviour. These practical problems often have more than one possible
solution, are ill-defned, and may beneft from knowledge acquired through experience or
observation (rather than being explicitly learned). The example he gives is promotion at work;
the person who is promoted is not necessarily the best at their job, but is more likely to be the
one who knows how ‘the system’ works, and knows how to work it to their advantage.
However is this a good theory? How else could one act other than adapting oneself, changing
the environment or shifting environments? Together they seem to spell out all possible options!
The theory must therefore necessarily be correct; it cannot be falsifed and thus may not be
scientifc. Putting that aside, a review of the evidence for ‘practical intelligence’ put forward by
Sternberg concludes that it is backed up ‘mostly with the appearance, not the reality, of hard
evidence’(Gottfredson, 2003) based on anecdotes and case studies; Linda Gottfredson’s paper
is straightforward, devastating and warmly recommended. There is also good empirical
evidence to back up her claim, as Koke and Vernon (2003) found that practical intelligence
correlated 0.45 with a test of g and did not predict academic performance any better than
did g. The notion of practical intelligence is appealing, but it may not stand up to scrutiny.
Conclusions
Although it was developed more than a century ago, the idea of general intelligence still seems
to be an important indicator of human behaviour – although it is now appreciated that there is
271
a hierarchy of abilities, rather than just a single g factor. Although several alternatives have been
developed over the years, several of these have disappeared and those that remain (Gardner,
Sternberg) seem to have major problems. Gardner’s theory does not provide any way of
measuring the levels of children’s intelligences, which is a cause for concern; tests which have
been developed by others certainly do not look as if they measure any form of ability. In addition,
Gardner’s major premise (that his intelligences are independent) is demonstrably incorrect.
Sternberg’s theory, like Gardner’s, was propounded in books rather than peer-reviewed
publications. Where it has been possible to test Sternberg’s theory, it has not held up well. For
example, his measure of ‘practical intelligence’ correlates substantially with a conventional
intelligence test. The hierarchical model of abilities is underpinned by a solid bank of empirical
data, and looks set to dominate both research and practice for the foreseeable future.

This chapter has concentrated on conveying a basic grasp of hierarchical models of ability,
since these are of considerable theoretical and practical importance; more detailed coverage
of these and the models of Gardner and Sternberg is given in Cooper (2015), Gardner (1993)
and Sternberg (1985) – which should perhaps be read alongside Gottfredson (2003). A trio
of papers exploring the validity of Gardner’s theory (and his response to criticisms similar to
those which I levied above) can be warmly recommended (Gardner and Moran, 2006;
Waterhouse, 2006a, 2006b). Those who are interested in the development of intelligence will
enjoy Schroeders et al. (2016). Although the results section is rather advanced, it can safely
be taken on trust. There is also a burgeoning literature on intelligence in other species; Arden
and Adams (2016), for example.
Scores on IQ tests gradually increased in much of the 20th century – a phenomenon
sometimes known as the Flynn effect. Rindermann et al. (2017) describe the phenomenon and
list some possible explanations whilst Williams (2013) gives a more detailed review of the
research literature. Herrnstein and Murray (1994) contains some extremely controversial
interpretations of the correlates of general ability – readers may like to evaluate critically both
this work and also the many counterviews that have appeared on the internet. Those who really
enjoy controversy might also like to explore the literature which claims that the average
intelligence levels in a country can explain why some countries are more economically advanced
than others – although the methodology of such studies needs to be carefully scrutinised, in
particular the assumption that ‘Western’ intelligence tests produce accurate results in other
cultures, and the possible presence of confounding variables (e.g., availability of education).
Hunt (2012) is one of the more balanced papers in this area. It is also worthwhile downloading
the Ekstrom et al. test and its manual (https://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/Kit_of_Factor-
Referenced_Cognitive_Tests.pdf) to see what intelligence items look like.
SAQ 12.1
There are no right or wrong answers to this question, the purpose of which
was to encourage thought. Some possibilities are discussed in the next
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section. Others might include analysing what actions requiring intelligence

seem to be performed by a wide range of people, e.g., by following students,
plasterers, unemployed people, pensioners, drivers, doctors, etc. during
their working lives and noting either what problems they need to solve or
asking them to ‘think aloud’. Alternatively, one can perform a massive
literature search, as Carroll (1993) has done, in an attempt to identify and
classify all the distinct abilities that have ever been reported in the literature.
Another approach would be to start from cognitive psychology and to try
to assess individual differences in the types of thing that cognitive
psychologists assess, e.g., speed of mental rotation, mental scanning,
semantic priming, etc.
SAQ 12.2
I cannot guarantee that these answers are correct – they merely represent my
view concerning the type of skills that might be most important in each of
the tasks:
a. action – output; content – aural; process – fine use of muscle
b. input, memory and knowledge
c. internal processing, verbal and remembering
d. internal processing, verbal and complexity of relations
e. internal processing, verbal, complexity of relations and creativity
f. internal processing, knowledge, convergence and remembering.
SAQ 12.3
It is probably not sensible to conclude causality because, although the
examples at the start of the chapter on factor analysis suggested that factors
can sometimes be causal, it is not possible to extrapolate this and argue that
any factor must be causal. For it is quite possible that things other than
‘general ability’ (possibly quality of education, inability to understand English,
anxiety) may cause the observed results. However, if g can be shown to refect
some basic feature of the individual (e.g., the speed with which their nerves
work) that cannot easily be assessed by any other means, then it may be
permissible to argue causality, and we cover this in Chapters 13 and 15.
273
SAQ 12.4
a. Gv
b. Gr
c. Gc
d. Gps.
SAQ 12.5
Advantages of using the single format of items include:
l ease of administration; only one set of instructions are needed
l lack of reliance on language, which may make it more fair for dyslexic
participants.
Advantages of using many different types of item include:
l less likelihood of boredom
l estimating g by averaging across many different types of items ensures
that the estimate will not be contaminated with the ‘unique factor’
(see chapter 5) associated with one type of item. As each type of item will
have a different unique factor associated with it, their influence will
disappear when combined. Gignac (2015) argues that these issues present
problems for using the Raven tests as a measure of g.
SAQ 12.6
a. mental age
Ratio IQ = × 100 whereas deviation IQ defines IQ as
chronological age
a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of
(usually) 16.
b. Because of the definition of deviation IQ given earlier (a normally
distributed variable), 50% of the children will always be defined as having
IQs below 100, even if the underlying raw scores on the test all increase
dramatically over the 10-year period. (In addition, the minister ought not
to assume that education can improve IQ!)
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Chapter 13
Ability processes
Introduction
So far, we have assumed that intelligence and abilities are real characteristics of individuals,
perhaps related to the way in which neurones operate or to the way in which individuals
process information. That is, we have assumed that abilities exist and that they infuence
behaviour. Not everyone shares this view. For example, Howe (1988) argued that these
abilities are a convenient way of describing how people behave, but are essentially
‘constructions’ of the observer, rather than any real property of the individual. According to
this view, it would be quite wrong to use general ability as an explanation – for example, to
say that a child performs well at school because he or she is intelligent would imply that
general ability is some basic property of the individual, rather than just a convenient way of
describing their behaviour. This chapter accordingly examines whether intelligence, measured
as described in Chapter 12, is related to the structure and function of the nervous system, or
whether it is just a social construction of little real interest. If such links can be found, it may
be appropriate to use general ability to ‘explain’ behaviour, since general ability may refect
individual differences in the biological processing power of the brain and nervous system – a
notion that dates back to Galton (1883) and Hebb (1949).
Learning outcomes
l Discuss why measures of mental speed might be related to g, and outline
the evidence linking direct and indirect measures of nerve conduction
velocity to g.
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Ability processes
l Show an understanding of attempts to model g by developing elementary

cognitive tasks, and an appreciation of the problems which were found
with this approach.
l Form an opinion about the relationship between g and working memory.
l Show a critical appreciation of modern research linking g to brain
structure and brain activity.
Chapter 12 made some rather important points. It indicated that almost all human abilities
are positively correlated together and that it is possible to describe these correlations either
by a single factor of general ability (as suggested by Spearman), by a set of 20 or more ‘primary
mental abilities’ (as suggested by Thurstone), by a few ‘group factors’ (as suggested by Burt
and Vernon) or, most generally, by a hierarchical model that incorporates all of these features
(as suggested by Carroll, Cattell and Gustafsson). This really is quite interesting. It would
logically be quite possible for human abilities to be independent of each other – after all, why
should abilities as diverse as musical talent, mathematical skill, vocabulary, memory or ability
to visualise shapes be interrelated? It is not as if there are any obvious processes (e.g., pieces
of knowledge or skills taught through education) that are common to all of them and that
could, therefore, account for their interrelationships.
However, knowing the structure of abilities does not mean that we understand what these
abilities are. For this we need to develop ‘process models’ that describe intelligent behaviour
in terms of lower-level biological, social, cognitive or neural processes. Only when we have
a good understanding of precisely why some people show different patterns of ability,
personality and so on, can we profess to understand why people show different levels of
abilities. Thirty years ago the structure of personality and ability was not particularly well
understood and journals were full of articles attempting to establish the basic dimensions of
ability. As there is now some consensus of opinion about the basic structure of abilities,
almost all of the older theories being accommodated neatly by a hierarchical model, the focus
of research has shifted. The main aim now is to identify the processes that cause individual
differences in ability to appear.
This chapter focuses on general intelligence, g, rather than any of the second-order or
primary abilities discussed in Chapter 12. There are two reasons for this. The frst is that as
there are rather a lot of primary and second-order abilities, any discussion of their underlying
processes would have to be quite superfcial to keep this chapter a reasonable length. However
the second reason is more important. A person’s level of g must, by defnition, infuence their
performance on all lower-level abilities. To anticipate Chapters 17 and 18, g seems to be the
‘active ingredient’ which makes lower-level abilities useful. So for example, a test measuring
spatial ability might be found to predict performance at work. The question is whether this
is because it measures g to some extent, or whether it is because it measures spatial ability.
Surprisingly, it turns out that tests almost invariably work because of the g component that
runs through each of them. Thus the main reason for considering g in this chapter is that it
seems to be a potent predictor of many types of behaviour.
Since abilities refect the processing of information by the nervous system, the logical place
to start looking for process models of individual differences is in the biology of the nervous
system and in cognitive psychology. Both of these areas can sensibly be regarded as lower
level, more fundamental causes of intelligent behaviour – it seems more likely that the way
neurones work will affect general ability than vice versa.
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Ability processes
When one starts looking into the infuence of social processes, personality, etc., the picture
becomes much more complex, because it is diffcult to be sure which variables are causes and
which are effects. For example, suppose that it is found that children who perform poorly at
mathematics hate the subject vehemently, whereas those who perform well have much more
positive attitudes towards it. We assume that all children have been taught the same syllabus
in the same way, and so any individual differences refect ability, not attainment. Perhaps we
can argue that children’s attitudes to a subject are an important indicator of their ability in
that feld – that is, that attitude infuences ability. Thus any process model of ability ought to
consider attitudes as important predictors.
However, this approach has several drawbacks. It is quite possible that the children’s
attitudes towards mathematics will result from their performance rather than vice versa.
Achieving plenty of A grades on mathematics tests, receiving approving comments from
teachers, etc., might cause children to enjoy the subject. Failing tests, being laughed at by one’s
peers and having to take extra tuition might well engender a negative attitude towards the
subject. Thus it is just as likely that attitudes result from ability as that attitudes cause ability –
which makes it unwise to rely on attitudes when exploring the causes of abilities. There is a
third possibility, too – that attitude and performance may both be infuenced by some other
factor(s), quality of teaching being one obvious variable.
These problems are not (quite) insurmountable, given excellent experimental design
and statistics, such as confrmatory factor analysis (see Chapter 19). However, it makes
sense to explore the simplest routes (biology and cognition) frst – it is possible that
individual differences in these areas may be able to explain a very sizeable proportion of
the individual differences in ability. If so, there is no need to consider the (methodologically
more messy) social and attitudinal approaches. However, if biological and cognitive
approaches are unable to explain individual differences in ability, then these other avenues
should be explored.
Neural processing and general ability

In the 1980s several theorists suggested that a person’s general ability may, in part, be
infuenced by the way in which individual neurones in his or her nervous system process
information. One theory suggests that high general ability may be a consequence of having
nerve cells in the brain that conduct impulses rapidly (Reed, 1984). Another theory suggests
that general ability may be related to the accuracy with which information is transmitted from
neurone to neurone (Eysenck, 1986; Hendrickson, 1972). The second point probably needs
some explanation. Imagine that you are listening to an AM radio tuned to a distant station.
It will be much more diffcult to hear what is being said than when it is tuned to a nearby
station, because the background hisses and crackles interfere with your ability to detect what
is being said – they mask the signal. It may be the same with neurones. Perhaps some people’s
neurones switch reliably from a very low to a very high rate of fring when stimulated by
another neurone. Other people’s neurones may fre quite frequently even when unstimulated
or may fre only moderately frequently when stimulated. In such cases, information will not
be transmitted very effciently from one neurone to others. Some upstream neurones will
‘think’ that a neurone has fred when it has not, or they may fail to detect a modest increase
in fring rate that corresponds to a real psychological event.
These two theories lead to similar predictions. They suggest that people whose neurones
conduct information quickly along the axon and/or which transmit information effciently
and accurately across the synapses are likely to be more effcient at processing information
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Ability processes
than those whose nerves transmit information slowly or have a low signal-to-noise ratio.
Several techniques have been developed to measure the speed and/or effciency of neural
conduction, including direct measurement, inspection time, reaction time and evoked
potential studies.
Direct measurement of neural conduction velocity

In principle, such direct measurement is easy. One merely has to apply two electrodes (as far
apart as possible) to a single neurone. An electric current is applied to one electrode, to
stimulate the neurone. The second electrode is used to time how quickly the impulse travels
down the axon of the neurone. If the distance between the two electrodes is measured with a
ruler, it is a simple matter to calculate the nerve conduction velocity. If this experiment is
performed with a large sample of people whose scores on a test of general ability are also
known, then theory would predict that there should be a substantial positive correlation
between general ability and nerve conduction velocity (NCV).
Vernon and Mori (1992) performed such experiments using nerves in the arm and wrist
and found that there was a signifcant correlation (of the order of 0.42–0.48) between general
ability and NCV. Thus it does appear from these studies that intelligent people have nerves
that simply transmit information more quickly than those of individuals of lower general
ability. Others failed to replicate this fnding (Reed and Jensen, 1991; Rijsdijk et al., 1995)
although Rijsdijk and Boomsma (1997) found a small relationship (r=0.15). However, these
tasks do not involve any synaptic transmission and so, if the individual differences arise at the
synapses, the Vernon and Mori task could not be expected to work.
McRorie and Cooper (2001, 2004) hence ran some experiments to determine whether
higher ability individuals show faster refex responses than lower ability ones (latency of knee-
jerk refex and speed of withdrawal from a painful electric shock). This second experiment
involved participants pressing a metal button with their fnger. After a few seconds, a painful
electric shock was delivered between the button and another electrode on the fnger; lifting
the fnger broke the circuit and terminated the shock. These tasks do involve synaptic
transmission (although no conscious thought at all) and there was a link between speed of
withdrawal and IQ supporting the Reed/Eysenck/Jensen theory.
Whilst directly stimulating nerves seems to be the obvious way of addressing the link
between intelligence and neural processing speed, it has three main problems.
l It can only be applied to nerves in the limbs and body – not those in the brain. This is a
problem because peripheral nerves are somewhat different from nerves in the brain
(for example, their size and coating of myelin may differ). Results obtained from stimulating
peripheral nerves may therefore not generalise to nerve cells in the brain.
l Stimulating a single long peripheral nerve does not involve any synaptic transmission.
If this is the key to understanding individual differences in intelligence (as suggested by
Hendrickson) then the Vernon and Mori experiment could not be expected to work
(although the refex experiments would).
l These experiments are diffcult to perform because accurate temperature control is
necessary which can be very diffcult to achieve in practice. Age and the amount of myelin
surrounding the peripheral nerve also infuence the conduction velocity.
It is therefore common to look at indirect measures of nerve conduction velocity, from

examining speed of information processing, nerve activity in the brain, and similar
measurements.
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Indirect measurement of neural conduction velocity

Inspection time Several techniques have been developed to measure NCV using indirect
methods. The simplest is a technique known as inspection time (Vickers et al., 1972). This
simply measures how long a simple stimulus has to be presented in order to be perceived
correctly. For example, suppose that either shape (a) or shape (b) in Figure 13.1 is fashed on
to a screen for a few thousandths of a second and a volunteer is then asked whether the longer
line was on the left or the right. Shape (c) is presented immediately after (a) or (b) to act as a
mask (if you are not familiar with the principles of masking you can safely ignore this detail).
It is important to realise that inspection time is a measure of how long it takes to see a stimulus
and not of how quickly a person can respond to it – in the inspection time task an individual
can take as long as they want to make their decision.
The aim of inspection time studies is to determine how long it takes an individual to
perceive such stimuli. Since the retina is essentially an outgrowth of the brain, people with
accurate and/or rapid neurones should be able to make this simple discrimination more at
briefer exposure levels than those with slower nervous systems. There should be a negative
correlation between general ability and inspection time.
The amount of time a person needs to see the fgures can be estimated by repeating the
experiment several times (e.g., 50–100 times) for each of several exposure periods. The
proportion of correct answers can be noted and plotted on a graph such as that shown in
Figure 13.2. It is possible to ft a curve to these data for each person, as shown.
At the fastest exposures everybody performs at chance level. However, as the presentation
time increases, it is clear that Person 2 can see which line is longer at short duration; they
begin to perform slightly above chance at 0.3 seconds, whilst Person 1 needs the shape to be
presented for about 0.4 seconds before they start to perform above chance levels. It is possible
to calculate a statistic for each individual to refect these differences – for example, the
exposure time at which there is an 80% chance that they will be able to solve the problem
correctly. All one has to do is plot the graphs, drop a line down to the x axis and read off the
inspection time for each person. This can be correlated with measures of general ability in
order to determine whether inspection time (and hence, indirectly, speed and/or effciency of
neural processing) is related to general ability.
Figure 13.1 Stimuli for an inspection time task
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Ability processes
Figure 13.2 Probability of correctly identifying the ‘longer leg’ of the

inspection time fgure at several exposure durations
Tens of studies show that it is. Most fnd that the correlations between measures of
general ability and inspection time are of the order of –0.3 to –0.5. Several alternative
methods of assessing inspection time have also been devised (e.g., McCrory and Cooper,
2005, 2007; Nettelbeck and Kirby, 1983) and they yield broadly similar results to the
method described above.
The interpretation of such data is however a little more controversial. It has been suggested
that the correlations between inspection time and general ability may be infuenced by
attention span or by the use of cognitive strategies, such as ficker detection, which will reveal
whether the shorter leg of the masked stimulus were presented to the left or the right
(Mackenzie and Bingham, 1985). Some researchers have developed more effective masks that
do not allow people to develop strategies for solving the task (Stough et al., 2001) whilst
others note that even when these are taken into account by experimental and statistical means,
there is still an appreciable correlation between the inspection time and g (Egan, 1994).
Alternative paradigms, such as ability to detect the apparent direction of a tone briefy
presented through earphones (McCrory and Cooper, 2005; Parker et al., 1999) which are not
affected by these cognitive strategies produce similar results to the original experiments, so
the fnding seems to be robust and genuine. Grudnik and Kranzler (2001) report a meta-
analysis of inspection time studies and conclude that the size of the underlying correlation is
approximately −0.51 after correcting for reliability and restriction of range.
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Ability processes

Why would it be serious if inspection time were shown to be infuenced by
cognitive strategies, such as ficker detection?
Overall, it is clear that inspection time has a very substantial link to general intelligence, and
that this work has replicated well using a variety of different stimuli. This lends strong support
to the theory that general intelligence is linked to the speed or effciency of neural conduction.
Reaction time Inspection time estimates the time for which a stimulus has to be presented in
order to be correctly recognised, but it is also possible to assess how long it takes an individual
to respond to a stimulus. This, too, might be related to general ability – if highly intelligent
individuals have neurones that transmit information particularly quickly or accurately, these
individuals should be able to respond more rapidly to a signal than people of lower general
ability. This idea was frst proposed by Galton (1883), who eventually concluded that no such
relationship existed. However, the accurate measurement of reaction times was problematic
150 years ago and Jensen and Munroe (1974) re-examined this issue. They measured reaction
time using the apparatus shown diagrammatically in Figure 13.3.
Figure 13.3 Jensen and Munroe’s (1974) choice reaction time apparatus
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Ability processes
The apparatus consists of eight green lights (here depicted by squares) arranged in a
semicircle on a metal panel. Beside each light is a button (denoted by a black circle) with an
additional ‘home button’ centred 15cm away from all of the other buttons. The lights and
buttons are connected to a computer that controls the experiment. The task is straightforward
and participants are asked to react as quickly as possible. The index fnger of the preferred
hand is placed on the home button. After a (random) period of a few seconds, one of the lights
is illuminated – the ‘target light’. The participant lifts their fnger from the home button and
presses the button beside this light. Two time intervals are recorded:
l the interval between the ‘target’ light being illuminated and the fnger leaving the home
button, known as the reaction time (RT)
l the interval between the fnger leaving the home button and pressing the target button,
known as the movement time (MT).
This is repeated at least 50 times. Measurements are also obtained for different numbers
of lights (varying from one to eight), the unused lights and buttons being masked off by metal
plates. Hence the apparatus measures simple reaction time (one light) or up to eight-choice
reaction time.
When one person’s mean reaction times are plotted as a function of the number of lights,
a graph similar to that shown in Figure 13.4 is obtained. (Do not worry about why the
Figure 13.4 Reaction time and movement time of a single person as a

function of the number of potential targets
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Ability processes
numbers on the x axis are not equally spaced.) Straight lines may be ftted to this person’s RT
and MT graphs as shown and the equations of these straight lines can be obtained by simple
algebra. The height of these lines (the ‘intercept’) shows how quickly the participant reacted
overall. The slope of the lines shows how much their RT (or MT) changes as the number of
potential targets increases. RT typically increases as the number of potential targets increases
(a phenomenon known as ‘Hick’s law’), whereas MT stays almost constant. We thus have
four measures for each participant, corresponding to the slope and the intercept of the two
lines. These measures may be correlated with scores on a test of general ability. It is also
possible to measure the variability of each person’s scores within a particular condition, for
example, the standard deviation of their scores within the four-light condition. This too may
be correlated with g.
The intercept of the RT graph generally shows a signifcant negative correlation with
general ability – in the order of –0.3 (Jensen, 1987a) whereas the slope does not correlate with
general ability. Intelligent people respond more quickly in each condition, but there is no
difference in the slope of the lines obtained by intelligent and less intelligent people (Barrett
et al., 1986; Jensen, 1982; Beauducel and Brocke, 1993). Variability of a person’s RT also
correlates with g (Doebler and Scheffer, 2016), more intelligent people being more consistent.
MT shows no correlation with general ability, although the variability in MT often does
(Jensen, 1982).
The Jensen apparatus is somewhat large and ‘clunky’; the fnger needs to travel a large
distance and the buttons have strong springs and need to be pressed hard. More modern
apparatus reveals large correlations between reaction time and g. It also seems that age
matters, as the correlation is larger for older groups. Der and Deary (2017) found a correlation
between four-choice RT and g of between –0.44 (aged 30) and –0.53 (aged 69).
Unfortunately, however, reaction times are not easy to work with.
l People occasionally give very long reaction times for no obvious reason, perhaps because
their attention wandered. The way in which such data are cleaned up (and making an
arbitrary decision about how long a reaction time should be before it is removed) can have
a massive effect on experimental results.
l Each person produces more short reaction times than long ones. As reaction times are
therefore skewed, it arguably makes little sense to average them anyway.
l Variability of RTs is substantially correlated with the mean RTs (typically r=–0.5) and so
it is diffcult to tell whether the link between RT and g indicates fast or consistent
responding.
Rather more complex models of how the brain makes the decision to respond to a stimulus
have recently been developed (Ratcliff et al., 2008; Ratcliff et al., 1999). These are based on
reaction time data from a two-choice task, but rather than looking at each person’s average
RT and its variability they measure rate of acquisition of information and other variables for
each person. These can be related to g. Schmiedek et al. (2007) found that rate of acquisition
of information correlated 0.72 with working memory; this is very similar to g, as discussed
below. These methods are a little complex and so will not be considered here, but are
recommended to anyone interested in researching this area. It is also possible to estimate the
amount of skew which an individual’s reaction times show, separately from their latency and
spread – an ‘ex-Gaussian’ function (Osmon et al., 2018) and anyone seeking to analyse
reaction-time-like measures would also be well advised to consult that paper.
Not everyone would agree that a link between reaction time measures and g necessarily
implies that intelligence is related to speed of processing. Longstreth (1984) suggests that the
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Ability processes
more intelligent participants may be able to devise effcient cognitive strategies for responding
quickly (Sternberg’s ‘metacomponents’ mentioned in Chapter 12). The correlations between
RT and general ability may thus refect the use of such strategies rather than anything more
fundamental. However, experiments performed in order to test such hypotheses show that
these strategies cannot explain the underlying correlation between RT and general ability
(Matthews and Dorn, 1989). Reaction time does seem to show a negative correlation with
general ability, as expected.

a. What is the difference between inspection time and reaction time?
b. Name three measures derived from the Jensen task that have been found
to correlate substantially with general ability.
Evoked potentials The fourth way of exploring the link between neural activity and general
ability relies on recording the electrical activity from brain cells. If one sticks (quite literally!)
one or more electrodes on the surface of the scalp and attaches these to sensitive amplifers,
it is possible to measure electrical activity in the brain – not in individual neurones, but in
whole areas of the brain. One can either analyse the activity obtained when the person is
sitting quietly, or note how the pattern of activity changes following some stimulus, such as
a tone presented through headphones. Auditory evoked potential (AEP) recordings are, as
their name suggests, measures of brain voltages (potentials) that are evoked by a sound.
In the simplest experimental design, the participant is seated in a comfortable chair, an
electrode is attached to their scalp and a pair of headphones is placed over their head. They
are simply told to remain sitting, with eyes closed, and do nothing. They are informed that
they will hear clicks or tones through the headphones from time to time, but that these should
be ignored. A hundred or so clicks are presented over a period of about 10 minutes. What
could be simpler, from a participant’s point of view?
The brain’s electrical activity is recorded for a couple of seconds following each click. In
practice, the voltages are typically measured every thousandth of a second following the onset
of the click and at the end of the experiment each of these 1000 voltages is averaged across
the 100 replications (hence it is known as the average auditory evoked potential). The 1000
averaged voltages may then be plotted as a graph, rather as shown in Figure 13.5, which is
based on the pioneering work of Ertl and Schafer (1969). This shows time on the x axis and
voltage on the y axis. This process therefore produces a different graph for each participant.
Several features of these graphs have been linked to IQ.
Hendrickson and Hendrickson (1980) suggested that high IQ participants appear to have
longer, more spiky waveforms and this could be assessed simply by measuring the length of
the graph over a particular period of time (such as 0.5 seconds). They called this the ‘string
measure’ since it was originally measured by putting a piece of string over graphs such as those
shown in Figure 13.5 and then straightening it out and measuring its length. Using this
technique, they found a correlation of 0.7 between string length and IQ in Ertl and Schafer’s
data, though it has proved diffcult to replicate this effect. A technically sophisticated study
by Barrett and Eysenck (1992) could fnd no evidence whatsoever for this relationship. There
are theoretical problems with the string measure, too. A spiky average trace can only arise if
(a) each individual trace contains a lot of high-frequency components and (b) the time course
of these components is consistent from trial to trial; if this is not the case the peaks and troughs
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Ability processes
Figure 13.5 Average auditory evoked potential recording
will tend to average out to produce a straight line. A fat trace could thus arise for two very
different reasons – a lack of high-frequency activity or inconsistent time courses. It would
surely make sense to analyse each of these variables separately.
If the Reed/Jensen theory is correct, one might expect people with faster-acting nervous
systems to show faster reactions to the stimuli – some or all of the large peaks and troughs
shown in Figure 13.5 might all move to the left for someone with high intelligence, as these
are thought to represent the processing of the auditory stimulus. The problem is, however,
that one can never be quite sure which neural networks are being picked up by the electrode,
and even the decision about where to place the electrode seems arbitrary. It seems possible
that two people may have developed different networks of neurons for processing such signals,
and this (rather than speed of activity within neurons or fdelity of transmission across the
synapses) might well infuence the AEP waveform. All in all the technique is rather crude,
although a fercely complex paper by Schubert et al. (2017) recorded evoked potentials from
several areas of the brain whilst people solved a variety of cognitive puzzles. They found
substantial links between ERP latency (how soon after the stimulus was presented the major
peaks and troughs appeared) and general intelligence, and found that the speed at which their
participants responded mediated this relationship. It seems that there is some association
between speed of information processing in the brain and intelligence.
Elementary cognitive tasks

It would be amazing if the kinds of ability described in Chapter 12 were completely
unrelated to the types of process studied by cognitive psychologists and so in this section
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Ability processes
and the next we shall consider some areas of overlap between the two. Carroll (1980)
suggested that some of the tasks traditionally studied by cognitive psychologists, such as
the Sternberg memory scanning paradigm or the Clark and Chase (1972) sentence verifcation
task, should be related to mental abilities. These experiments were designed to measure the
time taken to perform a single elementary cognitive operation (ECO). For example, the
Saul Sternberg memory scanning paradigm (Sternberg, 1969) presents a list of numbers or
characters for several seconds, after which it disappears and is followed by a ‘target
character’. The participant is asked to push one button if the target character was in the
preceding list and another if it was not. The reaction time is found to be related to the
length of the list. After a little statistical juggling (involving regression lines), it is possible
to estimate how long it takes an individual to ‘take in’ the meaning of the target and how
long it takes that individual to compare the target with one of the stored representations
of a character.
Jensen (1987b) used the Sternberg memory scanning experiment and found that comparison
time correlated negatively with scores on a test of intelligence whilst Carroll (1980) showed
that it is fairly easy to fnd small negative correlations (in the order of –0.3) between the time
it took people to perform various elementary cognitive operations and intelligence. These
studies were important because they showed that intelligence tests (even ones where
participants were given as much time as they wanted to solve the items) were related to speed
of processing in a wide variety of tasks then being developed by cognitive psychologists.
However this did not really help to develop a theory of human intelligence, other than showing
that speed of processing might be important.
The second approach attempts to model solution times to complex tasks by frst drawing
up a fowchart of the cognitive processes which need to be performed in order to solve a
particular type of problem, and then performing experiments to estimate how long a particular
person takes to perform each of these ECOs.

Is it possible that some cognitive strategies could affect performance on
either of these experiments?
Robert Sternberg (1977) performed some remarkably elegant experiments in this area. He
argued that if the sequence of cognitive operations required to perform a fairly complex task
were known, and if it was possible to estimate (through experiments such as those described
earlier) how long it takes each individual to perform each of these basic cognitive operations,
it might be possible to predict quite accurately how long it would take an individual to solve
the problem. In other words, one frst identifes all the ECOs that are thought to be involved
in a particular task and draws up a fowchart to show how these are organised. The next step
is to assess how long it takes each individual to perform each of these mental operations, using
carefully designed experiments. Having done this, it should be possible to ‘plug in’ the amount
of time that it takes an individual to perform each ECO in order to predict how long it should
take a person to solve a new problem which involves some or all of the same ECOs, performed
in a different sequence. This approach might produce a quantitative, predictive model – a
rarity in psychology. Essentially, ECO durations would replace ability traits as the unit of
analysis. That was the theory, at any rate.
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Ability processes
Much of Sternberg’s work focused on nonverbal analogy problems – for example, analogy
items based on simple cartoon characters. These characters differed from each other in the
following four basic ways:
l gender – male/female
l height – tall/short
l girth – fat/thin
l colour – shaded/unshaded.
A typical analogy task using these characters would be like that shown in Figure 13.6. You
have probably already encountered verbal analogies – for example, ‘cat is to kitten as cow is
to bull’ [sic]. Participants would have to decide whether each of these items were true or false.
Sternberg moved away from such verbal analogies because he felt that the use of language
may complicate the process of solving these problems. Instead, he argued that cartoon
characters can be used in the same way. In Figure 13.6 the only thing that differs between the
frst pair of characters is their sex. Their shading, height and girth are the same. Applying the
same rule to the second pair, the fourth character should clearly be a short, thin, unshaded
female. However, it is not, so the analogy is false.
Sternberg argued that six main cognitive processes underpinned performance on these
tasks, namely encoding (the recognition of each feature of the cartoon characters), inference
(noting which features changed between the frst pair of characters, thus inferring the rule to
be applied to the second pair of characters), mapping the relationship between the frst and
third characters, applying the rule to the third character, comparing the fourth character to
what it should be and responding appropriately. He drew up several plausible fowchart
models for solving these problems on the basis of these elementary cognitive operations.
Through the use of some ingenious experiments involving pre-cueing (sometimes showing
some of the characters before the others, thereby allowing some of the ECOs to be performed
prior to the measurement of the reaction times), he was able to assess the duration of each of
these components independently for each person (Sternberg, 1977).
The problem is that, even with a relatively simple task such as this, the number of possible
ways of solving the problem becomes enormous. For example, some cognitive operations may
Figure 13.6 Example of a schematic analogy task, reading ‘Tall fat unshaded
man is to tall fat unshaded woman as short thin unshaded man
is to short thin shaded man’ – an incorrect analogy. If correct,
the fourth character would be a short, thin unshaded woman
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Ability processes
be performed in parallel, rather than sequentially. Cognitive strategies for solving the problems
can also complicate the picture; for example, if three of the characters are shaded but one is
not or if one fgure is a different height from the other three, then the analogy must be
incorrect. Some (but not all) of the individuals performing this task seem to check for such
possibilities before analysing the problem in detail; intelligence did not seem to infuence the
decision to use a strategy. The one published attempt to replicate this work (May et al., 1987)
found that the model(s) proposed by Sternberg really did not ft the data very well. Neither
did the estimated durations of Sternberg’s six basic cognitive processes correlate very strongly
with other cognitive measures. Although it is an elegant and sophisticated attempt to estimate
the duration of elementary cognitive processes, it seems that people use heuristics when
deciding how to solve complex problems.
There is also the issue of what is meant by ‘elementary’. How can one ever tell that a
particular cognitive operation is so basic and hard-wired that it operates in the same way every
time, whatever else the organism is doing? Modelling intelligence using low-level tasks from
cognitive psychology may not be as fruitful as it once appeared. Higher-level cognitive
processes have however been linked to intelligence, as discussed below.
Working memory and intelligence

There is currently much interest in the relationship between working memory and
intelligence. Working memory, as studied by cognitive psychologists, is known to be closely
related to general intelligence (Colom et al., 2008; Engle et al., 1999). A careful meta-
analysis by Oberauer et al. (2005) indicates that the correlation is 0.85, showing that the
two concepts are virtually identical. However the meaning of this correlation is less than
clear, as discussed below.
Working memory tasks require a person to keep information in short-term storage
while performing some other cognitive operation. They may involve showing someone a
story consisting of several sentences and asking them to remember both the meaning
of the story and the last word in each sentence; they are tested afterwards on both of these
aspects. The task requires deep processing of words (to grasp their meaning) and memory
(for the last word in each sentence) and the central executive presumably works hard
switching resources between the two tasks. Table 13.1 gives an example of an item from
such a test.
Table 13.1 A typical item from a test of working memory
Description Text shown on screen
Passage shown on screen for 30 It was noon, and the sun beat against the outer
seconds. Participants are told to walls like an invading army. It was refected off
remember the meaning of the the cobbles in the old town. It felt as though an
passage and memorise the last word oven door had been thrown open. Flies buzzed.
of each sentence, which is in bold. No birds sang. The whole world seemed to doze.
Question 1 Where were the cobbles?
Question 2 What was the last word of the ffth sentence?
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Ability processes
Another task which supposedly measures working memory asks people to listen to a
string of numbers – e.g., 1, 4, 9, 2, 7 – and then repeat them backwards. It is thus necessary
to both remember the original list and process it in reverse. It correlates with general
intelligence which is perhaps hardly surprising as this ‘digit backwards’ task appears in
several intelligence tests (e.g., the WISC-IV) of which it is ‘a high quality subtest’ (Gignac
and Weiss, 2015). Perhaps cognitive psychologists are just re-discovering g, calling it
‘working memory’? The reverse digit-span task correlates only about 0.19 with another
measure of working memory (Hilbert et al., 2015) which casts doubt as to whether it is a
‘pure’ measure of working memory.
Other tasks have been used too. Johnson et al. (2010) describe some of them and report
the correlations between them for various age groups. These correlations are usually between
0.25 and 0.3, which raises concern about whether the tasks all measure the same thing. Based
on this research (which used a huge sample) it would seem essential to administer several
different working memory tasks, as each task has a lot of task-specifc variance associated
with it which needs to be removed by combining scores on several different tasks. Unfortunately,
however, researchers do not always do so.
Whilst combining scores from several different working memory tasks will be effective if
each task is affected by a different source of task-specifc variance, it will be no use at all if all
working memory tasks measure several aspects of cognitive performance – not just working
memory. Unfortunately Diamond’s (2013) conclusion is that many tasks which supposedly
measure working memory also measure many ‘executive functions’ which infuence problem-
solving ability. Executive functions she defnes as:
inhibition [inhibitory control, including self-control (behavioral inhibition) and

interference control (selective attention and cognitive inhibition)], working memory
(WM), and cognitive fexibility (also called set shifting, mental fexibility, or mental set
shifting and closely linked to creativity). From these, higher order EFs are built such as
reasoning, problem solving, and planning.
(Diamond, 2013)
These executive functions comprise the very skills which are required for the successful
solution of unfamiliar problems, which is exactly what intelligence tests entail. It would thus
be amazing if tasks which measured executive functions did not (a) resemble the problems in
intelligence tests and (b) correlate substantially with them. According to this view, tests which
claim to measure working memory may instead measure a whole bundle of cognitive processes.
If this is the case, then even if they show massive correlations with g as Oberauer’s work
suggests, it is diffcult to tell the extent to which the ‘working memory’ part of the bundle is
responsible for this correlation.
To summarise so far: is working memory the same as g? The correlations suggest that it
might be, although one must always ask how well working memory has been assessed; as
some tasks which supposedly measure it are only feebly related to other tasks. It is possible
that performance at many ‘working memory’ tasks are also infuenced by other executive
functions, which may account for their large correlations with tests measuring g. There seems
to be a need for cognitive psychologists to develop ‘pure’ measures of working memory, or
justify that the tasks which they currently use are pure measures of the concept.
One way of determining whether working memory is the same as g is to determine whether
tests of these two constructs predict behaviour differently. For example, if tests of working
memory and g are given to young children whose school performance is measured some years
later, do they predict performance equally well? We will consider such work in Chapter 18,
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Table 13.2 Correlations between fuid intelligence, working memory

and three EEG measures. P300 refers to a positive electrical
signal 300 milliseconds following a stimulu (Wongupparaj
et al., 2018)
Fluid intelligence Working memory
Working memory 0.53

P200 latency –0.17 –0.19
P300 amplitude for target stimuli –0.28 –0.28
P300 amplitude for non-target stimuli –0.48 –0.43
but note in passing that Alloway and Alloway (2010) believe that they show different levels
of prediction and so are not identical.
A second approach is to study the neurological underpinnings of both working memory
and g. This should reveal whether they involve activity in similar parts of the brain.
Unfortunately, the literature is sparse and sometimes seems to focus more on elegant
physiological measurement than elegant measurement of working memory.
Table 13.2 shows the correlations between three measures from an evoked potential study,
and tests of working memory and fuid intelligence. It can be seen that the correlations which
working memory and fuid intelligence show with the three measures from an evoked potential
study look similar. In addition, Clark et al. (2017) performed an fMRI scan whilst volunteers
completed an intelligence (Raven) or a working memory task. They found that similar areas
of the brain were activated by both tasks.
Wongupparaj et al. (2018) conclude that intelligence is infuenced by executive functions,
together with an input from working memory as evidenced by the psychometric and
physiological responses. These fndings agree well with our earlier suggestion that individual
working memory tasks may also measure executive function to a substantial extent, and
this combination of factors is what may make them correlate substantially with tests
of intelligence.
Intelligence, brain structure and brain activity

Brain size (volume) correlates somewhere between 0.26 and 0.56 with intelligence, the
volumes of the frontal and temporal areas being particularly important (Flashman et al.,
1997). Grey matter volume (cell bodies) seems more important that white matter volume
(axons; Colom et al., 2009). Interestingly, the correlation between brain volume and g is
almost entirely due to the same genes affecting both brain size and g (Posthuma et al., 2002)
showing that intelligence has a substantial biological basis. There is evidence that the thickness
of some areas of the cortex is related to g, and variations in thickness due to ageing are
refected in changes in g (Karama et al., 2011; Tisserand and Jolles, 2003), though of course
this does not necessarily imply causation. There does not seem to be much evidence for an
overall relationship between the amount of convolution (folding) in the cortex and intelligence,
or between the surface area of the cortex and intelligence (Bajaj et al., 2018), despite some
earlier suggestions that these were important.
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Which parts of the brain are active when we take intelligence tests? If we discover this,
and know the functions of various systems of the brain and their interconnections, then it
might be possible to develop a physiological model of the processes which underpin g. The
literature in this area can get technical, but Bastern et al. (2015) provide a clear review of
the main issues and research fndings whilst Luders et al. (2009) give an intelligible account
of the older literature outlining links between intelligence and brain activity, as revealed by
a review of all the literature on MRI, fMRI, PET and other scans and their relationship to
tests of psychometric g.
Jung and Haier (2007) reviewed studies which linked intelligence to brain structure and
function and found that the literature was surprisingly consistent. It showed that rather large
areas of the brain were involved, particularly activity in the grey matter (nerve cells) of the
parieto-frontal areas and some bundles of axons connecting the various areas. They suggested
that processing begins at parts of the brain (areas within the temporal and occipital lobes)
which deal with visual and auditory information, and then passes to areas which perform
recognition and higher-order analysis of auditory and visual information. The information
then fows to the parietal cortex and that the frontal lobes are involved in generating and
testing multiple solutions to the problem. Once the best solution is found other parts of the
brain make whatever response is required. Their paper goes into considerable anatomical
detail, but one of the great merits of this work is that it then draws on studies of traumatic
brain damage (e.g., shrapnel wounds, surgery, stroke) to test the theory. This shows that
damage to the areas which form the basis of Jung and Haier’s model result in changes to
intelligence, whereas damage to other areas generally do not.
More recent fMRI scans taken when people solve intelligence tests also show that the
frontal and parietal lobes of the brain seem to be particularly important, although Jung and
Haier’s fronto-parietal theory of intelligence requires some modifcation in the light of more
accurate scanning methodology (Basten et al., 2015). These authors show that other areas of
the brain are also involved, including the area below the cortex, the insular cortex and the
posterior cingulate cortex.
We encountered resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) in Chapter 11, where it was
used to explore whether individual differences in personality were related to the strength of
the neural networks which connect various brain centres. The same sort of approach has
been followed with regard to intelligence, with more promising results. For example, Hearne
et al. (2016) found that levels of intelligence were related to positive strengths of connections
between a number of neural sites (based on previous literature including, but not limited to
the frontal and pre-frontal cortex and parietal areas) when people were just resting. The
overall correlation was an impressive 0.38 and they conclude that ‘this pattern of connectivity-
intelligence associations is consistent with other fndings suggesting that higher global
network effciency is related to higher general intelligence measures and that the across-
network connectivity of the fronto-parietal network is critical for fuid intelligence’. This
fnding that the strength of the connections between distinct regions of the brain is related
to intelligence (even when people are not actively solving problems) is certainly consistent
with both Jensen’s theory of intelligence and much of the psychophysiological data considered
above. A similar fnding was reported by Ferguson et al. (2017) who scanned the resting
brains of volunteers, and estimated what they thought their intelligence would be based on
the degree of connectivity (synchrony) of many overlapping networks across the brain as a
whole. The correlation between measured intelligence and intelligence levels which were
predicted just from the analysis of the fMRI data was 0.24 – an impressive feat. We are
starting to understand how the connections between various parts of the brain result in a
particular level of intelligence.
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Summary
This chapter has covered a lot of ground – some of it rather technical. There are however
some rather clear and consistent fndings.
l Individual differences in brain structure (volume, etc.) correlate with g. If such physiological
variables are largely under genetic control, rather than being determined by purely
environmental factors, this suggests that g is linked to individual differences in the biology
of the brain.
l The fMRI studies investigating which areas of the brain are active when people solve
intelligence-test problems produce fairly consistent results and now that neuroscientists are
starting to determine the function of various parts of the brain and the pathways that
interconnect them this may allow them to understand the biological processes which
underpin g.
l Is g the same as working memory? We cannot really tell, because no one really seems to
know whether ‘working memory’ tasks really just measure working memory. If they do,
then the two concepts seem to be so highly correlated as to be almost indistinguishable.
l Does performance at elementary cognitive tasks predict g? It is not diffcult to fnd a
correlation in the order of 0.3 between a simple cognitive task and a test measuring g.
However modelling g in terms of a sequence of cognitive operations (Sternberg, 1977) does
not work, probably because people develop different strategies and heuristics for solving
the problems. There is also the problem of determining what these elementary cognitive
processes are; how can we show that each task is incapable of being defned in terms of
simpler processes?
l Is g linked to speed/fdelity of information processing in the nervous system? Evidence from
direct stimulation of peripheral nerves is ambiguous, however indirect measures (inspection
time, modern reaction-time studies and evoked potential measures) is plentiful. It all
suggests that a fast, accurate nervous system underlies g.

Ian Deary’s (2012) summary of intelligence research is comprehensive, even-handed and easy
to read; the genetics section can be postponed until Chapter 15. Der and Deary (2017) give a
very readable account of the reaction-time literature; the technical detail in the ‘methods’
section can safely be ignored. Inspection time studies seem to be less popular in recent years,
presumably because its relationship with g is now so well established as to be uncontroversial.
Deary’s (2012) review can be recommended, as can Sheppard and Vernon’s (2008) review of
the older literature. Finally, those who are interested in studying whether it is possible to boost
intelligence through training exercises might be interested in Hayes et al. (2015).
SAQ 13.1
The whole rationale for correlating inspection time with g is that inspection
time is thought to measure a rather simple and basic physiological process,
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Ability processes
namely the speed and/or accuracy with which information can be transmitted
from neurone to neurone. If it is found that performance on the inspection
time task is infuenced by ‘higher order’ mental processes (such as strategy
use or concentration), then it is clear that inspection time cannot be a pure
measure of this physiological phenomenon and so will be less useful for
testing the theory that intelligence is essentially a measure of how fast and/
or accurately nervous systems can transmit information.
SAQ 13.2
a. In an inspection time task the experimenter controls the duration of the
stimuli and ascertains the exposure duration at which each individual has
a certain probability (e.g., 75% or 90%) of correctly identifying the
stimulus. The participant can take as long as they like to make their
response. A reaction time task, by way of contrast, requires participants
to respond as quickly as possible to a stimulus. In the inspection time task,
perceiving the stimulus is the important part of the experiment, whereas
in the reaction time task it is responding quickly that is crucial.
b. The following three measures have been found to correlate substantially
with general ability:
l The slope of the line obtained when response time is plotted as shown
in Figure 13.4 shows a negative correlation with g.
l The intercept (height) of the line obtained when response time is
plotted as shown in Figure 13.4 shows a negative correlation with g.
l The variability in the movement time (e.g., the standard deviation of
individuals’ movement times for a particular experimental condition)
shows a negative correlation with g.
SAQ 13.3
It does seem possible that cognitive strategies might infuence performance
on the Sternberg task. Most obviously, the standard instruction to ‘respond
as quickly as possible while trying not to make any errors’ may well be
interpreted rather differently by various individuals, some of whom will
respond slowly in order to avoid making any errors, while others may be
content to sacrifce accuracy for speed. There are other possibilities, too. For
example, when scanning a list of ‘target letters’ in the Sternberg task, does
one continue to scan to the end of the list after detecting the target or
does one stop immediately? Is it possible to scan several elements
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Ability processes
of the list in parallel, rather than serially? The evidence shows that the
responses to this task are infuenced by such variables. If people use different
strategies, some of which are more effective than others, this will reduce the
correlation between task-performance and intelligence.
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Chapter 14
Personality and ability over time
Introduction
This chapter explores how personality and abilities change over time. It studies whether
there are changes from generation to generation, whether interventions designed to
change intelligence or personality are successful, and how personality and abilities change
as we age.
Learning outcomes
l Discuss four meanings of ‘change’ in personality and ability.
l Comment on whether the increase in test scores from generation to
generation means that intelligence levels are increasing.
l Discuss how (and why) personality changes over the lifespan.
l Discuss whether personality and ability traits are stable.
l Discuss the effectiveness of interventions to change personality and
ability, with particular reference to Head Start programmes designed to
boost intelligence.
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The issue of change in personality and cognitive abilities is one of the more muddled
areas of individual differences, for ‘change’ means different things to different psychologists.
It seems that there are four quite different issues running through the literature:
1. Do levels of personality and/or ability vary in same-aged individuals over time? For
example, are today’s 20 year olds any more or less neurotic than the 20 year olds in our
grandparents’ generation?
2. Do personality and cognitive abilities typically vary much over the lifespan? For example,
does neuroticism generally rise or fall at certain ages? Are 40 year olds generally any more
or less sociable than 60 year olds, regardless of their year of birth? To keep matters simple
I focus on changes in adulthood, rather than childhood, as this is not a developmental
psychology text.
3. Are personality and ability stable over time? Is someone who is highly extraverted (relative
to their peers) at age 20 also highly extraverted relative to their peers at age 70? This
question differs from (2) because the correlation coeffcient that is used to investigate this
issue ignores any shift in the mean level of the trait over time.
4. How much do specifc life events (e.g., psychotherapy, an enhanced early educational
environment, experience of war) alter personality and/or abilities?
To further complicate things, experiments need to be designed carefully to avoid confusing

genuine changes in scores within individuals with differences in scores between generations
or administering an unreliable test on two or more occasions and incorrectly inferring that
personality/ability changes over time.

What sorts of experiment might you design to determine whether a trait
changes in the four ways just listed?
There is also the question of whether a change in a test score necessarily implies that the
underlying trait has changed. For example, suppose that a group of children was coached
intensively on the sorts of problem used in ability tests as described by Hayes et al. (2015) –
putting sequences of pictures in the correct order, practising defning words for hours and
generally honing the specifc skills required to perform well on some ability tests. They are
then found to perform better than a control group when given an ability test. Does this imply
that they are more intelligent? It probably does not, as the ability test is only a valid measure
of g when used with naive participants. The enhanced performance is likely to be specifc to
the sorts of items on which they have been trained and may not generalise even to other IQ
tests, let alone to real-world performance (it may not indicate that the individual will be well
suited for a demanding college course or will perform well in a job requiring the exercise of
general intelligence).
Similar issues may affect personality tests. Society’s values change over time, so the
proportion of people agreeing that they believe in marriage (for example) would probably be
less than it was a generation ago – making people appear more unconventional. In addition,
some words used in personality tests (e.g., ‘wicked’) may have changed their meaning
302
substantially. It is possible that people will appear to be more unconventional, extraverted or

whatever than their parents just because of this.
Changes in lifestyles may also affect performance on ability tests. As a result of computer
games, children now have far more opportunity to hone their spatial skills and their hand–eye
coordination than they did a generation ago. Might this accidental training artifcially infate
their scores on some IQ tests? Although it sounds plausible, this seems not to be the case;
playing computer games has a ‘weak to non-existent’ infuence on cognitive abilities (Gnambs
and Appel, 2017).
The reason why these issues can be controversial centres on the nature–nurture argument to
be outlined in Chapter 15. It is sometimes asserted that because a personality or ability trait has
a strong genetic component, this makes it somehow immutable and hence interventions (such as
enriching the environment or improving thinking skills of disadvantaged children) are unlikely
to be effective. This argument is misguided for three reasons. First, I know of no personality or
ability trait that has a near total genetic component: in every case, environmental infuences,
either within or from outside the childhood family, will have some infuence on levels of the trait.
Second, genes cannot express themselves as behaviours unless they are given a particular
environment: for example, the gene which causes the illness phenylketonuria cannot express itself
(lead to the disease) unless patients eat or drink a source of phenylanaline. A child whose genetic
makeup means that they have an above average predisposition to excel at music is unlikely to do
so if reared in an environment where this talent is neither recognised nor developed. Third, it is
easy to forget that estimates of heritabilities refer to the population being studied, not to an
individual. Just because a trait has a heritability of 0.5 and the common (family) environment
has no infuence at all on its level in adulthood (e.g., general intelligence) it does not follow that
if one takes a particular child and raises it in an enriched (or an impoverished) environment then
this will not affect the child’s ultimate level of cognitive ability. It most probably will: the genetic
estimates can only speak about the likelihood of what will happen to children given the sorts of
environment typically experienced within a particular culture.
Ability change
Do abilities change from generation to generation?
Intelligence tests which are designed for the assessment of individuals need to be carefully
normed, as described in Chapter 3. That is, they are given to a large sample which is carefully
chosen to be representative of the population of the country in terms of age distribution,
gender distribution, ethnicity, socio-economic status, educational background, etc. The
distribution of scores is published in the test manual, and is used to convert a person’s score
into an IQ as described in Chapter 12. There is excellent evidence that performance on tests
measuring fuid intelligence improved from generation to generation in the 20th century
(Flynn, 2018), and there are several sources of evidence which show this.
l When the same people are given two versions of an intelligence test on the same occasion
(one using old norms, the other using new norms to calculate IQ), their IQ score on the
old test is almost always better than their IQ on the new test. This shows that the standard
has changed, and that people have got better at solving IQ problems.
l When large organisations (such as the military) give the same test to recruits year after year
without re-norming, they notice that the number of people with high IQs seems to rise each
year. This too suggests that people have got better at solving these problems.
303
l The tables of norms used to convert children’s scores into IQs change over time. An old
version of a test might show that an 11 year old who gets 48 items correct has an IQ of 100;
when the same test is re-normed some years later, a score of 48 might correspond to an IQ
of only 93, which once again shows that levels of intelligence have improved over time.
Of course, there are plenty of alternative explanations. The military might simply attract
more intelligent applicants as time goes by. However the same effect was found in countries
which have compulsory military service, so this is not the reason. Likewise it is possible that
children simply mature earlier, which might be the reason why today’s 11 year old performs
better than an 11 year old from 30 years ago. This cannot be the reason either, as the same
effect is found when adults are tested. Is it possible that the test relies on school learning, with
plenty of items measuring vocabulary, mathematics, etc.? If so, the increase in test performance
might just arise because children are receiving a better education nowadays. However the
same effect is found when tests such Raven’s matrices are used (see Chapter 12) and as these
do not involve language, mathematics or anything else which is taught in school, this cannot
be the explanation. Indeed the gain in IQ is larger for tests which measure fuid intelligence
such as the Raven than for tests which also rely on knowledge and hence measure crystallised
intelligence to some extent (Flynn, 1999).
This increase in performance from generation to generation is usually known as the Flynn
effect, after James Flynn, a New Zealand political scientist who reported the phenomenon (Flynn,
1984) and analysed it in detail (Flynn, 1987, 1999) though the issue had previously been noticed
in the 1940s (Deary, 2000). It means that by today’s standards, our parents and grandparents
were (on average) far less intelligent than we are. This is shown in Figure 14.1. The top of the
graph shows the average IQ (always 100) in the year in which a test was most recently normed,
for various countries. The lines connect to occasions when the test was previously normed; the
y-value shows what the average score (which was an IQ of 100 at the time) would correspond
to by the standard of the most recent norming. For example, one test was last normed in the UK
in 1994. It was previously normed in 1944. The average score (which corresponded to an IQ of
100 in 1944) only corresponds to an IQ of 73 by the standards of 1994.
It can be seen that the effect is both substantial, and consistent in several countries. As
Flynn observes:
Take a woman with an IQ of 110 who taught for 30 years in the Netherlands [from
1952 to 1982]. As [Figure 14.1] shows, during that period, the Dutch gained 21 IQ
points on Ravens. So in 1952, she was brighter than 75% of her senior students; by
1967, they were her equals; by 1982, 75% of them were brighter than she was.
The fnding that the Flynn effect is associated with abstract reasoning, tests measuring Gf
rather than Gc, suggests that it is not a simple consequence of better education or access to
knowledge (e.g., through cheap paperback books, radio, television and the internet).
Furthermore, the effect is found in both prosperous and developing countries (although the
increase in IQ is more marked in developing countries; Brouwers et al., 2009) but these
authors show that this is not entirely due to an improving provision of education in developing
countries. Several other possible explanations have been suggested. Improved nutrition seems
an obvious possibility, but these authors also show that attempts to boost IQ by improving
nutrition in Western countries which show the Flynn effect have proved largely ineffective.
Might healthier diets or reduced rates of alcohol consumption in pregnancy be the reason? It
is hard to tell. Could increased familiarity with IQ testing lead to a better grasp of how to
solve problems in IQ tests? Again, how can one check this? Or might it just be that modern
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Figure 14.1 Intelligence test scores in fve countries as a function of year

of birth (from Flynn, 1999)
life gives us far more practice at complex problem solving than our parents or grandparents
enjoyed; perhaps we just get more practice at abstract reasoning when trying to work out how
to fnd an effective backup strategy for the data on our computers, why our car will not
connect to the household wireless network, or weighing up price and time to determine which
is the ‘best’ air fare. It sounds plausible, and it would probably happen worldwide – but how
can one tell whether technological demands lead to better scores on ability tests?
The Flynn effect seems to be widespread. For example, Ronnlund et al. (2013) found an
increase in the fuid ability scores of over a million Swedish recruits between 1970 and 1993,
and increases have also been found in Argentina between 1964 and 1998 (Flynn and Rossi-
Case, 2012).
The big question is whether the changes in scores on IQ tests refect a real upwards shift
in intelligence (g) over the years, or whether people are just acquiring the skills needed to
solve intelligence test puzzles. If it is the former, then you would expect the higher IQ scores
to result in better performance at tasks which are known to refect general intelligence – for
example, reaction time or inspection-time tasks, or school performance. If the latter, we
would not expect higher scores on the tests to result in better performance in other areas;
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people may just be learning effective strategies for approaching novel problems, which
generalise to the types of problem in IQ tests.
This sounds possible, and it would certainly explain why the Flynn effect is greater for
tests measuring fuid, rather than crystallised ability. It should also be possible to tell whether
the Flynn effect represents a real upwards shift in intelligence by looking at the predictive
validity of IQ tests. For example suppose data are available to predict job or school
performance from IQ scores on two occasions, some years apart. Are the equations identical?
If so, this would indicate that the improved IQ scores on the second occasion are mirrored
by better academic or job performance, and so the increases in IQ scores represents a real
upward shift in general intelligence. If IQ predicts a lower level of job performance on the
second occasion, this would suggest that the Flynn effect affects performance at IQ tests but
not general intelligence.
Unfortunately it is hard to tell whether children perform better nowadays, as syllabi and
teaching methods will have changes, as will the educational outcomes which are assessed. It
is diffcult to think of a way in which modern-day educational performance can be directly
compared with that of some years ago. It is likewise diffcult to think of any jobs which have
remained pretty much unchanged for a period of some years, though if any could be identifed,
this would be a useful way of testing what the Flynn effect really indicates. However it should
be possible to check whether reaction time and inspection time have improved, as reaction
time has been studied for a century, and inspection time for over 40 years.
Nettelbeck and Wilson (2004) tested children from the same school in 1981 and 2001,
using the same IQ tests and the same equipment to measure inspection time. They found that
scores on the intelligence tests increased (the Flynn effect). Crucially there was no hint of any
change in the average inspection time between 1981 and 2001. The cohort tested in 2001 did
not seem to process information faster. This casts some doubt on whether the change in test
scores refects differences in IQ, or just better test-taking skills.
The picture becomes even more complex when reaction time is considered, as it seems likely
that reaction times have slowed over the years, rather than speeding up as the Flynn effect
might suggest. Evidence for this comes from a meta-analysis by Silverman (2010); to say this
work is controversial is an understatement, for there are formidable methodological problems,
including a lack of clarity about the apparatus used in the early (19th century) studies, the
experimental procedures and the representativeness of the samples (in terms of age, gender
and intelligence). We also noted in Chapter 13 that measuring average reaction time is
problematical, as it is necessary to ‘clean’ the data to remove extremely long reaction times,
and the way in which this is done can affect the mean reaction time which is reported.
A meta-analysis by Woodley et al. (2013) tries to correct for these problems, and their graph of
estimated reaction time against year of testing is shown in Figure 14.2. This still shows that
reaction times seem to be getting gradually longer, an effect which is statistically highly
signifcant. Other approaches fnd similar results. For example, Madison et al. (2016) tested
7000 Swedish twins using the same apparatus each time (hence overcoming one of the major
problems of the meta-analyses) and found reaction times had increased over a 27-year period.
The question of why reaction time seems to be increasing is fascinating, but for the present
all we need to note is that reaction times do not seem to be speeding up, as the Flynn effect
would suggest they should.
It does not seem that either inspection time or reaction time have speeded up, and so the
Flynn effect probably does not indicate a genuine shift in intelligence (g). As Flynn (2018)
argues, the (largely unknown) environmental infuences which boost scores on tests do not
seem to have boosted levels of other related variables, such as inspection time. We are just
becoming more skilled at taking tests.
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Figure 14.2 Estimated reaction time as a function of year of testing (from

Woodley et al., 2013). Note: small dots indicate data from
small samples (N<40)
Trahan et al. (2014) provide an excellent summary of the issue, its practical consequences
(for example, in determining whether a person should be regarded as having an ‘intellectual
disability’ which might indicate special educational needs, or affect their ability to stand trial)
and a discussion of the possible causes of the effect.
It is also possible that the Flynn effect is now over, and may be reversing. Teasdale and
Owen (2008) report data from the Danish military. Virtually all Danish men serve in the
armed forces from age 18 and so scores on the ability tests administered to these recruits
closely resemble those of the male population. The scores appear to show a three- or four-
point per decade rise during the 1960s and 1970s, but fell between 1998 and 2004. Several
other studies also show a decline – a ‘negative Flynn effect’ – in recent years (Dutton and Lynn,
2013, 2015; Graves et al., 2020). However as no one knows for sure why the Flynn effect
occurred in the frst place, we are also ignorant about the reasons for its (probable) demise.
We should also note in passing that a meta-analysis by Pietschnig and Gittler (2017) shows
that levels of ability-emotional intelligence did not seem to rise over the period 2001 to 2015;
this bolsters our conclusion in Chapter 7 that ability-EI does not really behave much like a
conventional cognitive ability, linked to fuid intelligence.
Cognitive abilities over the lifespan

If a researcher measures fuid and crystallised ability from adults of various ages on a single
occasion and plots their scores as a graph, they will fnd that they vary as shown in Figure 14.3.
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This shows the average score on the Kaufman Adolescent and Adult Intelligence Test (a test of
general ability) obtained by adults of various ages (Kaufman and Horn, 1996). It shows that
fuid ability peaks in the early 20s and then decreases, whilst crystallised ability seems to be
reasonably well preserved until at least the late 50s. At frst sight it seems that our fuid ability
declines with age whereas crystallised ability stays more constant. Perhaps in old age we come
to rely on our knowledge more than our reasoning ability. Although this interpretation of the
data is still occasionally found in the literature (e.g., Ryan et al., 2000) it confuses two different
things – age-related changes in cognitive ability, and the Flynn effect, which was in found in
the years whilst these data were gathered. Assuming that the data from all age groups is
gathered at roughly the same time (when a test is being normed) the older participants may
score lower simply because they were born earlier than the young ones (the Flynn effect). It
may not be the case that fuid ability declines because of old age; the older members of the
sample may not have been as clever in the frst place!
To discover the effects of ageing on cognitive performance, it is possible to correct for the
Flynn effect as shown in Figure 14.4 (I assume the correction to be 0.3 IQ points per year for
fuid intelligence, and 0.1 points per year for crystallised; the spreadsheets which perform this
correction are on the companion website ). Figure 14.4 shows how far the fuid and crystallised
abilities differ from the average – after allowing for the Flynn effect, which accounts for much
of the steady decline in scores seen in Figure 14.3. This analysis suggests that fuid and
crystallised abilities are far more stable that the cross-sectional data would suggest, and only
really fall dramatically once people are in their 80s.
Figure 14.3 IQ scores as a function of age. Based on data from Kaufman

and Horn (1996)
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Figure 14.4 Difference in IQ from 100 in IQ as a function of age allowing

for the Flynn effect
There are obvious problems with this sort of analysis – not least the need to assume a
particular value for the Flynn effect for Gf and Gc, and that age of death is not infuenced by
either of these variables. (If intelligent people live longer, then this will under-estimate the
amount of age-related decline.)
Rather than correcting statistically, it might be possible to perform a longitudinal study
and measure IQ from a single cohort of people (of the same age) on two or more occasions.
Several longitudinal studies have been performed, and yield similar results; Figure 14.5 shows
age-related changes on fve cognitive measures from Schaie (1996). The inductive reasoning
measure is a good approximation to Gf. Only number ability shows any real decline before
the age of 60, and inductive reasoning only showed a signifcant decline at age 74. This more
complex study agrees with the simple analysis reported in Figure 14.4.
There is a substantial literature which explores why these changes take place; it has been
found that inspection time and other measures of cognitive speed worsen appreciably with
age. However is this relationship causal? Does the slowing of neural processes cause a
decrease in cognitive abilities? Deary et al. (2010) measured intelligence and various forms
of cognitive speed in 70 year olds, and used regression to predict the 70 year olds’ intelligence
from their scores on the same test aged 11. They then determined whether adding a speed
measure improved this prediction. If so, they argued, it may act as a ‘biomarker’ for cognitive
ageing – a causal infuence. Inspection time made a modest contribution to the predictive
power of the regression, giving some hint that this measure of cognitive speed may explain
why cognitive abilities decline in old age, although the effect was not large.
There are other approaches too, although these can become a little complex. For example,
Finkel and Pedersen (2004) plotted the ‘growth curve’ in older adults (aged 50–96) showing
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Figure 14.5 Age-related changes on fve cognitive measures (from Schaie,

1996)
how cognitive abilities decline after age 65 before and after partialling out the effect of
cognitive speed. (‘Partialling out the effects of speed’ means estimating what the graphs would
look like if everyone had the same level of cognitive speed.) Partialling out speed produced
curves which showed much less age-related decline. It therefore does seem that speed may
affect cognitive decline. Interestingly, when speed was partialled out from a measure of Gc,
this continued to rise until the age of 75. There is also a substantial literature exploring the
role of various environmental factors on cognitive ageing and on environmental vs genetic
effects at various ages, however this literature is statistically rather complex and is, in any
case, really an aspect of developmental psychology, as it focuses on age-related trends rather
than individual differences. However it is of interest to us because it suggests some support
for the speed-of-information-processing theory of g outlined in Chapter 13.
Stability of ability over time

This essentially corresponds to the test–retest reliability of ability tests: the correlation that is
obtained when people sit the same test (or two parallel ones) months or years apart. Being
based on a correlation, it ignores any shifts in scores over time as a result of ageing or the Flynn
effect. It determines whether people’s position relative to their peers alters substantially: that
is, whether highly intelligent children generally turn into highly intelligent adults, and so on.
One might expect otherwise for it seems likely that random life events might affect cognitive
ability. For example, if attending school or college boosts g, then this will raise the scores of
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some children but not others as the amount of education which children receive varies. People
will have different incomes and life experiences including some (drink, drugs, illnesses) which
might perhaps infuence g. Some people will enter cognitively demanding careers, whilst others
will not. It could be argued that some children have a privileged childhood (good schools,
parental support, etc.) which might boost their IQ scores in childhood, but whose effect might
diminish over time. In short, there are plenty of reasons to suppose that childhood IQ should
not be strongly related IQ in adulthood or old age – particularly if one believes that g is largely
determined by social factors.
The most compelling evidence for the stability of general intelligence is a study conducted
by Ian Deary and his colleagues at Edinburgh and Aberdeen (Deary et al., 2000). They
discovered the scores from mental tests administered to all 11 year olds who attended school
in Scotland on 1 June 1932 and tracked down 101 of these individuals. They sat the same test
66 years (to the day) later and the correlation between the scores on the two occasions was
0.63. However, this underestimated the true correlation, as (a) the older sample showed a
lower range of ability scores than the original and (b) the test was not perfectly reliable. After
correcting statistically for these two infuences, it seems likely that the true correlation is at
least 0.8. This is a remarkable result, indicating that a person’s intelligence score (measured
by a simple group test at age 11) is a powerful predictor of their performance on the same test
several generations later. And this study is in no ways unique. Using highly reliable tests such
as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales, other researchers typically fnd correlations in the
order of 0.9 over a 10-year period (e.g., Mortensen and Kleven, 1993).
The correlations between measures of cognitive ability measured in early childhood and
adult intelligence are generally rather smaller than those obtained solely in adulthood. In a
typical example, Kangas and Bradway (1971) found a correlation of 0.41 between general
ability measured at 4 and 42 years of age. There are several reasons for this. Young children
may develop at slightly different rates, unrelated to their ultimate levels of intelligence, and
this might affect the accuracy of the frst assessment. Testing young children can be
problematical because of their short attention span. And the content of some tests used to
assess the ability of very young children is really very different from that of adult ability tests;
they include assessments of whether a child can pay attention to a novel stimulus (such as a
bell) or name things, rather than anything more cognitive. Reznick and Corley (1999) give a
useful précis of this literature.
It certainly seems that general ability is a stable phenomenon and intelligence measured in
middle childhood is an amazingly powerful predictor of intelligence in later life. However this
does not imply that intelligence is fxed or immutable. It would be possible for some
environmental infuence to boost (or hinder) the ability of children who received it. Just
because the trait shows high stability in children or adults living in the ‘normal’ world, it does
not follow that it will be immutable in the face of an intervention.
Interventions to change general ability

Many attempts have been made to change (improve) children’s levels of cognitive ability, over
and above the methods used in schools. For example, the HeadStart programme was a
government-funded project to try to improve the academic performance of children from
disadvantaged backgrounds. It is typically found that children from poor areas perform
poorly at school (and on ability tests) and it is possible that this is caused by an unstimulating
environment during their early years that fails to equip them for school. These children may
be less able to learn because they lack the background skills (particularly language skills)
developed by children reared in middle-class homes.
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A huge number of environment-enrichment programmes have been developed, implemented

and evaluated, mostly in the United States. They include the Milwaukee Project (Garber
et al., 1988) which identifed mothers who had very low IQs (below 75) and whose children
were therefore thought to be at risk. It assigned 40 children randomly to an experimental
group or a control group. Those in the experimental group received an enriched, social
environment specifcally designed to improve the children’s cognitive skills from 3 months to
5 or 6 years. It seems to have worked. The children in the experimental group showed IQs in
the order of 120 for the frst 6 years of the project; the control group showed IQs below 100
during this period. However, after the project fnished, the gains shown by the experimental
group rapidly diminished and fattened out at an IQ of 105 from age 6–13. This was
substantially higher than the IQ of the control group, which hovered between 80 and 90.
The big issue here is whether the intervention improved g or just test-taking skills. Jensen
(1989) observed that the substantial differences between the experimental and control groups
did not seem to be refected in the academic performance of the children in the intervention
and control groups which was quite similar (e.g., 11th percentile vs 9th percentile on a fourth-
grade mathematics achievement test; 19th and 9th percentile on the Metropolitan Test of
Achievement in the fourth grade). These differences were not statistically signifcant, and so
Jensen’s comment seems to be well founded. Six years of intensive stimulation, using just
about every technique then known to developmental and cognitive psychologists, seems to
have had little effect on g, though it initially raised IQ scores somewhat.
The Carolina Abecedarian project (Ramey et al., 1984) was similar. It randomly assigned
85 children who were identifed as ‘at risk’ on the basis of their mother’s measured intelligence
and social deprivation to an experimental or a control group. The children in the experimental
group experienced an enriched environment from the age of 3 months until they started
school. The intervention was for 8 hours a weekday, 50 weeks a year for over 4 years; no one
could argue that these interventions were too small scale to be effective!
The cognitive abilities of the children in the experimental and control groups were measured
every 6 months, and there were signifcant differences between groups (in the expected
direction) at all ages between 18 and 48 months. But what happened then? Figure 14.6 shows
the growth curve from Campbell et al. (2001). This indicates that children in the experimental
group showed a marked decline in their cognitive performance after starting school (age 4.5),
whereas those in the control group did not. Thereafter, both groups showed a gradual decline
in their cognitive scores.
So once again, marked differences were found in the early years (18 IQ points at 18
months; 16 points at 3 years) but by age 21 the difference has narrowed considerably (IQs of
89.7 vs 85.2: t(102)=2.39, p<0.01).
Perhaps the most obvious thing about Figure 14.6 is that the experimental group performed
much better than the control group even at the very youngest ages. This fnding can be
interpreted in three ways.
1. The most crucial period for boosting IQ was in the frst few weeks and months of the
project: the enhancements obtained in the very early weeks of the project caused the
sizable differences between the groups that were seen at 6 months and 18 months (Ramey
and Campbell, 1987 cited by Spitz, 1997).
2. The children in the experimental group were more intelligent than those in the control
group at the outset and this explains why they remained so in later life: the intervention
probably had no effect at all (Spitz, 1997, 1999) given that the differences observed
in the school-aged children and adults were no larger than they had been at 6 months
of age.
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3. The tests used to assess IQ in the very young children were not particularly reliable and
so it may not matter too much that the experimental group appeared to outperform the
control group at the early age – the two groups really were equivalent at the outset.
However the unreliability of the tests will, of course, be refected in the signifcance tests.
Just looking at Figure 14.6, it does not appear that the two groups started from the same
point at age 3. The 16-point difference there is enormously signifcant (t(96)=5.9, p<0.01 from
the data in Campbell et al., 2001) so one either has to suppose that the key infuences happened
in the frst 30 months or that the groups were not well matched at the outset. The Perry
program was similar, and produced similar fndings – improved IQ scores at age 3–4, but no
difference between the intervention and control groups by age 10 (Anderson, 2008). A year-
long programme in Venezuela was designed to improve school children’s reasoning skills
(Herrnstein et al., 1986) and led to a massive improvement in scores on an IQ test – 0.4
standard deviations, or 6 IQ points. However this study may well have taught students how
to tackle the sorts of problems found in intelligence tests, rather than boosting intelligence.
I have described these early studies in some detail as they appear to be the best designed
attempts to evaluate intensive early interventions, they measured changes in IQ (rather than
just school achievement) and they are the ones which appear to produce the best results. Other
programmes are summarised by the Consortium for Longitudinal Studies (1983) and in various
Figure 14.6 Cognitive growth curves as a function of preschool treatment

(Campbell et al., 2001)
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meta-analyses such as Camilli et al. (2010) and in a superb old chapter by Farran (1990). It is
important to stress that these programmes sometimes did improve other variables – for example
reducing the probability of criminal activity, drug use, etc. and (in some cases) boosting school
achievement.
Quite what is to be made of these results is still uncertain. Although both the Milwaukee
and Abecedarian projects seem to show that intensive intervention can improve the IQs of ‘at
risk’ children, there is dispute about whether the IQ gains in the Milwaukee Project were
caused by training children to take the tests; they did not seem to be refected in educational
performance. This was not a problem for the Abecedarian project, where children and adults
in the experimental group outperformed those in the control group on mathematics and verbal
performance tests (Campbell et al. 2001). But were the children in the experimental group
more intelligent at the outset than those in the control group? The consistently better
performance of the experimental group in even the earliest months of the project certainly
make this likely.
Whilst ‘early years’ intervention programmes continue to be implemented worldwide in
order to try to boost the school achievement of socially deprived children through pre-school
programmes, the focus has moved away from trying to boost (or even measure) intelligence,
presumably because the early studies seemed to show that interventions could improve school
performance and reduce anti-social behaviour but may not have had much infuence on
intelligence.
Going to school does, however, enhance intelligence. For example, when Norway increased
the period of compulsory school education by two years, the intelligence of 19 year olds who
were conscripted to the military jumped appreciably from their previous levels (Brinch and
Galloway, 2012) once the children who had experienced the two extra years of education
turned 19. Children whose birthdays fall either side of the ‘cut-off’ date which determines
when they go to school have also been studied. These children are almost exactly the same
age, but some of them will have received a year’s more education than others. This is refected
in higher IQ scores for the children who received an extra year’s education (Cahan and Cohen,
1989) although (surprisingly perhaps) the quality of education which pupils receive in various
American schools does not seem to infuence their IQ scores (Jencks, 1972).
As well as educational interventions, there has been a furry of studies investigating the link
between nutrition and intelligence. This work is important because Lynn (1990) suggests that
improvements in nutrition may explain why the Flynn effect is found, rather than the expected
dysgenic fall in IQ over time. Benton and Roberts (1988) gave 30 Welsh schoolchildren a
vitamin and mineral supplement every day for 8 months. Despite the small sample size it was
found that the experimental group gained about ten points in nonverbal IQ, the control
groups showing much smaller increases. There are two diffculties with this work. First, it is
an example of ‘blunderbuss psychology’ – fring a huge range of vitamins and minerals into
participants without any clear theoretical expectation of which one(s) are important. If the
intervention is successful then one still has to tease out precisely what is causing the increase
in IQ and why. Second, the fnding has proved hard to replicate. Schoenthaler et al. (1991)
gave 13 year old Californian delinquents similar supplements for 13 weeks and again found
a statistically signifcant increase in IQ of about 0.3 of a standard deviation, but failures to
replicate include Crombie et al. (1990). A meta-analysis by Protzko (2017) shows that any
effect of vitamin and mineral supplication is so tiny as to be of no practical signifcance, unless
children normally eat diets defcient in vitamins.
Finally, what of ‘cognitive training’ programmes to boost intelligence in adults and
adolescents? Given that working memory seems to be closely linked to g and may be
susceptible to training, several researchers (Colom et al., 2010; Harrison et al., 2013) have
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given students intensive training on working memory tasks, and then determined whether
this led to an increase in scores on tests measuring fuid ability. It did not. Shipstead et al.’s
(2012) meta-analysis confrms that other attempts to boost fuid ability are also unsuccessful,
whilst Te Nijenhuis et al. (2007) show clearly that whilst some interventions can boost
performance on IQ tests, they do not increase g itself. Increasing fuid intelligence or g seems
to be nearly impossible. There is an exception. An excellent and very readable meta-analysis
by Protzko (2017) shows that being taught to play a musical instrument seems to enhance
g. This is based on fve randomised-control studies, covering instruments as diverse as the
piano and percussion, and it is unlikely to be due to publication bias. The mechanisms are
unclear, and there are problems with some control groups, but it is an intriguing fnding
which needs to be explored further.

a. Why do you think that vitamins may only affect nonverbal ability scores?
b. What is missing from these studies?
Personality change
Does personality change from generation to generation?
The Flynn effect has revealed the gradual increase in performance on ability tests from
generation to generation. Do personality traits vary in the same way? It is diffcult to tell,
and there are several reasons for this. First, there has really only been any consensus about
the structure of personality since the 1960s while intelligence tests have been used for an
extra 60 years. Thus there are few useful personality data available from those born much
before 1930.
Second, because personality questionnaires are generally much less useful to occupational
psychologists than are ability tests, they are less often administered to large samples of people
(e.g., military recruits) year after year. This makes it diffcult to identify trends.
Third, few (if any) personality tests appear to be re-normed as carefully as ability tests.
Tests such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scales are administered to large samples of people,
painstakingly chosen to represent the population in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, area of
residence, etc., as this is necessary to estimate the distribution of scores in the population in
order to use the test diagnostically. This is a phenomenally expensive operation, but it is
essential as these tests help make life-changing decisions about people’s future capabilities and
educational needs. Because personality scales are not used in this fashion, tables of norms are
far more haphazard – if, indeed, they exist at all. Thus it is impossible to detect changes in
personality over time by scrutinising people’s scores when renorming.
The obvious difference between ability tests and personality tests is that to perform well
on ability tests, one actually has to demonstrate a high level of ability, through solving diffcult
problems. To obtain a score indicating a high level of extraversion (or any other trait), it is
only necessary to claim to do certain things (e.g., feel more optimistic than most; to enjoy
parties). So even if we could detect shifts in scores on personality tests, there would always
be the niggling doubt that these may not refect real shifts in personality. Instead, it may just
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be that certain behaviours have become more socially acceptable and so people are more likely
to claim to show them, or that the meaning of some of the words has changed (‘gay’, ‘wicked’)
which might affect the extent to which people agree with those items. It is necessary to
establish the ‘measurement invariance’ of a scale to check this, and only one published study
seems to do so.
Students entering the Psychology course at the University of Amsterdam were given a
questionnaire measuring the Big Five traits each year from 1971, and full details (including
age and sex) were available from 1982 onwards. Smits et al. (2011) argue that there was little
change in the admissions requirements between 1982 and 2007, although the intake grew in
size and attracted more female students. It seems that over this period students became more
agreeable, more conscientious and less neurotic.
Another study examined the personality scores of 400 000 male Finnish military conscripts
who were born between 1962 and 1976, though unlike the Smits study it did not establish
measurement invariance. The scales used were developed by the military, and unfortunately
did not measure the Big Five (or other common) personality traits. However the scale
measuring sociability correlated 0.8 with Extraversion, achievement striving and deliberation
correlated 0.44 and 0.54 with Conscientiousness, whilst self-confdence correlated –0.47
with Neuroticism. Thus it might, perhaps, be possible to draw some tentative conclusions
about the generational stability of three of the Big Five factors from these data. The study
showed that there were consistent increases in all four of the scales mentioned above.
Compared with those born in 1962, the recruits who were born in 1976 were 0.6 of a
standard deviation higher in sociability, about 0.4 and 0.2 standard deviations higher on
striving and deliberation, and 0.6 standard deviations higher on self-confdence. These are
substantial changes which might perhaps suggest that Extraversion and Conscientiousness
have risen from generation to generation, whilst Neuroticism has declined. The changes in
Neuroticism and Conscientiousness were similar to Smit’s results, discussed above; however
it is diffcult to tell what causes these changes, or whether they are just due to shifts in
attitudes which affect the way questions are answered.
Personality over the lifespan

There is a substantial literature outlining how scores on personality tests vary over the lifespan,
mostly from cross-sectional studies. However as we do not know for certain whether there is
a Flynn-type effect for personality (as described in the previous section) it is diffcult to be sure
whether differences in personality at various ages from cross-sectional studies imply that
people’s personalities change as they get older, or whether our levels of personality traits are
(and always have been) rather different from those of our parents and grandparents. This will
be a problem for studies which investigate personality change over long periods (decades,
rather than years) using cross-sectional designs.
Data from a cross-sectional study by Roberts et al. (2006) are shown in Figure 14.7.
Assuming that there is no ‘Flynn effect’ for personality, it is clear that the social dominance
facet of Extraversion (self-confdence, assertiveness, etc.) tends to rise through adolescence
and into middle age, Emotional Stability (the opposite of Neuroticism) also rises during this
period, Conscientiousness starts to rise from age 20, and Agreeableness rises more slowly, the
only statistically signifcant jump occurring in one’s 50s. Social vitality, or sociability, is
thought by some to have a slightly different developmental trend, which is why it is considered
separately; it does not seem to change much. This analysis runs counter to some early claims
that personality is fairly constant after age 30 (Costa et al., 1987) although there is little
evidence that Extraversion or Neuroticism change much after that age.
316
Figure 14.7 Personality change as a function of age (from Roberts et al.,

2006)
What life events infuence personality? It seems obvious that a diagnosis of a (non-trivial)
cancer will have an infuence on personality – yet Chow et al. (in press) concluded that in their
sample of older adults ‘more similarities than differences in personality change between older
adult cancer survivors and those without a cancer diagnosis’. Both groups’ personality traits
changed to similar extents. Is this a quirk of the elderly? Denissen et al. (2019) also looked at
the impact of ‘normal’ life events on personality, in a large, representative sample of the Dutch
population. Their life events were surveyed each month, and their personality was assessed
every one or two years, and once again, life events had surprisingly small effects on personality.
Obtaining employment led to a (long-lasting) increase in emotional stability, getting married,
becoming unemployed, becoming disabled or even being widowed had no signifcant effect
on the Big Five traits. Childbirth led to a drop in conscientiousness; emotional stability
increased in the period leading up to the birth, then fell back again. Once again it seems that
life events do not have much effect on people’s personality.
317
Stability of personality over time

Because there seem to be few long-term longitudinal studies of personality on a par with Deary
et al. (2000) for general ability (neither is there any evidence for or against a ‘Flynn effect’ for
personality), the evidence here is not so clearcut as for the stability of cognitive abilities. Short-
term test–retest studies are numerous and are summarised in a meta-analysis by Roberts and
Delvecchio (2000). Test–retest correlations (estimated over a time span of 6.7 years) increase
with age, from 0.3 in childhood to 0.7 between ages 50 and 70 and Conley’s classic (1984)
paper likewise estimated year-on-year stability of personality at about 0.96 per year, implying
a test–retest reliability of about 0.75 over 7 years.

What is the difference between this type of change and that discussed in the
previous section?
Interventions to change personality

Can personality be changed? This seemingly simple question leads us in several directions.
For example, there is an extensive literature on personality change following head injury and
the administration of a wide range of drugs (e.g., benzodiazepines, alcohol) and environmental
insults (lead, mercury, foetal alcohol). There is also a substantial literature on the treatability
of patients diagnosed with personality disorders, but none of these studies addresses the
malleability of normal personality traits with which this chapter is concerned. The reason
why no such studies seem to have been performed is simple. While general ability appears
to be a highly valued characteristic in our society (not least because it predicts desirable
properties, such as income and longevity) there is no pressure to ensure that a child (for
example) maximises their potential for Extraversion. Society seems to function quite well
with a mixture of extraverts and intraverts, tough and tender-minded individuals, worriers
and the irritatingly calm. The only times when attempts are made to try to alter personality
is when the individual is at one extreme of a scale, such as when they suffer debilitating
anxiety or shyness.
The clinical evidence shows that personality traits such as Extraversion or Neuroticism can
sometimes be modifed by clinical procedures. For example, Ost and Breitholtz (2000) found
that both relaxation and cognitive therapy signifcantly reduced the anxiety experienced by
adult patients, while behaviour therapy may also be useful in treating social phobia, which
may be regarded as an extreme form of Introversion (Turner et al., 1996). A meta-analysis by
Roberts et al. (2017) pulls together the results from 207 such studies, most of which looked
at clinical events such as psychotherapy or pharmacological treatments; their aim was to
discover whether personality can be changed, rather than whether life events typically do
change personality. Most participants were being treated for depression, anxiety or eating
disorders, and most studies followed changes of a period of 3–6 months. Overall, it was found
that therapy did indeed bring about ‘positive’ changes in personality (lower Neuroticism and
higher Extraversion, Agreeableness and Openness) and that these effects seemed to last for a
substantial time after the treatments fnished. The authors also looked into the effectiveness
of different forms of therapy, which need not concern us here; what is perhaps noteworthy is
that rather short treatments (typically four to six weeks) proved suffcient to bring about
318
personality change. Longer periods of treatment did not seem to lead to much greater change.
However whilst all of these results seem to suggest that therapy can bring about personality
change, the authors are careful to stress that they do not know what people’s personalities
were before they entered therapy. It is possible that some life or biological event caused
personality levels (e.g., Neuroticism) to rise, and the therapist only helped them return to
base-levels; the therapy may have restored a person’s normal level of personality, and might
not have changed it.
Summary
This chapter has argued that when discussing the variation in a trait, four distinct research
questions need to be addressed:
l the change in the trait from generation to generation

l changes that occur as a function of ageing
l whether the ordering of people on a trait is similar at different points in time
l the effects of behavioural interventions on traits.
Quite a lot is known about these issues in the case of cognitive abilities. The Flynn effect
shows that abilities seem to be rising from generation to generation for reasons that are poorly
understood, but which may have something to do with improvements in nutrition. The rise
in cognitive abilities through childhood is well established; so too is their decline after age 50,
although the Flynn effect needs to be considered when interpreting these data. When people
are retested on ability tests their scores are strikingly similar, even several decades later. And
although attempts to improve cognitive abilities by ‘hothousing’ children from disadvantaged
backgrounds during their early years have frequently been interpreted as showing that
intelligence can be boosted, both of the two main studies have a number of problems that
make this conclusion dangerous.
Far less is known about how these questions relate to personality. Little is known about
how personality shifts from generation to generation. Developmental changes in personality
are well established (agreeableness increasing and openness to experience and extraversion
decreasing in old age and anxiety falling as one passes through the 20s) though generational
shifts may complicate the interpretation of these data. The test–retest reliability of personality
traits is high, although few long-term longitudinal studies have been performed to test this
across the entire lifespan. And fnally, no deliberate attempts seem to have been made to
modify ‘normal’ personality traits, although the clinical literature provides hints that these
may be more susceptible than abilities to change.

Spitz (1997, 1999) gives a highly sceptical look at the HeadStart projects: in the interests of
balance, it would also be sensible to read some publications from the authors of such
interventions, such as Campbell et al. (2001). Those who wish to study these issues in more
depth might enjoy Jaušovec and Pahor (2017), Nisbett et al. (2012) or Farran’s (1990)
excellent review of the older literature.
Deary et al. (2000) provide a fascinating evidence for the stability of individual differences
in mental ability from childhood to old age, while Flynn’s (2007) book gives a detailed account
319
of how intelligence levels seem to have changed from generation to generation. Although the
review of the empirical literature is now out of date, Chapter 6 of Brody (1992) gives an
excellent discussion of environmental determinants of intelligence, while Costa and McCrae
(1994) discuss personality change over the lifespan.
SAQ 14.1
a. Locate test scores from an old experiment. Match individuals to members
of the old sample with respect to age, sex, etc. Administer the test to
these individuals. If sample sizes allow, factor analyse the items from the
original and new samples (separately) to ensure that all the items work
properly. If any items fail to perform well in both samples, drop them.
Then compute the total scores on the remaining items and compare the
two groups’ scores using a t-test or similar.
b. Perform a longitudinal study and perform an ANOVA comparing scores
at various ages. Consider using year of birth as a covariate to compensate
for any gradual increase or decrease in scores associated with year of
birth.
c. Measure the same sample on two occasions. Correlate scores on the two
occasions.
d. Design an intervention study with proper control groups. Assess the trait
regularly during the intervention and for as long a follow-up period as
possible. Analyse using analysis of variance (between-subjects factor of
occasion, between-subjects factor of group).
SAQ 14.2
a. Cattell’s distinction between fluid and crystallised intelligence viewed
fluid intelligence as abstract thinking power, whereas crystallised
ability resulted from choosing to apply these skills to gain knowledge
in some area. If fluid ability is indeed largely biological, then it would
probably be easier to detect any enhancements in fluid ability. Also
there may be a time lag between boosting fluid ability and the
acquisition of crystallised knowledge: it would be interesting to retest
the children.
b. Long-term follow-up, to see whether the effects are permanent (cf. the
HeadStart programmes).
320
SAQ 14.3
As it is based on a correlation, test-retest analysis ignores any differences in
level (or variability) in a trait over time. For example, if some people scored
10, 11, 12, and 14 on a test on one occasion and 30, 32, 34 and 38 on a second,
the correlation between these two scores would be 1.0 even though the
mean has changed as has the range of scores.
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Chapter 15
Environmental and genetic

determinants of personality
and abilities
Introduction
Empirical studies of the extent to which personality and ability can be inherited provide
valuable evidence as to the relative importance of biological and social factors in development.
It is often claimed that intelligence is substantially inherited – but what about personality?
And how strong and consistent is the evidence? If genes infuence levels of some trait, does
this mean that all children in a family will closely resemble their parents? This last interpretation
is both widely believed and incorrect, as will be shown below.
There are three other issues, too. First, studying heritability can also show whether individual
differences are ‘real’ characteristics of organisms (as trait/biological theorists would argue), or
whether personality is a social construction – an inference drawn by others that need have no
basis in the biology of the individual, and which need not even accurately refect their behaviour.
Second, it is useful to refect on what the implications of strong environmental or strong genetic
infuences on personality might be for society. If personality and abilities were completely
determined by social factors, would this always be desirable? What would be the consequences
if genetic makeup infuences personality or abilities? Finally, what about the interaction between
environment and genetic infuences? We know that genes can only infuence behaviour given
appropriate environmental conditions, but do adults and children tend to encounter the types
of environment which will allow any genetic potential to turn into behaviour?
Learning outcomes
l Show a grasp of why it is important to discover the extent to which genes
and environment typically infuence personality and ability traits.
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Environmental and genetic determinants
l Show an understanding of the methods of behaviour genetics.

l Show knowledge of the genetic and environmental infuences on
intelligence and personality at various ages.
It is my experience that students sometimes approach this topic with a deep sense of
misgiving, suspecting that they are about to be indoctrinated by biological reductionists who
are trying to stress the primacy of biological effects and downplay all forms of social infuence
on behaviour. Nothing could be further from the truth. The methods discussed below show
the extent to which both environmental and genetic factors infuence behaviour in childhood
and adulthood, and it is worth stressing that if environmental factors are all-important and
genetic infuences are trivial, the analyses will show this.
The question of whether personality and ability are socially determined or whether they
are infuenced by our genes is one of the best researched topics in psychology, with studies of
varying quality dating back to the early years of the twentieth century. So why is it so
important? The answer is quite simple. One school of individual difference theorists rooted
in behaviourism, social psychology and sociology claims that the environment is of paramount
importance in determining how individuals behave. Behaviourists argue that reinforcement
history determines how a person acts; ‘personality’ is just a by-product of our reinforcement
history, and is thus a product of our environments. Psychologists with an interest in social
construction argue that personality is inferred by other people, who may choose to ‘see’
constancies in behaviour (personality traits) that may not really exist. For these theorists, the
interesting issue is the social and political processes by which personality and ability traits are
attributed to others. Squibb (1973) wrote:
intelligence has been seen as a psychological attribute of individuals and not as a

function of the social matrix; that its defnition has varied from time to time and group
to group as constructions of reality have varied from social location to social location;
and that its use in education in determining opportunity and access has served the
political and economic interests of some groups to the detriment of others
arguing that intelligence is nothing more than a politically suspect social construct. Likewise
a widely cited paper by Oakes et al. (1997) states that they make ‘three fundamental
assumptions grounded in the sociology of knowledge’, one being ‘that conceptions of
intelligence are socially constructed rather than scientifcally discovered’ whilst ‘prevailing
conceptions of and responses to intelligence are grounded in ideologies that maintain race and
class privilege’. That paper presents a very different view of ‘intelligence’ from the evidence-
based issues considered in this book, and might be worth reading for that reason. The social
construction of personality is less controversial, and Hampson (1984) discusses these issues
in some depth; the book is old, but the issues remain much the same.
Other researchers claim that personality and intelligence appear to have some clear links
with the biology of the nervous system. They point to evidence (such as was considered in
Chapters 11 and 13) that is consistent with the idea that personality and intelligence are
behavioural consequences of biological structures that really are ‘inside’ the individual. If this
is so, it seems reasonable to ask whether these behaviours may be infuenced by individuals’
genetic makeup. If it can be shown that a trait is substantially infuenced by genetics, this
326
means that the characteristic is as much a property of the individual as their eye colour or
weight and that sociological or social psychological theories will be unable completely to
explain behaviour. To do this it is necessary to also look at individual differences in the biology
of the nervous system.
These two schools of thought were widely opposed a century ago.
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specifed world to bring
them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any
type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even
beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations,
and race of his ancestors
(Watson, 1930)
suggesting that biological makeup is of little importance in shaping personality or abilities,

whilst
Once grasp the truth that a child’s fate in life is frequently decided long before birth,
and that no amount of food or hospital service or culture or tears will ever wholly make
good the defciencies sometimes found
(Guyer, 1916)
suggests that genetic infuences are paramount. Of course these views are extreme, and Cattell
(1971) wrote that ‘an inordinate proportion of extremists is ready to say that either heredity
does not matter, or that environment can be forgotten’. These days almost all researchers
consider that both environmental and genetic infuences are important, and the interaction
between environmental and genetic infuences also need to be considered, as genes can only
infuence behaviour under certain environmental conditions. (A child can only develop their
musical talent if their environment permits this, for example.) That said, the old entrenched
positions sometimes linger:
Strong performance at IQ tests is simply a refection of a certain kind of family

environment.
(Rose et al., 1984).
Genetics and behaviour

When I refer to genes in the following sections, I mean those genes that vary between people.
Most of our genetic material determines that we have the characteristics of humans, rather
than chimpanzees or mushrooms: all humans of the same sex will have exactly the same
sequences of these genes. These are of no interest to us. The crucial genes from the point of
individual differences are those which vary. Some of these code for physical features (e.g., eye
colour, hair colour, height) but the function of most of them is unknown. They usually each
affect several behaviours; a gene that determines eye colour might also infuence personality,
which explains why several theorists scrutinise correlations between physical characteristics
and individual differences (Jensen and Sinha, 1993). Thus when I refer to the similarity of
people, I mean their similarity with respect to the 1% or so of the genes that vary in normal
people – and not the 99% that defne our species.
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It is important to understand the distinction between variations in a characteristic within

families and variation that occurs between families. If the family environment infuences the
level of a trait then this will result in all the children showing similar levels of the trait. For
example, if relaxed, accepting parenting styles lead to children developing low levels of
Neuroticism, all the children in the family should show low Neuroticism, since each will have
experienced the same parenting style. Children within a family differ somewhat with respect
to their genetic makeup; they share only about 50% of their genes, as each child inherits a
(more-or-less) random 50% of the genetic material from each parent. Thus you would not
expect them to be entirely similar. This is an important point; if genes infuence personality,
we would expect considerable variability between children in the same family. If genes rather
than parenting styles infuence Neuroticism, children within the same family will differ
somewhat in their level of Neuroticism because they each result from a different throw of the
genetic dice. It is therefore common to compare the amount of variation in a trait within
families to the amount of variation between different families to determine whether a trait
has a genetic basis.
Pairs of randomly selected strangers should show no similarity on a trait, because they
have shared neither a common environment nor any genes (other than the ones that make
us all human). Brothers and sisters brought up in the same family will tend to be highly
similar to each other if the family environment shapes behaviour and only moderately
similar to each other if genes are important (because they will share just half of their genes,
on average).
Methods for studying the nature/nurture issue

During the process of conception, there is a 50–50 chance that each of the genes in the
fertilised egg will be derived from the father or the mother. A large number of both parents’
genes will be identical (since it is the genes, after all, that determine whether the DNA produces
a human hair, a frog’s leg or an oak leaf), but some of the parents’ genes will be different, i.e.,
the parents will show some genetic variability. This chapter considers whether individual
differences in these genes do, in any way, relate to individual differences in personality or
ability. This discipline is known as behaviour genetics.
There are two types of twins. Identical, or monozygotic twins, are formed when the
fertilised egg splits in two, and produces two separate (but genetically identical) individuals
(who are obviously always same sex). Non-identical, ‘fraternal’, or dizygotic twins result from
two separate eggs being fertilised. These twins are just ‘womb-mates’ and like any other pair
of brothers or sisters just share 50% of their variable genes.
The consequences of parents’ genetic variability are rather well known so far as physical
characteristics are concerned. Eye colour, blood group, inability to taste the chemical
phenylthiocarbamide and colour blindness are among the physical characteristics that can be
inherited and it can be shown that just a few genes determine each of these outcomes. That
is, if the genetic makeup of the parents is known, it is possible to predict rather accurately the
probability of (say) a particular eye colour. Personality traits and abilities are rather different
in that they are continuous traits rather than taking just a few possible values. Geneticists now
know that most traits are infuenced by a very large number of genes, each of which makes a
small infuence in enhancing (or reducing) a person’s level of a trait.
How can we tell whether any of the genes which parents pass on to their offspring are
capable of infuencing personality traits or abilities? Tryon (1940) studied a random sample
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of rats, and found that some were better at running through a maze to fnd food than others;
he called these ‘maze-bright’ and ‘maze-dull’. He then mated the maze-bright rats together,
mated the maze-dull rats together and measured the maze-running performance of their
offspring, identifying second-generation maze-bright and maze-dull rats. He repeated this
procedure for several generations of offspring. Both groups experienced the same environments
so if genes infuenced speed of maze-running, then after a few generations the ‘fast learning’
genetic variations will have accumulated in the maze-bright rats, and will have been bred out
of the maze-dull rats. If genes did not affect maze running, then there could be no difference
between the maze learning performance of the two groups of descendants.
It was found that the progeny of the maze-bright rats consistently learned the maze task
faster than the descendants of the maze-dull rats, showing that speed of learning is infuenced
by genetic makeup – in rats brought up in the same environment, at least. If the same principle
applies to humans and a trait (such as g or Extraversion) is infuenced by our genetic makeup,
we would expect individuals who have a similar genetic makeup to show similar scores on
the trait, provided that they are brought up in conditions which allow the gene to express
itself. If genes have no infuence on our intelligence (that is, if it is our environments alone
that determine g or Extraversion), we would not expect people who are genetically similar to
have similar scores on the psychometric test unless they have also been brought up in similar
environments. And if some people experience environments which allow the genes to express
themselves whilst others do not (for example, being exposed to many foreign languages, or
never being allowed to socialise) there would be an interaction between genetic and
environmental infuences.
All this sounds very straightforward, but there is, of course, one huge problem. People tend
to be brought up within families. This means that genetically similar individuals (parents and
their offspring) are often found to be living in the same place, sharing the benefts (or hardships)
of a particular income level and perhaps bringing to bear the same attitudes to education and
learning that their parents gave to them. So although members of a family are to some extent
genetically similar, it is not possible simply to conclude that any similarity between their scores
on some psychological test implies that this trait has a genetic component. It is just as likely
that social factors (income, attitudes, etc.) cause their scores to be similar.
‘Assortive mating’ creates diffculties, too. This is the tendency of ‘like to attract like’ –
couples may come together because they see in each other characteristics (environmentally or
genetically determined) that they both share. High intelligence is a good example; the
correlation between partners’ IQ is 0.3 (Johnson et al., 2014). So can this explain any similarity
in their offspring’s intelligence? How can we tell the extent to which environmental or genetic
factors infuence personality or intelligence? The answer is to look at genetic similarity within
families (as well as between families), although this method is rather beyond the scope of the
present chapter.
Several different experimental designs have been used to examine the extent to which
personality and ability traits are infuenced by genetics and the environment.
Twin studies
Identical twins have identical genes; non-identical twins on average share only half the genes
that vary in humans. Suppose that a trait is measured in many pairs of identical twins and in
pairs of non-identical twins, each pair of twins being brought up together in a normal family.
If pairs of identical twins are found to have scores that are more similar than the scores of
pairs of non-identical twins, this suggests that the trait has a genetic component – that is, that
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their greater genetic similarity causes them to have scores that are more similar than are those
of pairs of non-identical twins. If pairs of identical twins are no more alike than pairs of non-
identical twins, this suggests that the trait has no genetic component.
This all assumes that identical twins are not treated more similarly than non-identical
twins. If they are treated more similarly, this could explain why their test scores show larger
correlations.
Sometimes parents believe that twins are identical whereas they are not. Do these fraternal
twins, who are treated by their parents as if they were identical, tend to show personality and
ability scores which correlate as substantially as those of identical twins? If so, this shows that
the similarity between identical twins in general might arise because they are treated similarly
by their parents and others. However this and other methodologies all show that the way in
which the twins are treated does not cause them to develop similar levels of personality or
ability traits (Loehlin and Nichols, 1976).

What would you conclude if identical twins’ scores on some trait were found
to be no more similar than the scores of non-identical twins (who share only
half their genes, on average)?
Other family studies

Each parent shares half their genes with each of their children and this implies that the
children will also, on average, share half their genes with each other. Figure 15.1 shows some
other linkages. If a trait is infuenced by genetic factors, one would expect children who are
very similar genetically to show similar scores on the trait and children who are less genetically
similar to differ more. If the individual’s environment determines the level of the trait, all
children reared in the same environment (regardless of their genetic background) should show
similar levels of the trait. Family units in which a grandchild of an older daughter may be
brought up alongside uncles and aunts of a similar age may be useful here, although for some
reason such studies are rarely reported.
Adoption studies
These are valuable since they allow one to see the extent to which the environment
can infuence scores on a trait. These days, all studies are based on children who were
adopted very shortly after birth. Such an adopted child shares no variable genes with the
other children in his or her adoptive family. If a study shows that adopted children generally
have similar levels of a trait to other members of their adoptive family, this suggests that
the trait is infuenced by the family environment, rather than by genetics. If the correlation
is close to zero, then merely being brought up in the same family environment has no
infuence on the trait, and so genes may play a part. If the mothers of adopted children can
be traced, it is possible to determine whether the biological mothers’ levels of personality
and ability traits resemble those of their adopted-away children. If the correlation is zero,
this suggests that genes do not infuence levels of the trait, whereas if the adopted-away
children resemble their biological parent(s), this suggests that the traits may be infuenced
by genetic makeup.
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Figure 15.1 A single family tree showing genetic linkages. Lines indicate
which offspring receive about half of their genetic material
from which other individuals. A, B, C and D are unrelated
individuals. E and F are the children of A and B, while G is the
child of C and D. H is the child of F and G. Siblings will share
about half of their genes with each other, and with their
parents, so E and F, E and A, F and A, E and B, G and C, and G
and D will each share about half of their genes. H will share
about a quarter of her genes with her grandparents (A, B, C
and D) and aunt or uncle (E)
Genetic infuences over the lifespan

One has to be careful about the age of individuals in genetic studies. As Pedersen and
Lichtenstein (1997) have observed, the relative importance of genetic and environmental effects
is quite likely to vary with age for several reasons. First, some genes are known to infuence
behaviour only at specifc times – the genes that control the production of certain hormones
(and thus bring about puberty) being one example. Thus, even if a certain group of genes can
potentially infuence an individual’s personality and intelligence, they need not all be active at
all ages. Hence the extent to which our intelligence or personality is infuenced by our genes is
likely to vary over our lifespan simply because not all genes are infuential all the time.
Second, it might be that genetic infuences on personality or ability are important only
early in life. It seems quite possible that, as one gets older, the accumulation of experience
and the variety of life events may become far more infuential than our genetic makeup in
determining how we think or behave, so perhaps genetic infuences on personality and ability
decline with age.
Third, one can argue entirely the opposite case. It might be that the environment will tend
to magnify any early genetically infuenced individual differences in personality or behaviour.
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For example, a young child who is identifed as being of higher than average intelligence might
be encouraged to take plenty of examinations, stretch his or her abilities to the limit by taking
demanding university courses and so on.
The studies have been performed and they indicate that our genetic background certainly
continues to affect our personality and general intelligence into middle age and beyond
(Loehlin, 1992; Pedersen and Lichtenstein, 1997; Pedersen et al., 1988; Briley and Tucker-
Drob, 2017), showing that early genetic effects are not swamped by environmental infuences
as we grow up. In the case of general intelligence, it seems that the infuence of genetic factors
is actually far more pronounced during middle age than during childhood or adolescence
(McGue et al., 1993; Haworth et al., 2010) whilst for personality genetic effects are much
more constant (Briley and Tucker-Drob, 2017). Thus it is emphatically not the case that our
genetic background infuences our behaviour only in childhood or adolescence. Rather, it
seems to set us up for life.
Methods of quantitative genetics

Let us consider what infuences the personality or ability of children in a family. In the
previous section, I referred rather vaguely to ‘environmental effects’ as a blanket term for
everything that is not genetic. However, geneticists distinguish between two types of
environment. The frst is the shared environment (sometimes also known as the common
environment and hence denoted by ‘C’), which basically represents the living conditions and
the ethos experienced by all members of a family. It covers every infuence that may make
members of the same family show similar traits, including parental income, quality of
housing, parental attitudes to education and discipline, nutrition and any other environmental
events that would be expected to infuence the development of all members of the family in
much the same direction.
Not every environmental infuence on a child will be shared by other children in the family.
Friendships outside the family (e.g., with classmates) that are not shared with other family
members, a good (or bad) relationship with a particular teacher, the effects of illnesses,
disability or bullying and every other experience that is not shared by other family members
together form the individual’s unique environment (referred to as ‘E’). The shared environment
is composed of infuences that will make family members similar to one another, whereas the
unique environment describes environmental infuences that tend to make family members
different from one another.
In addition to these environmental infuences, it is possible that genetic similarities between
family members will also infuence their levels of certain traits. We represent the infuence of
these genetic factors by ‘A’.
We assume for simplicity that individuals’ scores on a particular test can be completely
explained by these three sources of variance (shared environment, unique environment and
genetic similarity), each of which can be expressed as a number between 0 and 1 and that they
add together (no interactions). Thus we may write:
total variation =1 = A + C + E Equation 15.1
The basic aim of these genetic analyses is to establish the values for A, C and E in the
equation – that is, to establish the relative importance of genetics, the shared environment
and the unique environment in determining the level of some trait. (More complex models
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have been devised to include interactions, but the simple additive model shown above is
widely used.)
Note that the values for A, C and E:
l describe what happens in the population, and not to an individual

l depend on the culture tested.
Thus if it is found that general ability has a heritability of 0.5, this implies that about half the
variation within the population can be attributed to the effects of genes. It does not mean that
about half of a particular individual’s intelligence is due to their genes. Furthermore, most of
the children in countries where these studies are performed have had a reasonable standard
of living: few live in extreme poverty, all have gone to school, receive medical treatment where
necessary and so on. If studies were performed in cultures where there was far greater
environmental variation between families than in western society, it is highly probable that
larger values for C and E and smaller values for A would be found.
The key point to grasp is that we can gather data from children (or adults) on a test
measuring g or Extraversion, and estimate the heritability of that variable, together with the
impact of the shared and the non-shared environments.
The only infuences that could cause a ‘family’ of two unrelated children (e.g., an adopted
child and one of their step-siblings) to show similar scores on a test would be from the
common (shared) environment. So we can write:
runrelated_together = 0 + C + 0
where runrelated_together is the correlation1 between the pairs of unrelated children, and A and E
are both zero; the correlation between the pairs of children estimates the size of the infuence
of the common (shared) environment.
The only infuences that could cause identical (monozygotic) twins reared together in the
same family to show different scores on a test would be aspects of their unique environments,
as their genetic makeup and the shared environment are identical, so we can write
rmz_together = 1 – E
for identical twins who are reared together. Hence knowing the correlation between the scores
of identical twins brought up together (normally but not necessarily by their parents) estimates
the infuence of the unique environment directly.
Sometimes identical twins are separated after birth and adopted by very different families,
having no contact with each other or their birth mother. The only thing that could lead them
to show similar levels of a trait would be their genetic similarity (since their common and
shared environments are very different), giving
rmz_apart = A
So it is only necessary to administer a test to these separated twins and calculate the correlation
between them to draw some rather powerful conclusions about the heritability of whatever
trait is measured by the test.
Separated twins are a rarity, and diffcult to track down, and it is possible that the adoption
process introduces trauma which might affect development. Luckily it is also possible to
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perform a few calculations based on the relative similarity of the test scores of identical
(monozygotic) and non-identical (dizygotic) pairs of twins raised together by their parents
which will show the importance of genetic effects, the common environment and the unique
environment for as particular trait. For identical (monozygotic) twins reared together we can
write
rmz_together = A + C Equation 15.2
as the monozygotic twins are genetically completely identical, and they share all their genes
and the common environment.
Since dizygotic twins who are reared together share half their genes and the common
environment, we may write
rdz_together = 0.5A + C Equation 15.3
We can measure the test scores of samples of twins and calculate values for rdz_together and
rmz_together; these are just correlations showing how similar the identical twins’ scores are on
the trait, and how similar the non-identical twins’ scores are.
Subtracting Equation 15.3 from Equation 15.2 gives
rmz_together – rdz_together = 0.5A
and multiplying both sides of the equation by 2 this becomes
2(rmz_together – rdz_together) = A Equation 15.4
So if the correlation between pairs of identical twins reared together is 0.7 for some trait,
whilst the correlation between pairs of non-identical twins reared together is only 0.4, this
means that the heritability of the trait is 2(0.7 – 0.4) = 0.6. Sixty percent of the variation
between people on that trait is explained by variations in genetic makeup. Note that this
heritability applies to everyone – not just twins. We just use samples of twins to estimate its
value.

a. Suppose that many pairs of dizygotic twins were given the same
personality test, and the scores of these twin-pairs were correlated
together, giving r = 0.4. Suppose the experiment was repeated with
monozygotic (identical) twins, giving r = 0.6. What is the heritability of
the personality trait?
b. How important are the shared environment and the unshared
environment? (Hint: look back at equation 15.2 then equation 15.1.)
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There are two main problems with the study outlined above. First, it must assume that the
monozygotic twins are not more similar than non-identical twins for environmental (rather
than genetic) reasons, e.g., being dressed similarly, or being treated similarly just because they
look the same. The second problem is that measurement error (e.g., that brought about by
using an unreliable test or thinking that twins are identical when they are not) can also be
confused with variation due to the non-shared environment. Suppose that the correlations
were found to be exactly zero for monozygotic and dizygotic twins because the test was
completely riddled with measurement error. You should verify for yourself (using the equations
given in the answer to self-assessment question 15.2) that the genetic effects and the shared
environment would seem to have no infuence on the trait, but that all of the variation would
appear to arise from the unique environment. In a typical experiment (in which there is some
measurement error), we may therefore expect the effect of the unique environment to be rather
overestimated. Statisticians have developed ways of ‘tweaking’ the formulae to allow for this,
but this is rather too detailed an issue for us to consider here.
There is also a large literature exploring each of the issues raised above. For example,
Nancy Segal (2018a) tracked down pairs of unrelated individuals who just looked as if they
were identical twins, and would thus (presumably) have been treated similarly on the basis of
their appearance. Were their personalities similar? The answer was (unsurprisingly) ‘no’,
indicating that separated identical twins are unlikely to be similar just because people react
to their appearance in the same way. She also discusses studies where parents think they have
identical twins, but the twins are in fact dizygotic; they turn out to be no more similar than
‘normal’ dizygotic twins, despite presumably being treated more similarly than usual. She also
discusses ‘virtual twins’ – where parents who have a child under 1 year old also adopt a child
of the same age. These children are brought up together (like twins) but are unrelated to each
other. You may like to think about how measuring the correlations between these individuals,
and comparing this correlation with the correlation found between dizygotic twins reared
together, might say something about the infuence of the shared childhood environment.
You should be able to appreciate that it is possible to draw up systems of equations for
other family members of known genetic similarity (e.g., cousins reared in the same environment)
and so to estimate the relative importance of A, C and E by several different methods. Likewise
it should be clear how one could interpret the correlation between an adopted-away child and
their biological mother (who share half their genes, so doubling the correlation between them
estimates the heritability of the trait).
Measuring environmental effects directly

It is tempting to think that it would be easy to measure the infuence of the shared environment
directly, rather than going through the complicated analyses described above. Surely all one
needs to do is put together a comprehensive questionnaire to explore all possible aspects of
the family environment (parental attitudes, child-rearing practices, nutrition, hours of
television watched, availability of books, etc.), administer this to samples of people and
correlate this with IQ (or personality) and one has a direct measure of the home environment
experienced by their children. This has been done (Bradley and Caldwell, 1984) – but it does
not work. This is because the home environment is substantially infuenced by the parents’
genetic makeup (Braungart et al., 1992). More intelligent parents tend to provide more
intellectually stimulating home environments – trips to the theatre, books, cognitive activities.
Extraverted parents will throw parties, socialise, take risks, perhaps surround themselves with
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other cheerful people, and so on. Thus at the end of the day one cannot tell whether the
children of these parents tend to grow up smart (or Extraverted) because of the genes which
they inherited from their parents, or because of the way in which the shared home environment
is shaped by the parents’ intelligence and personality. This is why it is better to estimate A, C
and E from twin or family data, as shown above.
Interactions between genes and environments

Children also create their own unique environments (rather than just ‘happening’ to develop
certain hobbies or friendships) and Plomin et al. (1985) suggested that the child’s unique
environment may also be infuenced by genetic factors. Suppose that intelligence or personality
is substantially infuenced by genetic makeup. It seems quite likely that the intelligent child
will actively seek out intellectually stimulating environments – playing chess, asking parents
for educational games, joining several clubs at school, reading educational magazines and
perhaps making friends who are also of above average ability and discussing abstract concepts.
This means that the child’s unique environment may be determined, at least in part, by their
genetic makeup (i.e., intelligence). The lifestyle of the extravert (their unshared environment)
may also be created so as to allow the free expression of extraverted behaviour (playing
contact sports, socialising, etc.) while that of the neurotic may be designed to be as safe,
predictable and unthreatening as possible. Thus the types of unshared environment experienced
by individuals may be infuenced by their genetic makeup. The ‘unique environment’ is
probably not an environmental accident which just happens to a child, but is to some extent
something which each person carves out for themselves.
Parents are likewise not passive providers of the same environment for each child. They
may respond to children’s needs and interests; for example, if a child appears to be intelligent,
affuent parents might be able to develop this by providing books, extra tuition and so on;
less affuent parents may simply not be able to afford to develop their children’s potential in
this way. There might therefore be an interaction between environmental and genetic factors,
with only children being raised in affuent families being able to fulfl their genetic potential;
the infuence of genes may be much greater at higher income levels than at lower levels.
In Western society, interactions such as this can be found by comparing the heritability of
intelligence in the United States (Turkheimer et al., 2003). For the most socially deprived half
of the sample, the shared environment largely determined the level of the children’s IQ (C=0.6)
whilst the genetic effects were small; for the advantaged children the reverse was found.
A similar effect was found for school achievement (Harden et al., 2007) and in adults by Bates
et al. (2013). This last study is interesting for several reasons. It shows that children cannot
easily ‘catch up’ in adulthood from the effects of a poor childhood environment. It also shows
that as well as leading to higher levels of intelligence, a privileged childhood leads to adult
IQs which are both higher and have a larger range – a fnding which they interpret as genes
multiplying the effect of those environmental factors which develop IQ.
The studies discussed above used data from the United States, and there have been several
failures to replicate the effect in children and adults in countries such as the UK, the Netherlands
and Australia (e.g., van der Sluis et al., 2008; Asbury et al., 2005; Grasby et al., 2019). The
reasons for this are unclear but the Turkheimer sample included a large proportion of very
impoverished and marginalised families. It is possible that their ‘advantaged’ group may have
been ‘disadvantaged’ by the standards of other countries and samples. The failure to replicate
these effects outside the United States may perhaps suggest that in other countries children’s home
environments provide suffcient stimulation to allow their genetic potential to develop fully.
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Multivariate genetics
The technique of multivariate genetics sounds complex, but is not. This technique seeks to
answer a simple question. Suppose that two variables (verbal ability and numerical ability,
for example) are found to be correlated. Suppose too that behaviour genetic studies show that
both verbal ability and numerical ability have a genetic component. It might be the case that
one set of genes infuence verbal ability and another, quite different, set of genes affect
numerical ability; the reason why verbal and numerical ability are correlated might be due to
quality of schooling or something similar. Or it might be that the same genes infuence
performance on both verbal and numerical ability. Genes that infuence performance on
several traits are known as generalist genes.
Multivariate genetics is a fairly simple extension of the behaviour genetic methods described
earlier that allows one to determine the extent to which a correlation between two variables
occurs because certain genes infuence both of them. It typically involves giving one member
of each pair of identical twins a test of verbal ability and the other twin a test of numerical
ability. The same is then done for pairs of non-identical twins and, after some mathematical
wizardry, it is possible to determine the extent to which the correlation between verbal and
numerical ability (in this example) is caused by generalist genes. The interesting point is that
generalist genes are quite common – e.g., Davis et al. (2009). This has some interesting
applications. For example, some behaviours such as school achievement and leadership are
found to be infuenced by genetic makeup (Calvin et al., 2012; De Neve et al., 2013). So are
many traits such as Extraversion and g. So do the genetic variations which cause a child to be
intelligent also affect their performance at school? Do the genes which infuence intelligence
and/or the genes which infuence Extraversion help make someone a good leader, or are
different sets of genes involved? In other words, is general intelligence a cause of school
performance? Is Extraversion causes of good leadership? We return to these important issues
in Chapters 17 and 18.
Molecular genetics
Now that the human genome is completely mapped, the hunt is on to fnd what various genes
actually do – and especially to discover which ones code for intelligence. Robert Plomin and
his co-workers at King’s College, London have been taking a mixture of DNA from within
various groups that are homogeneous with respect to intelligence (e.g., a group of very
intelligent children; a control group of children with IQs close to the mean). They then look
for differences in the DNA of these two groups of children. The problem is that because so
many genes seem to each have a small effect, it is diffcult to identify which genes are
involved; it is rather like performing a million t-tests, fnding that 50,500 of them are
signifcant at the P<0.05 level (rather than the 50,000 one would expect by chance) and then
trying to work out which of the 50,500 are ‘false positives’ and which represent genuine
differences. In addition, the whole feld is rather technical and not particularly accessible to
the non-specialist. However replicable results are now emerging for intelligence and some
aspects of personality (e.g., Savage et al., 2018; Nagel et al., 2018). Plomin et al. (2006) give
an excellent and highly readable summary of the issues involved with this research. Plomin’s
(2018) book also gives an excellent non-technical introduction to the subject for those who
want to explore it further.
However because this literature is so technical, the following sections focus on the
contributions from behaviour genetics.
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Genetics of ability
Few issues in psychology have received as much attention as the origins of intelligence, perhaps
refecting the importance that we attach to this concept. Bouchard and McGue (1981)
reviewed over 140 studies of the relative importance of genetic factors, shared environment
and the unique environment for determining general intelligence. Their conclusion (and one
that is entirely consistent with later evidence) is that approximately 50% of the variation in
adult and child intelligence is attributable to our genes. The effects can be discerned very early
in life, although the measurement of cognitive ability in young children is a notoriously
diffcult and unreliable process and some studies must be discounted because they used
inadequate tests.
Plomin (1988) summarised a vast amount of data from twin, family and adoption studies.
These studies are old because the evidence is now so well established that there is no point in
repeating them. They reveal the following:
l Adult identical twins who were reared apart have IQs that correlate 0.74, suggesting that
genetic factors account for about three-quarters of the variation in children reared within
this culture.
l Adult identical twins who were reared together have IQs that correlate 0.87, while fraternal
(non-identical) twins reared together have IQs that correlate 0.53. Substituting these values
into Equations 15.4 and 15.2 (above), this shows that IQ has a heritability of 2(0.87 – 0.53)
= 0.68, the shared environment accounts for 2(0.53 – 0.87) = 0.19 of the variation in IQ
and the unique environment explains the remaining 13% of the variation between people.
l Pairs of unrelated children living together and adoptive parents and adoptive children show
correlations in IQ of 0.23 and 0.20, suggesting that the shared environment explains about
20–25% of the variation in IQ in childhood.
The really interesting fndings concern the relative infuence of the shared environment on
IQ as children get older. Theorists such as Skinner asserted that the childhood environment
and childhood experiences should play an important part in children’s eventual cognitive
development. So, too, do parents who pay to send their children to expensive schools in order
to develop their potential to the full. However, does the shared environment of childhood
really infuence adult IQ?
The answer seems to be a frm no. Studies of pairs of unrelated children brought up in the
same family show that the correlations between their IQs fall to zero by adulthood – the
shared environment has no infuence on children’s eventual cognitive ability. (Note that this
applies to all children, not just those who are adopted. The purpose of considering adopted
children is to eliminate genetic infuences from the equations.) Family infuences normally
have no impact whatsoever on adult intelligence, which is certainly a good thing for children
who are reared under diffcult circumstances.
Many studies have examined the general intelligence of identical and non-identical twins
who are brought up in a normal family environment. These studies are based on rather large
samples – the Louisville Twin Study alone considers some 500 sets of twins. Wilson (1983)
reports the correlations between the cognitive functioning of pairs of twins during early life.
Between the ages of 3 and 18 months, pairs of identical twins and non-identical twins show
rather similar correlations (of the order of 0.55 to 0.7) indicating that the family environment
infuences their scores on the tests. However, at 18 months of age the correlation is 0.82 for
identical twins but 0.65 for fraternal twins, the values at 24, 30 and 36 months being broadly
338
similar. This suggests (as you should verify using the formulae derived in your answer to self-
assessment question 15.2) that genetic factors seem to account for about a quarter to one-third
of the variation in the cognitive abilities of even these young infants. Later analyses suggest
that the heritability increases from about 0.4 at 1 year of age to 0.57 at 4 years and 0.7 at 7
years (Cherny et al., 1996).
Thompson (1993) cites evidence from the Western Reserve Twin Project based on 148 sets
of identical twins and 135 sets of fraternal twins aged 6–12 years, which suggests that general
cognitive ability has a heritability of 0.5 at this age level. That is, genetic factors account for
50% of the variation between children’s scores on the test. The shared environment accounts
for an additional 42% of the variance, with the unique environment having relatively little
effect. In other words, the genes and the ‘family ethos’ are of almost equal importance as
infuences on the child’s intelligence at this age.
After this age, the infuence of the shared environment almost disappears. When the same
experiment is repeated with adolescents, the genetic infuence is much the same, but the shared
environment has a negligible effect on the mental abilities of young teenagers (LaBuda et al.,
1987). This is a surprising fnding. It seems that, at this age, it simply does not matter what
family background, facilities, encouragement or diffculties the children enjoy – their
intellectual ability appears to be infuenced in equal measure by their genetic background and
their non-shared environments. The infuence of the family seems to have virtually no effect
on the child’s intellectual ability after the early teenage years.
One sometimes fnds research which links some aspect of adult performance to things done
to, or for, them by their parents. Breast feeding (vs bottle feeding), reading to children,
providing an environment with plenty of books, encouraging learning or having the means to
pay for private education all sound as if they might be important infuences on a child’s
development, which might affect their adult IQ. None of them normally is. Although there
are correlations between these variables and the intelligence of grown-up children, the links
tend not to be causal. For example, intelligent mothers tend to choose to breast feed their
children, and because these mothers pass on half their genetic material to the children, the
children will tend to be intelligent too (Cooper, 2015).
The fnding that the family environment normally has zero infuence on adult intelligence
is both extremely well replicated and incredibly far reaching. In order to tell is there is a causal
link between parental behaviour and any trait or behaviour in children which has appreciable
heritability at the time it is measured, it is essential to either use a genetically informed design
(e.g., studying twins or adopted children) or measure the parents’ levels of the trait or
behaviour and correct statistically for their infuence. A study which correlates any parental
behaviour with any heritable behaviour (or trait) of their children must perform such
correction. Otherwise it is impossible to tell whether the parental behaviour or the parents
genes infuence the children’s behaviour. Alarmingly, such studies still occasionally get
published and cited (e.g., Ece Demir-Lira et al., 2019).
This also raises some interesting issues concerning the effectiveness of educational
interventions. It shows that it is wrong to regard children’s minds as identical blank slates and
consequently that even the most favourable environmental stimulation is unlikely to have the
potential to change any child into a genius, as genetic factors will also infuence the child’s
ultimate intellectual performance. This is consistent with the fnding discussed in Chapter 14
that the effects of an enriched environment at some critical stage of development are not as
massive as had been expected.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. It means that even the most ghastly family
environment will not have an adverse effect on all children’s IQ. It also seems that factors
339
outside the family are much more potent infuences on the adolescent’s IQ than any family
infuences, although family infuences can be important for younger children. The most
consistent fnding to emerge from these hundreds of studies is that some children do appear
to have a defnite advantage in life when it comes to IQ and that these genetic infuences do
not decline with age. About 50% of the variability in IQ can be explained by a knowledge of
individuals’ genetic backgrounds and this applies to adults at least as much as it does to
children.
This is not to say that educational interventions should not be attempted. After all:
l The interventions discussed in Chapter 14 were designed to improve educational

performance rather than IQ, and since the studies never really sought to boost IQ, it may
be unreasonable to conclude that because they cannot do so, no intervention is likely to
prove effective in increasing intelligence.
l They may be able to motivate children to work hard and motivational/attitudinal
infuences may have a profound infuence on educational performance (although not
necessarily on IQ).
l Genetic factors account for only about 50 to 70% of the variability, implying that
environmental improvements can have a marked infuence on IQ.
l However, the evidence does show very clearly that theories that seek to ‘explain’ intelligence
purely in terms of social processes will, at best, be able to explain 50% of the variation in
IQ. Although many of us would wish that it were not so, the literature indicates that an
individual’s genetic makeup is as important as all of their environmental infuences in
determining their ultimate level of intelligence. Children are simply not born with equal
intellectual potential.
Genetics of personality
The issue of the genetics of personality is much less controversial than the genetic basis of
ability, simply because society does not really care too much whether an individual has an
extreme personality type. Individuals who are three standard deviations above the mean on
Extraversion are, on the whole, treated in much the same way as individuals who are three
standard deviations below the mean. They are not (some of us introverts would add
‘thankfully’) encouraged to develop their Extraversion to its maximum extent. Thus the social
consequences of having a particular type of personality are much less marked than those of
ability.
Several studies have examined the extent to which the main personality traits are determined
by genetic makeup, using the methodologies described earlier – for once again we make the
assumption that an individual’s position along a particular personality trait is infuenced by
the additive effects of a large number of genes. For example, Jang et al. (1996) used twin and
adoption data to determine the extent to which each of the ‘big fve’ personality factors of
Costa and McCrae is infuenced by genetic makeup in adulthood. Jang et al. concluded that
the heritabilities of Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness
were 41%, 53%, 61%, 41% and 44%, and the infuence of the common (family) environment
was in each case rather small. Loehlin (1992) and Zuckerman (1991) provides useful
summaries of the older literature, again showing that:
l heritabilities are substantial

l the infuence of genetic effects does not disappear by adulthood
340
l the shared (family) environment really plays a rather minor part in determining personality
at any age, the non-shared environment being a much more potent infuence on all
personality traits.
For example, Table 15.1 shows the correlations between the personality test scores of
identical twins and fraternal twins brought up together for three broad types of personality
factor (these are grouped, since not all investigators used the same scales), namely Extraversion/
sociability, Neuroticism/emotionality and Psychoticism/impulsivity/unsocialised Sensation
Seeking. The fgures in each column vary somewhat, since the studies used different tests (that
varied in reliability and validity). You will see that some of these studies are based on enormous
samples of identical and fraternal twins, and that there is a considerable degree of consistency
in the results. If genetic makeup had no infuence on personality, one would expect sets of
identical twins to have personality traits that were about as similar as sets of fraternal twins –
that is, the correlations in the ‘I’ columns in Table 15.1 should be about the same size as
the correlations in the ‘F’ columns for the same trait. You do not need any fancy statistical
analyses to see that this simply is not so. Pairs of identical twins have really quite similar levels
Table 15.1 Correlations between test scores of sets of identical twins (I)
and fraternal twins (F) (reared together) on personality scales
assessing the three major dimensions of personality, namely
Extraversion (E-Sy), Neuroticism (N-Emo) and Psychoticism/
impulsivity (P-Imp) (adapted from Table 3.2 of Zuckerman,
1991)
Study Age No. of sets of Personality trait

twins
E-Sy N-Emo P-Imp
I F I F I F I F
Loehlin and 18 490 317 0.61 0.25 0.54 0.22 0.54 0.32
Nichols (1976)
Tellegen et al. 21 217 114 0.54 0.06 0.54 0.41 0.58 0.25
(1988)
Rose (1988) 14–34 228 182 0.60 0.42 0.41 0.22 0.70 0.41
Floderus-Myrhed 17–49 2279 3670 0.47 0.20 0.46 0.21 – –
et al. (1980)
Floderus-Myrhed 17–49 2720 4143 0.54 0.21 0.54 0.25 – –
et al. (1980)
Rose et al. (1988) 24–49 1027 2304 0.46 0.15 0.33 0.12 – –
Rose et al. (1988) 24–49 1293 2520 0.49 0.14 0.43 0.18 – –
Eaves and Young 31 303 172 0.55 0.19 0.47 0.07 0.47 0.28
(l98I)
Pedersen et al. 59 151 204 0.54 0.06 0.41 0.24 – –
(1988)
341
of Extraversion (r values of between 0.46 and 0.61), whereas pairs of non-identical twins tend
to be considerably less alike in their degree of Extraversion (r values ranging from 0.06 to
0.42). Similar trends can be seen for the other two main personality traits. This strongly
suggests that these three main personality traits have a substantial genetic component. When
the correlations from the Floderus-Myrhed studies (chosen because they involve the largest
samples of twins) are entered into the formula shown in the answer to self-assessment question
15.2, the estimated heritability of Extraversion can be seen to be of the order of 0.54 to 0.66.
Similarly, the infuence of the shared environment is essentially zero, as you should check for
yourself.
Family studies, studies of separated identical twins, and adoption studies once again
produce almost identical results.
The study by Pedersen et al. involved 59 year old males, while participants in the studies by
Loehlin and Nichols (1976) and Tellegen et al. (1988) were aged 18 and 21 years, respectively.
The infuence of genetic factors on personality does not seem to decline with age. If it did,
Pedersen’s identical twins and fraternal twins would show similar correlations. If anything, the
data suggest that genetic infuences become relatively more important as one gets older.
Like the fnding that the shared environment is of little importance in determining adult
intelligence, the last mentioned result is, I feel, one of the most remarkable discoveries in
the whole of psychology. Given all that has been written about the importance of the family
in childhood, it is truly amazing to discover that some aspects of personality seem to be
almost entirely uninfuenced by the type of family in which one is brought up. Given the
range of family environments typically found in our culture, it does not generally matter a
jot which of these a child experiences – any infuences on the child’s later personality must
be understood in terms of the genes that are inherited from their parents and not in terms
of their childhood experiences per se. The correlation between genetically dissimilar children
who are brought up (adopted) in the same family is typically almost zero (Zuckerman
mentions an r value of 0.07).
As Brody and Crowley (1995) have observed:
[If] shared environmental infuences are close to zero, most of the variables that have
typically been studied by developmental psychologists have little or no infuence on
personality [and] it is usually a mistake to study environmental infuences on personality
and intelligence without a consideration of possible genetic effects.
Given that virtually all the studies point to the same conclusion, it is diffcult to argue with
this analysis. It certainly appears that all the ingenious environmentally based developmental
theories of Rogers, Freud, Skinner, Bandura, etc., are simply incorrect (at least in that the
family environment spectacularly fails to infuence the two major personality traits, namely
Extraversion and Neuroticism).
The evidence suggests that personality is determined by a mixture of genetic factors and
the non-shared environments of children – the infuence of particular teachers on a child, the
‘special’ relationship between a child and other members of his or her family or the infuence
of friends from outside the family. However, it is necessary to qualify this assertion somewhat.
Some personality traits (or behaviours) have been found to be substantially infuenced by the
common environment. For example, Stevenson’s (1997) twin study examined the extent to
which prosocial behaviour (empathy, helping behaviour and altruism), antisocial behaviour
(aggression or destructive behaviour) and sociability were genetically determined. Antisocial
behaviour was found to have a comparatively small genetic component (0.24, as opposed to
0.54 and 0.67, respectively) and was the only behaviour for which the infuence of the shared
342
environment was substantial (0.54, as opposed to 0.2 and 0, respectively). Thus it is clear that
some behaviours, at least, can be moulded by the family – it just so happens that the main
personality traits are not shaped in this way.
Politics of IQ and personality

Finally it may be useful to look at the political implications of both an extreme environmental
and an extreme hereditarian position. This may sound odd in a psychology text. However,
the whole issue of heredity vs environment has become heavily politicised and generates strong
emotions, with authors such as Kamin (1974) and Gould (1996) – who take strong
environmentalist positions – still being cited.
Suppose that personality and abilities were completely shaped by the environment – the
settings in which adults live and children develop, their interactions with other people, schools,
parental attitudes to education and so on. This is the view often taken by the political left,
since if it is assumed that social factors determine IQ, it suggests that improved social
conditions can allow everyone to develop to their full potential. Without such interventions,
the outlook for a child being brought up in a poor environment is grim indeed – the accident
of birth will mean that they are unlikely to develop a high IQ, for example. Since IQ is
generally found to correlate with income, it means that the whole dreary and unfair cycle of
poverty, low opportunity and low achievement is likely to continue from one generation to
the next. By way of contrast, children who enjoy a good education and upbringing and have
plenty of books, computers and encouragement will all (presumably) turn into geniuses, since
there is nothing in their environment to stop them from doing so.
Similar arguments can be put forward for personality traits. If environmental factors are
all-important, a child who experiences a chaotic or traumatic childhood might inevitably
become depressed, anxious and neurotic, whereas one brought up in a stable, loving and
nurturing home would be expected to thrive psychologically. About the only good thing about
this vision is that improvements to the environments of the disadvantaged underclass would
be expected to lead to a dramatic improvement in their personality and abilities.
Would the situation be any better if our traits were entirely genetically determined? We
need to assume that people will experience environments which will allow their genes to
express themselves – but as most children go to school, socialise, etc. this may not be too much
of an issue. Consider personality frst. The way in which children are brought up by their
parents would not infuence their adult personality – which is fne for traits such as Extraversion
but which would be unfortunate if a child has high levels of Psychopathy or Neuroticism
which might cause problems in adulthood; a strong genetic basis might suggest that
interventions to modify these personality traits may not be effective. On the positive side, it
means that children who are raised in deprived or abusive environments would not have their
personalities scarred by the experience.
If IQ is determined mainly by genetic factors, it might be possible increase the average IQ
in the country by ensuring that high IQ individuals produce more children (preferably with
other high IQ individuals) than do low IQ individuals – an extremely controversial principle
known as ‘eugenics’, discussed by psychologists such as Lynn (2001). This has, of course, been
associated with the political far-right.
Even if we ignore the horrifc implications of eugenics, both scenarios sound profoundly
depressing to me. However, I mention these political fantasies (and no doubt reveal my
ignorance of sociological principles!) in order to encourage you to understand some of the
moral issues that can emerge from the simple question of whether individual differences are
343
infuenced more by nature than by nurture – that is, because of genetic or environmental
infuences. The unfortunate problem is that some journalists, psychologists and other social
scientists seem to decide what the answer to the nature/nurture question should be, rather
than looking at the evidence dispassionately. In this chapter I have tried to survey the literature
as objectively as possible, but you will quite probably hear rather different interpretations
given by others, particularly sociologists and social psychologists, who are understandably
keen to emphasise the importance of the environment in determining behaviour. Because of
the importance of this issue, it is vital that you read the primary sources and critically evaluate
the merits of any interpretation of the data.
Summary
We now know a great deal about the relative importance of environmental and genetic
infuences on personality or intelligence, and different methodologies (studies of identical and
non-identical twins, studies of separated identical twins, studies of adoptees) produce nearly
identical results. Intelligence and the major personality traits are all infuenced by our genetic
makeup (some personality traits more than others) and these genetic infuences persist until
adulthood. Vukasovic and Bratko (2015) give a review and meta-analysis of the personality
literature for those who want to explore the topic in more detail. Polderman et al. (2015)
report the results from a meta-analysis of all traits based on over 14 000 000 pairs of twins.
Some of these are not really relevant (their defnition of ‘trait’ includes ‘structure of the
eyeball’, etc.) but some are; they conclude that general ability has a heritability of 0.66 in
adults, for example (see their Table 3).
Methodological objections (such as the idea that parents and teachers treat identical twins
more similarly than non-identical twins) seem not to be the cause of the greater similarity of
identical twins. The problem is that social psychologists, sociologists and the like are unhappy
with the idea that one’s genetic makeup can moderate (and arguably dominate) the effects of
the environment, while others are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge the often-potent
infuence of the unshared environment. Those wishing to explore the interaction between
genes and environment and a number of other important issues in intelligence research will
enjoy the paper by Sauce and Matzel (2018) which is likely to become a classic.
The surprising fnding, to my mind, is that the family environment usually matters rather
little. By and large, children develop in the ways that they do because of their genetic makeup
and environmental infuences which are not shared with other family members (and which
may themselves be under genetic control). Although evidence for a gene x environment
interaction for intelligence is somewhat contradictory, it seems that improving family
environments may sometimes increase both the level and range of the children’s IQ.
Given the exciting nature of the fndings discussed in this chapter, it is necessary to remind
ourselves of one basic point before moving on. You will recall that there is some opposition
to the very notion of traits. Intelligence is seen not as refecting some real property of the brain,
but as a convenient social abstraction (Howe, 1988); personality traits have received the same
treatment at the hands of some social psychologists (Hampson, 1988). Although these
contributions are dated, their infuence lingers on. The fnding that intelligence and personality
traits all have a very substantial genetic component indicates that neither of these views can
be entirely correct and that the individual differences that we measure by means of psychological
tests are, to a considerable extent, the behavioural consequences of individual differences in
certain biological structures.
344

There are several excellent texts and journal papers that introduce basic genetic concepts (such
as those described here) before going on to describe more complex issues, such as multivariate
models. These include Robert Plomin’s (2018) superb and non-technical account of a lifetime’s
work on the origins of intelligence and personality, Bouchard (1993), Krueger et al. (2007),
Bouchard (1995), Plomin et al. (1995), Plomin et al. (2006), Brody and Crowley (1995); there
are plenty of others. Nancy Segal’s very readable paper on various types of twin study (Segal
et al., 2018b) is also warmly recommended. I make no apology for the age of some of these
references: the basic facts about the heritability of traits were established some time ago and
the subsequent literature has become rather technical.
SAQ 15.1
The methods of behaviour genetics explore whether people who have similar
genetic makeup also show similar scores on a trait. If people with more
similar genetic makeup also tend to more similar scores on some trait, this
indicates that the trait has a genetic component. In this hypothetical example,
as identical twins are genetically identical, whereas non-identical twins only
share half of their variable genes, fnding that genetic similarity does not
result in greater similarity of scores on the trait would suggest that the trait
is not infuenced by genetic makeup.
SAQ 15.2
a. Substituting in the values for the correlations in Equation 15.4:
A = 2 (0.6 – 0.4) = 0.4
In Equation 15.2
rmz_together = A + C
0.6 = 0.4 + C
Making C, the infuence of the shared environment, 0.2

Substituting into Equation 15.1,
1=A+C+E
1 = 0.4 + 0.2 + E
345
Making E, the infuence of the unique environment, 0.4.

b. In this hypothetical case, genetic infuences and the unique environment
are of equal importance and each is about twice as important as the
shared environment in determining scores on that trait.
Note
1 A special form of the correlation coeffcient (the intraclass correlation) needs to be used for
these analyses as it is not obvious which member of each pair should be regarded as measuring
the x variable, and which the y variable.
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Chapter 16
Psychology of mood and

motivation
Introduction
While the previous chapters have focused on the nature and assessment of stable traits (such
as general ability or Extraversion), so far there has been no mention of the assessment of
states. Unlike traits, states are not stable, constant features of individuals as are (for example)
Extraversion and verbal ability. Instead, states are highly volatile, changing from hour to
hour or from minute to minute, often (although not necessarily) in response to life events.
Two broad classes of state have been identifed, namely mood states and motivational states,
and this chapter explores both of them. Mood states represent feelings – satisfaction, joy,
terror, arousal and a host of others – whilst motivation states represent those things which
make us behave in a particular way – hunger, need to assert oneself, need to protect one’s
family and so on.
Learning outcomes
l Show an appreciation of the problems of measuring states, and outline
how moods might be measured by P-technique factor analysis.
l Discuss the structure of mood, showing an appreciation of what is meant
by ‘Positive Affect’ and ‘Negative Affect’.
l Demonstrate knowledge of how moods may be changed, mood rhythms
and mood variability.
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Psychology of mood and motivation
l Show a critical appreciation of motivational theories based on Grit,

planned behaviour, self-determination and metamotivational states.
l Evaluate and describe Cattell’s theory of motivation, showing familiarity
with terms such as erg, sentiment and the dynamic lattice.
Moods are the familiar surges of emotions that we feel on the morning of an examination,
on seeing a beautiful sunset, on viewing a moving performance on stage or screen or after
seeing our team win an important match. Some authors draw distinctions between moods and
emotions, but I will not do so in this chapter as there seems to be considerable confusion about
what (if anything) such distinctions should be (Beedie et al., 2005). Variables such as their
duration, intensity and links to external infuences have been suggested, but do not seem to
lead to a neat categorisation (Cooper, 1997).
Motivational states are internal feelings that drive us to eat when hungry, to spend hours
assuaging our social conscience through voluntary work, to spend time and money fnding a
partner and so on. They are similar to the ‘drives’ and ‘instincts’ invoked by early theorists
such as McDougall (1932) – theories which fell into disrepute once it was appreciated that
they were circular. For example, it might be found that people who are deprived of food
actively seek it out. The reason, according to McDougall, is because hunger is an instinct.
What does hunger do? Well, it makes people seek out food. We are saying is that the reason
that people seek out food is that they seek out food. We give the illusion that we understand
the reason for a behaviour just by saying that there must be an instinct for it.
The second problem with this approach is that it cannot be shown to be false. How could
one show that there is not an instinct called hunger? This makes the idea unscientifc, according
to philosophers of science such as Popper (1959).
Third, how broad are the instincts? Are there separate instincts for seeking out fruit, cheese,
Belgian-chocolate-coated peanuts, etc. – which there perhaps ought to be because different
people will seek out different things. If so, the number of instincts will become near-infnite.
The diffculty of measuring states

Scales that measure states, just like those that assess traits, must be shown to be reliable and
valid. How can the reliability of a mood scale be assessed? One property that it most certainly
must not show is high temporal stability (test–retest reliability). Because moods change over
time while traits do not, if individuals are found to have similar scores on two occasions this
shows that the scale is measuring a trait of some kind, rather than a state. However, it is
possible to calculate the internal consistency reliability of a mood scale and it should be clear
from Chapter 8 that this is, in any case, the more theoretically useful measure of reliability.
Assessing the validity of scales that measure states is rather more problematical, for as
states (by defnition) last only for a short time and are susceptible to environmental infuences,
it is necessary to measure the mood (or motivation) and to assess the criterion behaviour(s)
at almost the same time. There would be little point in measuring mood on Monday and then
correlating these scores with some criterion data on Friday, as people’s levels of mood/
motivation will almost certainly have changed.
The construct validity of mood scales could, perhaps, be assessed by correlating scores on
once measured moods or motivation with scores on other criterion measures, such as anxiety
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(as rated by an observer) and so on. However, there is a problem with this approach, since it
may confuse the mood (or motivation) with personality. For example, suppose the sample
contains some individuals who are always anxious (i.e., high on the trait of anxiety or
Neuroticism). Any signifcant correlations between self-reported anxiety (in a mood
questionnaire) and rated anxiety might simply show that the items in the questionnaire
measure trait anxiety. For this reason, it is much better to perform longitudinal studies and
to see how mood or motivational state varies relative to each individual’s own baseline.
It is also possible to establish the content validity of mood scales, since many intense moods
have clinical overtones – anxiety, depression, etc. For example, it would be diffcult to argue
that a mood scale that asked about all the symptoms of depression in DSM-5 was not valid.
However, this is rather more diffcult for motivational states.
Worse still, a huge number of cognitive variables may affect states. The feelings that you
experience when a stranger pours a drink over you will vary enormously depending on
whether or not you believe it was an accident (and perhaps even whether you think that the
stranger is good-looking). We can also manage our moods as discussed in Chapter 7 – for
example, evaluating whether or not we are experiencing negative moods (‘stress’) and
exploring our options for reducing such feelings (e.g., through the use of coping mechanisms,
dropping out of university, improving our time management skills or heading for the bar).
It is also necessary to consider which aspects of states we should assess. When measuring
traits there is only one sensible thing to measure, namely the person’s level of the trait, which
is assumed to be a stable feature of that individual. However, many more options are available
when measuring mood or motivational states. For example, one could choose to measure:
l a person’s level of the state(s) at one particular instant, e.g., their level of anxiety prior to
an examination
l the extent to which a person’s state score changes between two situations, e.g., their level
of anxiety before an examination minus their level of anxiety when sitting relaxing on a
beach
l a person’s average level of the state(s), e.g., the average strength of a person’s sex drive over
a period of weeks or months. For moods, the average state may resemble a personality trait
(Cattell, 1973; Cooper and McConville, 1989)
l the variability of a person’s state(s) from hour to hour, day to day or week to week
l periodic fuctuations in states – the extent to which a person’s level of state(s) can be
predicted by some regular daily, weekly, monthly or annual cycles
l the speed with which a person’s score on a state changes following some intervention.
When considering traits it was only necessary to try to understand which variables affected
the level of the trait (e.g., the biological basis of intelligence). However, it is clear that any
comprehensive study of moods and motivational states will need to consider all of the factors
listed above at least. This makes it diffcult to construct and test any comprehensive theories
of mood and motivation and ensures that the feld is far too broad to be covered in any depth
in this chapter!
Mood
Nature of mood
Much research into moods has been driven by clinical interest, for example the development
of tests to assess patients’ levels of anxiety and depression. Thus, many inventories have been
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designed to measure depression, anxiety, hopelessness and the like, with fewer attempting to
assess the more pleasant moods, such as elation, sociability or joie de vivre. There are two
problems with this approach. First, it means that different clinicians may have devised scales
that measure the same construct, but may have labelled these constructs differently. One
person’s ‘anxiety’ scale may measure precisely the same thing as another theorist’s scale of
‘state Neuroticism’, ‘tense arousal’ or ‘Negative Affect’ and this can create confusion. The
second problem is that this ad hoc approach to the construction of mood scales may leave
certain important aspects of mood unmeasured. Apart from the work of Storm and Storm
(1987) which did not use factor analysis, and a little early work by Cattell (1973) there has
been little attempt to ensure that mood scales – even supposedly comprehensive ones – actually
measure the full range of possible moods. Different mood theorists tend to use different
samples of items and so discover different numbers of mood states.
A glance at the Mental Measurement Yearbooks will reveal that a quite bewildering range
of tests has been developed to assess mood. Some measure single moods (e.g. the State–Trait
Anxiety Inventory and the Depression Adjective Checklist), while questionnaires such as the
Profle of Mood States (POMS; Lorr and McNair, 1988), the Howarth Mood Adjective
Checklist (HMACL-4; Howarth, 1988), the Eight State Questionnaire (8SQ; Curran and
Cattell, 1976), the Differential Emotions Scale (DES-III; Izard et al., 1982), the Nowlis Mood
Adjective Checklist (Nowlis and Nowlis, 1956), the UWIST Mood Adjective Checklist
(Matthews et al., 1990) and the Clyde Mood Scale (Clyde, 1963) each claim to measure a
number of distinct mood states. Their use is not restricted to psychological research, the
Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS; Zigmond and Snaith, 1983) scale being
widely used in medicine and the POMS in particular being popular in sports psychology.
There is good evidence that these multi-scale tests measure two broad dimensions of mood
known as Positive Affect (energy) and Negative Affect (anxiety/tension) (Lorr and Wunderlich,
1988; McConville and Cooper, 1992b; Watson et al., 1988) as discussed below.
Five problems in measuring mood

Most of the scales just mentioned were constructed by administering samples of adjectives to
groups of volunteers and asking them to rate how accurately each of the adjectives described
how they felt or behaved at that instant, rather than how they usually felt or acted. Supporters
of this approach to mood scale construction believe that this is suffcient to guarantee that the
scale measures a state rather than a personality trait.
However, there are problems with almost all of the scales mentioned above.
l It is generally not at all obvious how or why each scale selected those particular items for
inclusion. There is no guarantee that the items are a random sample of potentially mood-
describing adjectives.
l No attempt is made to eliminate synonyms – many of the scales may be highly reliable
simply because all the adjectives contained within them mean precisely the same thing. The
fnding that a group of items unexpectedly vary together is what allows us to infer
the presence of some ‘source state’. We should not (sensibly) infer the operation of some
source trait where the items have to form a factor because they are just synonyms, but this
does not stop some theorists from doing so.
l This method of constructing mood scales (factoring correlations between items following
a single administration of the test to a large group of people) is precisely the same technique
as that used to fnd personality traits. So how can we ever be sure that these scales measure
mood states at all? Different techniques must be developed.
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l Moods are supposedly exquisitely sensitive to environmental conditions, so the setting

in which people complete the questionnaires is likely to infuence the scores that are
obtained, and this will itself infuence the number and nature of the mood factors that
are derived. Asking undergraduates to complete mood questionnaires in a large group
thus seems to be rather short-sighted as it is diffcult to imagine how anyone could feel
fearful, exuberant, zestful or excited (for example) when sitting in a lecture theatre
ploughing through a questionnaire containing hundreds of items for the sake of course
credit. Asking volunteers to fll in a short mood questionnaire at random intervals when
alerted by an application on a mobile phone overcomes this problem, and allows moods
to be sampled in many situations – the ‘experience sampling method’ discussed by
Hektner et al. (2007). Free software for performing such studies includes https://
pielsurvey.org/.
Lazarus (1991) observed that the correlation between mood scales (and mood items) will
vary according to the situation. For example, ‘active’ is an item measuring Positive Affect.
Lying in bed, half-asleep, low activity is a good feeling and one which is likely to be associated
with low levels of ‘distress’ (an item measuring Negative Affect). However if one is falling
asleep and not feeling ‘active’ during an important meeting or examination, this is likely to
be associated with high levels of ‘distress’, as one realises that one must try to focus and
concentrate. Depending on the situation, the correlation between these two items can be either
positive or negative; Folkman and Lazarus (1980) show this is not just a theoretical issue, but
one which affects studies in real life.
Discovering the main dimensions of mood is thus a tricky problem and there is little frm
evidence that we have arrived anywhere near a solution. Most attempts to solve the problem
have fallen foul of one of the issues mentioned above, and anomalies often arise when the
scales are examined in detail. For example, Curran and Cattell’s (1976) Eight State
Questionnaire supposedly measures eight quite distinct moods, yet the correlation between
some of the scales is of the order of 0.7 to 0.8, once their reliability is taken into account
(Matthews, 1983). Much the same is true of Howarth’s scale (Howarth, 1988). This suggests
that the divergent validity of some of the scales is dubious. There is no space here to examine
the psychometric properties of all of these scales in detail, but a hardnosed reading of the test
manuals and published literature often fails to reveal much convincing evidence for their
validity. However, in the next section we shall consider a method of scale construction
guaranteeing that a scale will measure a mood state, rather than a trait, so eliminating one of
the major problems outlined earlier.
Identifying moods using factor analysis

The key feature that distinguishes mood from personality traits is that moods vary over time,
whereas personality traits remain more or less constant. This basic distinction can be used to
construct scales that can be shown to measure mood rather than personality. Consider, for
example, the fve-item questionnaire shown in Table 16.1.
Suppose that just one person was asked to answer the questions shown in Table 16.1 at
the same time of day on 20 consecutive days. It would be possible to show how the responses
vary from day to day by drawing graphs rather like those shown in Figure 16.1. (I arbitrarily
decided to plot the daily responses to items (a) and (b) on the frst graph and the daily
responses to items (c), (d) and (e) on the second graph, since plotting all fve items on the same
graph appeared confusing.) It is possible to learn rather a lot about the structure of moods
from such graphs.
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Table 16.1 Five items from a hypothetical questionnaire
Strongly Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly

agree disagree
(a) At the moment I feel 5 4 3 2 1

quite cheerful
(b) It is easy for me to 5 4 3 2 1
concentrate
(c) My heart is pounding 5 4 3 2 1
(d) I am worrying more 5 4 3 2 1
than usual
(e) I generally prefer my 5 4 3 2 1
own company to that
of other people
Figure 16.1 Daily responses of one person to the items shown in Table 16.1
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For example, it is clear that items (a) and (b) tend to move up and down together – when
one of them is high, so is the other. The same is true for items (c) and (d). Item (e) is different,
since responses to this item vary relatively little from day to day, which is hardly surprising
since the item appears to measure a personality trait rather than a state. (It asks the person
how they generally feel, rather than how they feel at this moment.) Thus just by looking at
this graph it is clear that the fve items measure two distinct states plus one trait.
Plotting graphs such as this is a time-consuming business and interpreting the results is not
particularly ‘objective’ – neither is it easy to see what is going on when the number of items
becomes large. Fortunately, you already know how to analyse these data.
Suppose we correlated together the person’s scores on the fve items in the questionnaire.
This may seem rather odd – we have previously calculated correlations only for many people
tested on one occasion, rather than for one person tested on many occasions. One simply
enters the data obtained on 30 occasions as if they had been obtained from 30 individuals and
uses the same statistical package as usual.
Factor or principal components analysis is the obvious tool to explore the structure of these
correlations, and Table 16.2 shows the loadings from a principal components/VARIMAX
analysis of the correlation matrix, rotating two factors. This analysis can tell us how many
groups of items tend to rise and fall together from day to day in a single individual. Items that
do not vary much (or which do vary, but in a different way from any other items in the
questionnaire) will not load on any of the factors, as you can see by looking at item (e) in
Table 16.2. Thus this technique of factor analysis is able to distinguish traits from states,
which is precisely what is required when developing a mood questionnaire.
This form of factor analysis, in which correlations between items are calculated after
administering the items to one individual on many occasions, is known as P-technique, to
distinguish it from the more usual method of factor analysis (R- or regular technique).
Suppose that ten people each completed the mood questionnaire on 30 occasions. Much
the same method can be used to analyse these data: the experimenter can either perform ten
separate analyses using P-technique (each based on 30 occasions) or else the ten tables of
data can be stacked one on top of each other, so that the computer program ‘thinks’ it is
analysing the data from one individual on 300 occasions. This is sometimes known as ‘Chain-
P’ technique. It is prudent to standardise the scores on the items for each person (i.e., to
transform the scores so that each person has a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1: z
scores) before stacking the data and performing the P-factor analysis. This will guard against
any contamination by traits, as you may care to verify using some made-up data (or see
Cooper, 2019).
Table 16.2 Rotated factor matrix showing one person’s responses to the
fve-item questionnaire administered on 30 occasions
Item Component 1 Component 2
a –0.092 0.934
b –0.231 0.905
c 0.938 –0.155
d 0.897 –0.295
e –0.381 0.217
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It is also possible to administer questionnaires to large groups of people on two occasions,

to calculate the difference between individuals’ scores on each of the items on the two
occasions and factor analyse these difference scores. This technique, too, will reveal any states
that run through the questionnaire quite independently of any traits that might be present and
is sometimes known as dR (for ‘differential-R’) technique, since it is based on difference
scores.

a. Why are P-, Chain-P and dR techniques used when constructing mood
scales?
b. How might you discover the number and nature of the main dimensions
of mood using P-technique?
Structure of mood
Reanalysis of the correlations between mood scales (Watson and Tellegen, 1985) and
hierarchical factor analyses of mood items drawn from the major mood scales (McConville
and Cooper, 1992b) typically reveals fve primary mood factors: depression, hostility, fatigue,
anxiety and energy/Extraversion (also known as ‘Positive Affect’). Since the frst four of these
are very substantially intercorrelated, it is possible to group these four scales together and call
them ‘Negative Affect’ as shown in Figure 16.2. Thus one can conclude that there are either
fve main dimensions (the fve primary factors) or two main dimensions (‘Positive Affect’ and
‘Negative Affect’) of mood.
It is a great pity that the terms ‘Positive Affect’ and ‘Negative Affect’ were used to describe
the two main dimensions of mood, since there is much confusion in the literature about what
these terms mean. Positive and Negative Affect are not opposite ends of the same dimension
of mood – ‘good mood’ vs ‘bad mood’. Instead, they represent two completely different
dimensions of mood. Negative Affect describes feelings of depression, anxiety, anger and
emotional upset. Positive Affect refers to feelings of energy, enthusiasm and high activity level:
in other words, arousal.
Figure 16.2 Hierarchical structure of mood
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There would seem to be plenty of scope for repeating this research, using P-technique,
Chain-P technique or dR technique to discover the main mood factors that run through a
carefully sampled set of items from which synonyms have been removed.
Changes in mood
It is surprisingly easy to alter levels of mood experimentally, using the ‘Velten technique’
(Martin, 1990; Velten, 1968) and its derivatives. In the original Velten technique, subjects
read a standard series of statements and were asked to try to experience the mood implied by
them. The frst statements are fairly innocuous (e.g. ‘I’m feeling a little ‘down’ today’), but
they soon plumb the depths of despair (e.g. ‘I feel so wretched that I just want to die’) and
after working their way through the series of cards, individuals really do seem to feel the
depression. This is refected in their scores on questionnaires and also in objective measures,
such as brain activity and pain sensitivity which are known to refect depression (Berna et al.,
2010). It therefore seems to be a genuine effect, rather than some kind of demand characteristic
(in which the participant sees the purpose of the experiment and resolves to give the
experimenter the sort of results that they want). Interventions such as viewing videoclips and
listening to extracts of music have also been used; eleven of these methods were evaluated by
Westermann et al. (1996) who concluded that video clips and stories are the most effective,
especially when participants are urged to ‘feel the mood’.
Life events, both positive and negative, also infuence Negative Affect, with minor hassles
(such as rainy weather, missing a train or losing an umbrella) having a surprisingly strong
infuence on Negative Affect (Gruen et al., 1988) and apparently trivial events such as fnding
some small change left in a public telephone booth reduce it (Isen and Levin, 1972). I only
know of one attempt to induce Positive Affect (McConville, 1992); published studies which
claim to do so really try to lower Negative Affect.
The cyclical nature of mood

The time course of moods has also been extensively studied, although one immediately
encounters a formidable methodological problem. It is extremely diffcult to separate the
effects of time from the effects of life events. For example, suppose it was found that individuals
showed a dip in certain moods each evening. Would this indicate that these moods were under
the control of some ‘biological clock’ that causes the levels of mood to rise and fall with a
particular frequency (e.g., every 24 hours)? The answer is, of course, that it would not. Moods
may dip at a particular time of day because of fatigue, the physiological after-effects of eating
dinner or a whole host of other factors that just happen to occur at the same time each day
because we tend to live fairly regular lifestyles.
Some studies have circumvented this problem by monitoring the mood of people who are
kept in a laboratory in which there are no windows and the length of the ‘day’ is artifcially
changed (generally increased) from its 24-hour norm. If the daily frequency of moods changes,
this will indicate that the moods are a by-product of life events. If the moods remain locked
to their 24-hour (or similar) cycle, this would suggest that they are under the direct control
of a biological clock, possibly mediated by chemicals such as cortisol. One such study found
that individuals’ levels of happiness were infuenced both by their life events and by the
24-hour cycle (Boivin et al., 1997), suggesting that this mood is, to some extent, under
physiological control.
Several studies also suggest that a 7-day cycle infuences mood levels (e.g., Larsen and
Kasimatis, 1990). However, it is not altogether clear whether the 7-day cycle is biological in
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origin or whether it refects social habits that happen to be tied to a 7-day week (perhaps
socialising at weekends and feeling gloomy when returning to work on Monday).
Mood variability
Mood variability is a particularly interesting issue, since there are remarkably large individual
differences in the extent to which people’s moods change over time. Chris McConville
(McConville and Cooper, 1992a) asked people to complete a mood scale each day for about
30 days. Figure 16.3 shows the daily mood scores of two participants in this study. It can be
seen that one participant shows considerable variability from day to day, while the other
person’s moods vary hardly at all. We were not expecting to see such huge individual
differences in variability, and found that variability measured when mood was assessed
multiple times a day (using an electronic pager) correlated substantially with day-to-day
variability, indicating that moods are not at all stable.
It is a well-established fnding that all of a person’s moods vary to a similar and characteristic
extent (Wessman and Ricks, 1966). This implies that we can regard mood variability as a kind
of trait and postulate some type of regulating mechanism that controls the extent to which
individuals’ moods swing either side of their habitual level.
Figure 16.3 Mood levels of two volunteers on 30 days, showing individual

differences in variability of mood
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It is possible to calculate three statistics from data such as these.
l The standard deviation of an individual’s scores shows their mood variability. This has
been shown to correlate with Neuroticism and similar traits (Hepburn and Eysenck, 1989;
McConville and Cooper, 1992a), and levels of depression (Kuppens et al., 2007).
Interestingly, a longitudinal study showed that the minority of participants (12%) whose
mood variability increased during early adolescence showed elevated levels of both
delinquency and depression (Maciejewski et al., 2019), suggesting that mood variability is
linked to these forms of psychopathology.
l It is also possible to measure whether a person’s moods swing rapidly from peak to peak,
rather than transitioning more slowly (for example, mood scores of 20, 40, 10, 30 rather
than 10, 20, 30, 40) using a statistic known as the mean-square successive distance: for the
first person this would be (20–40)2 + (40–10)2 + (10–30)2 = 1700, as opposed to 300 for
the second person. Studies using this statistic also show that rapid transitions of mood are
associated with depression (e.g., Kuppens et al., 2010).
l Finally, it is possible to calculate a statistic called the ‘autocorrelation’ which essentially
shows whether a person’s score on one occasion is predictable from their score on the
previous occasion, or whether the pattern of mood change is truly random (Jahng et al.,
2008). It involves correlating their score on one occasion with the score on the next.1 If a
person produced mood scores of 4, 7, 2 and 8 on four occasions, the autocorrelation would
involve correlating the following pairs of numbers: (4,7), (7,2), (2,8).

Suppose that one person completes a scale measuring Negative Affect every
hour between 7am and 11pm one day. What can you infer about their moods
by calculating:
a. Their average mood
b. The standard deviation of their moods
c. The average squared difference between their moods on successive
occasions (e.g., their squared difference between their mood at 7am and
at 8am, and at 8am and 9am, etc.)
d. In (c), why did we calculate the squared differences rather than just the
differences?
e. The autocorrelation.
Thinking back to how EEG signals were analysed (Chapter 13), what could
Fourier analysis tell us about the time course of mood?
A meta-analysis by Houben et al. (2015) shows that people who show elevated levels of
(trait) depression, anxiety and other components of Neuroticism:
l show more variable moods, as measured by the standard deviation of their mood scores
over time.
l have moods which swing more rapidly from one extreme to the other, rather than
transitioning more slowly (even though the standard deviation of the scores is the same).
l have moods which are unpredictable from previous moods.
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These last two areas have not been heavily researched, but it does seem that extreme
variations in mood, rapid shifts in mood and moods that vary at random are associated with
Neuroticism and its components.
Motivation
Several older theories regard motivation as a trait, rather than a state. For example, ‘need for
achievement’ or ‘need for affliation’ (Murray, 1938; McClelland, 1961) look as if they refect
stable aspects of personality rather than anything which changes over time; it is therefore no
great surprise to fnd that when people’s scores on scales measuring these needs were factor-
analysed alongside their scores on the Big Five (Costa and McCrae, 1988), need for achievement
had a strong loading on the NEO Conscientiousness factor (0.6), and need for affliation
appeared on the Extraversion factor with a loading of 0.83. (The frst fnding is hardly
surprising, as need for achievement is one of the facets of Conscientiousness, as shown in
Table 6.3.) Although organisational psychologists are keenly interested in trying to predict
job performance from such scales, it is clear that they measure personality rather than
motivational states, and so will not be considered further.
The psychology of motivation has not been studied as extensively as that of mood, and
researchers take rather different approaches to the topic. Thus it is not possible to follow the
approach of the previous section and outline theories which come to the same broad conclusion
about the number and nature of human motives, their origins and measurement issues. This
is because the concept of motivation is bound up with ‘attitude strength’ and ‘interest strength’;
we can try to measure whether a person has a positive, neutral or negative attitude towards
(say) playing sport, and use this as a measure of the strength of their motivation.
My main concerns with this approach are that:
l Attitudes may well not be states, but resemble traits. Indeed, we argued in Chapter 10 that
attitudes such as authoritarianism are stable over time, and should be regarded as narrow
personality traits. If attitudes are personality traits, then they should presumably be
correlated with other traits (to make sure they are not measuring the same things) and their
origins explored in much the same ways as described in Chapters 6, 9, 10 and 11. However
most attitude research is conducted by social psychologists who tend to assume that the
strength of an attitude is a state.
l The number of attitudes is near-infnite. Rather than attitude to sport, we could look at
‘attitudes to watching televised soccer at weekends’, ‘attitudes to playing golf’, ‘attitudes
to shooting animals’ or attitudes to a myriad other sports-related activities.
l Does it make sense to combine attitudes and ask about ‘interest in sport’ when different
people mean different things by the word ‘sport’, and no distinction is made between
watching, doing or competing?
l There is a risk of circularity. We infer that someone has a positive attitude towards sport on
the basis of their answers to a questionnaire. We then may be tempted to say that the reason
that someone plays sport is because they have a positive attitude towards it . . . I would
argue that using terms such as ‘attitude’ or ‘interest’ without demonstrating that the concept
is broader than the means used to measure it is nonsensical. This is why we spent so much
time discussing whether personality and ability traits are related to other variables (such as
the way in which we are brought up by our parents, or the electrical activity in our brains).
l Are we always consciously aware of our motives? If not, measuring motivation by using
attitude scales may be simplistic.
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At its simplest, this approach suggests that our attitudes to various people, objects,
activities or behaviours determine whether we approach, are indifferent to or avoid them.
For example, if we want to try to measure the extent to which children are engaged with
some aspect of education, all we need to do is write some items to measure this (as described
in Chapter 20), perform factor analyses, validate the factors and voilà – we have a test which
appears to measure one or more aspects of engagement with education. Silverman and
Suhramaniam’s (1999) review lists several such scales, with example items.2 However it has
become apparent that relating attitudes to either behaviour or intention does not generally
result in powerful levels of prediction; factors other than attitudes might also play a part in
infuencing our motive (intention) to do something. For example, we probably all know
people who smoke, who admit that smoking is a flthy habit, but who are unable to quit.
Hence the theories discussed below do more than just measure attitudes; they combine
information about attitudes with other information in order to better predict behaviour.
This is important because much motivation research is performed by applied and social
psychologists who are interested in attitudes to important topics such as health, exercise,
school, work and suchlike. Social psychologists have studied how such attitudes form and
may be changed (e.g., Olson and Zanna, 1993) but a discussion of attitude change is beyond
the remit of this book.
Thus far I have outlined the problems with motivation research as it is usually conducted
without suggesting what an alternative could look like. We know that motivation often should
behave like a state. Hunger motivates us to eat; after our hunger is satisfed we will not be
interested in food for a few hours. Likewise after doing our duty and visiting lonely (but
boring) relatives for an afternoon, our conscience will be salved and we are unlikely to rush
back the following day. According to this view, our motivational states vary from hour to
hour and day to day; some of the questions which need to be answered are:
l How many distinct motivational states are there?

l What determines the strength of each state at a particular time?
l Do various motivational states combine and interact to direct our behaviour?
l How can we measure the strengths of each person’s motivational state at a particular time?
l Are individuals’ levels of motivational states reliably linked to other variables – life-experiences,
physiological changes, etc.?
Because there is so little agreement about what is meant by ‘motivation’ and the best way
to measure it, I consider fve rather different theories below.
Grit
Grit (Duckworth et al., 2007) is the term used to explain why some people accomplish
more than others of equal intelligence and abilities. It views motivation as a kind of
personality trait which affects the level of performance in every area of a person’s life –
although most research in the area has focused on job-success. They defne Grit as
‘perseverance and passion for long-term goals’, overcoming setbacks, boredom and
disappointments in the process. Duckworth et al. argue that Grit differs from the personality
trait of Conscientiousness in that it focuses ‘on long term stamina rather than short term
intensity’, although it is not clear why they feel that the trait of Conscientiousness implies
anything short term.
Their samples were large, and so even small effects were statistically signifcant. Grit
correlated between 0.64 to 0.77 with Conscientiousness in these studies. If the scales were
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perfectly reliable these correlations would be even higher (approx. 0.8 to 0.95), which casts
doubt on the authors’ claim that Grit is much different to Conscientiousness (it lacks
divergent validity).
Their Grit scale contains items which focus on consistency of interests (keeping focused on
a project rather than switching to something else) and perseverance of effort/hard work. Grit
scores were higher the more education the (American) sample had received, and the variation
in Grit scores was lower amongst the better-educated, which is certainly consistent with the
idea that only those with higher Grit can cope with advanced study. Surprisingly, perhaps,
Grit was better than Conscientiousness at predicting who would drop out of an intense
military training course (West Point) although the amount of variance explained by Grit was
tiny – just 3.9% in one study, and 1.4% in another.
Since then, Grit has become something of a growth industry, the Duckworth paper having
been cited over 1000 times. Most of these studies are applied, relating Grit scores to variables
such as educational attainment, personnel retention, sporting attainment and even whether
one remains married. However as few of these studies control for Conscientiousness, it is not
obvious whether Grit adds much to our understanding of motivation. It invariably shows very
large correlations with Conscientiousness, and whilst it does sometimes seem to make a
statistically signifcant contribution (because of large sample sizes) effect sizes are usually small
(e.g., Eskreis-Winkler et al., 2014).
The theory of planned behaviour

Ajzen’s (1987) theory of planned behaviour suggests that our intention to do something is
infuenced by our attitude towards it, social pressures to do (or not do) it – the ‘subjective
norm’ – and the apparent ease or diffculty of doing it (perceived behavioural control, also
known as feasibility or self-effcacy). Whether or not we actually do what we intend is another
matter, and so these variables generally infuence intentions – not the behaviour itself. The
exception is perceived behavioural control/feasibility/self-effcacy); Ajzen suggests that this
can infuence behaviour directly if (and only if) there is some agreement between the perception
of the ease of reaching by behavioural goal and the actual ease of doing so. If you think that
you can get a job as an astronaut (when you realistically cannot), or if you think that you
cannot get a good grade for your next assignment (when you actually can) then perceived
behavioural control will not infuence your behaviour directly.
For example, I might see that losing weight is good for my health, and so have a positive
attitude towards doing so. ‘Fat shaming’ stories in the press, which make me think that society
values thinner people, support this course of action, and I strongly believe that I can lose
weight if I modify my diet. All of these things infuence my intention to lose weight; whether
this translates into behaviour depends on other things, too – for example, whether my partner
also wants to shed some weight, whether I can afford to eat the expensive foods recommended
by a dietician and whether I have time to cook.
This approach treats motivation (the intention to do something, which then leads to some
behaviour) as a process, which depends on people’s attitudes, their expectation of success and
social pressures. Ultimately performance is thought to be determined by a person’s motivation
(their level of intention) and their belief that they can do it (perceived behavioural control).
It is possible to test models such as these, and Ajzen’s (2011) review suggests that combining
attitudes and beliefs in this way is successful. However as this model is based mainly on
attitudes and perception (of social norms and self-effcacy) rather than attempts to measure
them, it is generally studied by social psychologists rather than those with an interest in
individual differences.
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Figure 16.4 Ajzen’s model of motivation
For those of us with an interest in individual differences, this approach raises some
interesting issues. How many attitudes can people have? How broad or how specifc should
they be? For example, should we measure ‘attitudes to immigration’ or ‘attitudes to
unemployed Australians living in the country illegally and intending to work here’? It looks
as if the number of attitudes which can be measured is near-infnite and this approach seems
rather strange to those of us who have been focused on trying to understand the structure of
individual differences. Second, the method of developing questionnaires to measure attitudes
is much the same as the methods used to measure personality traits. So how can one ever be
sure that an ‘attitude measurement’ is not exactly the same as a personality trait?
At frst glance self-determination theory does seem to be useful in predicting behaviour,
such as probability of dropping out of high school (e.g., Hardre and Reeve, 2003). However
careful reading of this much-cited paper shows that it only relates motivational variables to
the intention to drop out of school; Vallerand (1997) shows that this intention is only weakly
linked to actual behaviour (the path coeffcient being 0.24, for those who are interested in
such things). That said, the theory is widely used, and the models which it produces are at
least testable; it is possible to estimate the size of each of the effects depicted by lines and
curves in Figure 16.4, and determine whether the model fts the data in a cross-sectional study.
It is particularly popular as a means for predicting health behaviour (e.g., Cooke et al., 2016)
although it has also been found that interventions which change attitudes, subjective norms
or perceived behavioural control do not always result in changes of behaviour. The model
sometimes does not predict how behaviour changes in a longitudinal model, leading Sniehotta
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et al. (2014) to conclude that ‘The

longer we delay the retirement of
the TPB, the longer we put off the
discovery of a better explanation
of health behaviour change’.
Self-determination
theory
More complex models of
motivation have also been
developed by social psychologists
(e.g., Vallerand, 1997). Vallerand’s
model includes a widely used
distinction between intrinsic and
extrinsic forms of motivation (Deci
and Ryan, 1985). Some activities
are an end in themselves –
eating when one is hungry, and sex
for example. They are performed
solely because they feel good. Other activities are a means to an end. You might be reading
this chapter because of the pure pleasure it gives you, but it is more likely that you do so in
order to get a good grade in some assignment, which itself will help you get a good degree,
earn a good salary, enhance your self-esteem, please your family and so on.
Being motivated to do something because it is associated with some longer-term reward,
or to avoid punishment, is extrinsic motivation. Social psychologists have studied situational
and social variables which infuence these forms of motivation.
Self-determination theory takes this one step further. It argues that there is a continuum
ranging from self-determined behaviour to non-self-determined behaviour. Self-determined
behaviour implies intrinsic motivation – doing something because one wants to. Extrinsic
behaviour is somewhere in the middle. It involves doing things in order to achieve various
rewards (or avoid punishments) set by others or oneself (e.g., handing in coursework on time
to avoid a penalty, or meeting an exercise goal one has set oneself). One is in charge, but
performing some activity to meet goals set by oneself or others. At the other extreme is
‘amotivation’ where one does things without seeing that they lead to any obvious reward or
punishment – rather like ‘learned helplessness’. Ryan and Deci (2000) outline this theory in
more detail.
Vallerand (1997) further suggests that the three main types of motivation (intrinsic,
extrinsic and amotivation) can be observed at global (and stable), contextual and situational
levels. At the global level, motivation is rather like personality – a tendency to do things either
for pleasure or because they lead to some goal. At the next level of generality (‘contextual’)
one looks at a particular domain of activities – for example work, or relationships – and
examines intrinsic, extrinsic and amotivation here; this allows for the possibility that a person
can be intrinsically motivated in one area of their life, but extrinsically motivated in others.
Finally the situational level of motivation tries to understand why a person does something
at this particular moment. This is the ‘state motivation’ to which we referred at the start of
this chapter.
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These theories are complex, and it is not entirely obvious how they can be tested (or
disproved); there is also the problem that they may categorise the ways in which people
behave, without necessarily explaining the underlying processes. For example, people do
things in order to try to reach some goal that they set themselves. This would be described as
‘introjected regulation’ which is one form of extrinsic motivation. There is a temptation to
then use ‘introjected regulation’ to try to explain why people act in a certain way, which seems
to be circular.
Questionnaires have been devised to measure motivation at the global, contextual and
situational levels. For example, Guay et al. (2003) developed a questionnaire to measure
various aspects of global motivation. It suggests that there are three forms of intrinsic
motivation: doing things because they feel pleasant (e.g., ‘In general, I do things in order to
feel pleasant emotions’), because of the pleasure of accomplishing something (e.g., ‘. . . for
the pleasure I feel mastering what I am doing’) and to gain knowledge (e.g., ‘. . . for the
pleasure of acquiring new knowledge’). In addition, it measures three aspects of extrinsic
motivation: external regulation (‘. . . because I do not want to disappoint certain people’),
identifed (‘. . . in order to help myself become the person I aim to be’) and introjected
(‘. . . because I would beat myself up for not doing them’) as well as an amotivational scale
(‘. . . although I do not see the beneft in what I am doing’).
Several contextual-level scales have also been developed to assess motivation in a particular
area (e.g., the Sports Motivation Scale of Pelletier et al., 1995). This uses the same basic
structure and asks why people practise their sport, rating answers such as ‘for the pleasure
I feel in living exciting experiences’, ‘because I feel a lot of personal satisfaction while mastering
certain diffcult training techniques’ and so on.
Finally the Situational Motivational Scale (Guay et al., 2000) is widely used to try to assess
why people behave in the ways that they do; it asks ‘why are you currently engaged in this
activity’ and consists of items such as ‘because this activity is fun’, ‘because I think that this
activity is good for me’ and so on.
This theory thus allows for the measurement of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation
and amotivation at the three levels of generality, which no doubt explains its popularity in a
wide range of contexts – once again, particularly in applied psychology such as workplace
motivation, sports psychology and health psychology.
There seem to be several problems with this approach.
l It is not immediately obvious where these three forms of intrinsic motivation came from,
or whether they cover the whole gamut of motives.
l Merely naming something does not really mean that we understand it. It is rather like
inferring the presence of some characteristic (e.g., ‘introjected regulation’) by observing
behaviour, then trying to explain the behaviour by using the characteristic. We have been
careful to ensure that personality traits are broader than the tools used to measure them;
the same may not be true here.
l The items in these scales certainly look like bloated specifcs; they are extremely similar in
meaning, and are thus bound to form reliable scales but need not be source states.
l It assumes that a person can stand back and accurately appraise why they behave in the
ways in which they do, which may be a particular problem with the ‘general’ level of
motivation.
l It assumes that we are consciously aware of the true motives for our actions, and are able
to articulate them.
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l It assumes that there is such a thing as ‘general motivation’. There may not be. Some or all
of us may behave intrinsically in some contexts and extrinsically in others, so it may make
no sense for some or all of us to consider our average, which is what ‘general motivation’
essentially is. Someone with an ‘average’ level of general motivation could have an average
level of all contextual motivations . . . or some which are very high and others which are
very low. They are surely very different people!
l Whilst psychologists studying personality and ability inferred the presence of a general trait
through empirical analyses, which shows that a general trait refects real individual
differences in behaviour or abilities, Vallerand’s model appears not to be based on hard
data.
As a psychologist with an interest in individual differences, the questions which interest

me are:
l What are the main motivational goals? How many different types of activities are performed
solely for pleasure, and, in the case of extrinsic motivation, what are the ultimate goals
that people seem keen to reach?
l Do people differ in their strength to which these ‘ultimate’ goals infuence behaviour? Are
some people propelled by their sex drive, for example, whilst religion motivates others? If
so, what causes this?
l How can we measure how important each of these goals is for a particular person in a
particular situation at a particular time?
To address these issues I next consider a neglected old theory put forward by Cattell.
Cattell’s theory of motivation

Cattell’s contribution is heavy on theory (and neologisms!) but somewhat disappointing when
it comes to practical assessment issues – and in this respect resembles his contribution to
personality theory discussed in Chapter 6. He argues that two basic issues need to be addressed
(Cattell, 1982; Cattell and Child, 1975; Cattell and Kline, 1977):
l It is possible that our degree of interest in an object or activity may manifest itself in many
ways, and so it is unwise to focus on attitude or interest questionnaires (‘how much do you
enjoy good food and wine’) to measure motivation. He argues that we may not always be
consciously aware of our motives which might reveal themselves by slips of the tongue,
behaving irrationally, misperceptions such as misreading signs so as to ‘see’ the name of an
object or person of interest or mistaking a stranger for someone who is known to us. Simple
questionnaires may not be able to tap all aspects of interest strength.
l Each of these areas of interest can fulfl several basic needs for an individual. For example,
playing football might provide an individual with company, an opportunity to behave
aggressively (pugnaciously), as well as the intrinsic (physiological) pleasure afforded by the
exercise. Motivation research should identify these basic human needs.
First, it is necessary to be able to identify (and measure) precisely what we mean by ‘interest
strength’ and then to look at the specifc goals that are achieved and moods that are
experienced, through following these interests. Cattell is particularly critical of the narrow
view of attitudes taken by social psychologists. First, he suggests that ‘motivation’
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questionnaires actually tap stable personality traits rather than motivational states, and there
is certainly good evidence that scores on some ‘interest questionnaires’ correlate appreciably
with personality and ability traits (Ackerman and Heggestad, 1997). Second, he argues that
people may simply be unaware of their true feelings and behaviour, which will make self-
reports of dubious value.
Cattell and Kline (1977) describe 68 different ways of assessing strength of interest.
Suppose we wanted to fnd out how religious someone usually was. We could try measuring
the following:
l self-reports of how important religion is to them

l reading preference (percentage of religious books on their bookshelf)
l inability to see faults (e.g., being unable to list many disadvantages of the chosen form of
religion)
l various physiological changes (e.g., increase in heart rate when shown a relevant religious
symbol)
l proportion of time and money spent in religion-related activity
l knowledge of religious facts (which is, of course, also likely to be infuenced by general
knowledge which will need to be controlled for statistically)
l better memory for religion-related than for non-religious material in a laboratory-based
test of memory; this might indicate deeper processing
l a belief that religion-related activities are in some way better than other activities (e.g., ‘it is
better to spend a spare 10 minutes praying rather than talking to one’s partner’) and so on.
Suppose that we ask a large group of individuals to identify some issues or activities in
which people are likely to have varying degrees of interest (e.g., their job, playing soccer, their
religion, abortion, socialism and gastronomy) and we assess the strength of interest in each
of these using some or all of Cattell’s 68 techniques – the interest measures. Do all of these
interest measures rise and fall together for each activity, or are there several distinct ways in
which ‘strength of interest’ can show itself? Cattell (1957) reported just such a study. He found
that, when the correlations between these various interest measures were factor analysed, not
one but seven factors emerged. This is important, for it suggests that measuring strength of
interest by one method alone (e.g., by questionnaire) is likely to be inadequate, since strength
of interest itself has several quite distinct aspects.
Alpha is the term Cattell gave to the component that refects conscious wishes, including
those that are illogical. Buying a dress despite the fact that you know that you cannot afford
it is a good example of the alpha component of your interest in clothes. Beta refects conscious,
rational preferences, of the type that will be expressed when responding to questionnaires that
ask how much one likes or dislikes certain objects or activities. Buying a computer because
you know that it is useful for your studies is an example of beta-type motivation. The third
factor, gamma, is a form of motivation that arises because the individual feels that he or she
ought to take an interest in something. Someone might feel pressured into listening to a
particular piece of music or experimenting with drugs because they feel that this is the kind
of behaviour that is expected of their peer group, rather than because they want to. Delta is
a purely physiological response to certain stimuli that (interestingly) appears to be quite
distinct from the other aspects of interest – it seems that certain sights and sounds can lead
directly to changes in activity of the autonomic nervous system. The nature of the remaining
three factors is not well understood, and this research does not seem to have been replicated;
it should be.
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a. (i) A man’s pulse races when he sees his next door neighbour. (ii) When
walking down the street he misreads a shop sign, thinking it shows the
neighbour’s name. When asked about the neighbour, he (iii) describes
them as ‘just a neighbour’ and (iv) says that he feels that it would be
wrong to feel any emotional attraction. Try to categorise this man as
having low or high scores on components alpha to delta.
b. Cattell claims that there is more than one factor of attitude strength,
although this fnding needs to be replicated. If it were to be replicated
successfully, what would its implications be for social psychology?
Cattell (1950) gave a 24-item attitude questionnaire to a sample of people. These 24 items
were thought to measure 12 different ergs (basic biological drives) identifed in the work of
McDougall and others – and they did so. Some others were added later, as shown in Table 16.3.
Cattell believed that these ergs represented the main motivational infuences found in people,
although clearly some people will be more motivated by some of these variables than others.
‘They are the main sources of human reactivity and energy, in that they determine us to
attend to certain objects and fnd them emotionally interesting’(Cattell, 1992). He found that
the same ergs and sentiments (socially determined drives – e.g., protecting one’s family) arose
when performing longitudinal studies of individuals, using ‘P-technique’ as described in the
study of moods, above (Cattell and Cross, 1952) which suggests that this list of ergs describe
what motivates an individual, as well as ‘people in general’. These ergs may correspond to
areas of intrinsic motivation discussed above, although no one seems to have tested this, or
expanded Vallerand’s theory to include more than three types of intrinsic motivation.
Although they emerged as expected from a factor analysis of attitude items, there does not
seem to have been any attempt to ensure that they represent all possible sources of motivation;
there has been no attempt to develop a ‘personality sphere’ for ergs, for example, although
this would be a straightforward (if boring) exercise.
There are other possibilities, too. If people are asked to give as many answers as possible
to describe why they are performing a number of different activities (e.g. ‘why are you reading
this book?’) they will presumably answer ‘to pass my exams’, ‘so that I don’t look a fool in
next week’s tutorial’, ‘because it interests me’ or something similar. The process can then be
repeated (why is it important to pass one’s examinations or not to appear stupid in class?)
time and time again until, eventually, the explanation cannot be taken any further. Eventually,
something just is motivating. However as far as I am aware, no one has done so.
Sentiments are bundles of attitudes which are socially determined (and so are likely to vary
in strength from culture to culture), and which are linked to both ergs and attitudes. They
represent things which are may be important to us – our home, self, family, parents, religion,
hobbies, etc. – and Cattell has proposed studying the linkages between attitudes (conscious
and unconscious), sentiments and ergs in what he calls the ‘dynamic lattice’. This will be
different for each person, and will show how each sentiment is linked to a number of ergs;
the hobby of playing sport (the sentiment) may fulfl the need for pugnacity and gregariousness,
for example. Various attitudes will also be linked to the sentiments and/or ergs. For example
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the attitude ‘I enjoy same-sex company’ might infuence the importance of the sporting
sentiment for an individual. So too will ‘I want to live a healthy life’.
Likewise if a person is found to have a strong alpha, beta, gamma and delta interest in
vintage cars (thus indicating that cars are probably really rather important to them at a
number of levels) it seems reasonable to ask what needs are met by this interest. Perhaps the
local vintage car club provides company. The person may possibly like to bask in the interest
awakened in onlookers when he or she drives around in it. The car may be seen as a fnancial
investment, or perhaps the real reason is the pleasure inherent in fxing it when it breaks down –
having to manufacture parts from scratch. If psychologists can discover the ultimate reasons
underlying such interests, they may claim to have understood motivation.
Cattell has developed adult and children’s versions of a test, known as the Motivation
Analysis Test, which claims to measure the strength of the main ergs and sentiments (Cattell
et al., 1970). Unfortunately, however, the adult version simply does not seem to form the
factors that Cattell claims (Cooper and Kline, 1982).
Although it is horribly complex and diffcult to test, it seems that Cattell’s approach has two
good points. It tries to identify empirically the main areas which might motivate people – the
ergs and sentiments in Table 16.3 – rather than just assuming that there are three types of
intrinsic motivation. It also suggests that we should be creative when trying to measure strength
of interest, rather than just relying on self-report questionnaires. However this work needs to
be replicated, and an effective test developed to measure these motivational states.
Table 16.3 Some ergs and sentiments from Cattell’s theory of motivation
(Cattell, 1950) *=in Cattell and Kline (1977) but not Cattell
(1950)
Ergs Sentiments
Self-assertion (mastery, display) Parents

Mating (sex) Home (husband/wife/partner/children)
Escape (fear) Profession (career)
Pugnacity (anger, aggression) Money (salary, etc.)
Food seeking (hunger/thirst) Self
Parental protectiveness (tender emotion) Religion
Gregariousness (avoiding loneliness) Country (patriotism)
Sleep Political party
Curiosity (wonder) University (if attended)
Appeal (despair, dependence) Aesthetic interests
Self-submission (dislike of assertive action; Sport and ftness
falling back on ethical principles, etc.)
Play (fantasy, regression) Technical interests (cars, computers, etc.)
Narcissism* (self-indulgence) Superego* (sense of duty)
Exploration* (ideas, news, etc.)
371
Apter’s theory of motivation

Michael Apter (1982) set out a novel theory of human functioning, some of which is relevant
to the psychology of motivation. He argued that our subjective experience of an activity can
change both qualitatively and quickly. For example, the act of cooking dinner can begin as a
mundane chore but turn into something much more exciting as one struggles to produce
something creative from the contents of the larder; the task may be objectively the same (an
observer would just notice us preparing dinner) but our experience of it may alter radically.
Like Vallerand, he argues that some activities are intrinsically satisfying whilst others are
performed as a means to some other end (e.g., someone enduring an awful job because the
pay allows them to indulge their hobbies). Apter et al. (1998) suggest that we tend to approach
tasks in fve ways, as shown in Table 16.4.
The fve ‘metamotivational states’ shown in Table 16.4 are not dimensions like traits.
Instead, Apter suggests that we fip from one extreme to the other: our experience of a task
is either that it is intrinsically rewarding and fun (paratelic) or that it is something that has to
be done to satisfy some long-term objective (telic), that it is either to be performed according
to certain rules or with creativity, that we are dominant or supportive when performing it and
we focus on our own or others’ needs. When performing any task we are at one extreme or
the other of these fve states; here are no half-measures.
Telic behaviour is associated with trying to achieve some long-term goal or fulflling a
biological need (for example, studying to pass an exam, earning money to buy food or pay
one’s credit card bill): if this telic behaviour were not performed it is likely to make us feel
anxious or over-aroused, so when in telic mode we try to reduce our level of arousal. Paratelic
behaviour is something that is performed because it is intrinsically enjoyable (cf. the intrinsic/
extrinsic distinction of self-determination theory). In paratelic mode, we may seek out
Table 16.4 Ways in which we approach tasks according to Apter’s theory

of motivation
Pole 1 Pole 2
Name Description Name Description
1 Telic Serious Paratelic Fun

Goal directed Spontaneous
Intrinsically rewarding
2 Conformist Rule base Challenging Exploratory
Focuses on obligations Free
Non-conforming
3 Autic mastery Dominance Autic sympathy Need to be attractive,
Control of people or sympathised with and
events popular
4 Alloic mastery Need to join powerful Alloic sympathy Need to nurture and
teams or organisations support others
to beneft oneself Beneft others
5 Tranquil Need for peace and Arousal seeking Need to experience
removal of problems excitement
372
stimulation (excitement: e.g., risky sports, stimulating conversation) in an attempt to increase

our levels of arousal. So, according to this theory, whether we try to increase or reduce our
level of arousal depends crucially on whether we are currently operating in the telic or paratelic
mode.
Questionnaires such as the Motivational Style Profle (Apter et al., 1998) and the Telic/
Paratelic State Instrument (O’Connell and Calhoun, 2001) have been devised to assess the
proportion of time an individual spends in each of the fve modes (e.g., telic vs paratelic) and
to measure whether an individual is currently in a telic or paratelic state. The latter 16-item
questionnaire is probably just a bloated specifc, with items such as ‘feeling playful/feeling
serious minded’, ‘feeling playful/feeling serious’, ‘just having fun/trying to accomplish
something’.
But is the theory correct? More fundamentally, is it possible to show that it is incorrect?
Finding that bungee jumpers function in paratelic mode while people completing their tax
returns operate in telic mode would probably be regarded as evidence for the theory by most
researchers. But how could it be otherwise? If someone chooses to take part in an activity for
no reason other than its pleasurable sensation, then how can they possibly be in telic mode?
Who could possibly go through the nausea of balancing their books in paratelic mode, given
that they are forced to do so on penalty of paying a fne? So I am not at all sure whether this
sort of evidence tells us anything useful. Neither does the study of physiological correlates.
Svebak and Murgatroyd (1985) and others have shown telic dominance to be refected in
physiological indices (muscle tension, skin conductance, depth of breathing) when people play
a racing-car simulation game. However as telic dominance correlates −0.55 with Extraversion
(and −0.41 with Neuroticism) according to Apter et al. (1998) it is not entirely clear whether
the best researched aspect of Apter’s theory is any more than a mixture of these two personality
traits. In addition, as the theory is not explicitly tied to a physiological model, this fnding is
just an interesting correlate – perhaps not support for any causal model leading from
physiology to behaviour.
Second, the theory talks about broad classes of motivation (hence ‘metamotivational
states’) rather than anything as specifc as ergs or sentiments. For example, it argues that
focusing on obligations/rules is one kind of motivational state while thinking creatively is
another. But how does this translate into behaviour? What kinds of rule do people typically
focus on? What kinds of creative activity do they follow? It seems to me that the theory is
more a way of rationalising what people do into some theoretical framework than a technique
for the prediction of behaviour.
Third, are the fve metamotivational states genuinely types rather than traits? Is a person
either totally controlling or totally needing sympathy? There are sophisticated statistical
techniques that can be used to test hypotheses such as these, but they appear not to have been
applied to reversal theory.
Fourth, it is surely necessary to understand not just the average amount of time that a
person spends in which state of each of the fve metamotivational components, but what
causes them to fip. Otherwise, the danger is that the theory can ‘explain’ any behaviour
performed by anyone at any time. I certainly have reservations about the theory.
Summary
This chapter has explored the nature and assessment of the major ‘states’ – moods and
motives. I have suggested that there are four major faws in the common practice of constructing
mood scales in much the same way as personality scales are developed – because they may
373
just measure personality traits – and that Cattell’s alternative methodologies are much to be
preferred, even though the mood scale created by this technique (the Eight State Questionnaire)
does not appear to work. Finally, we have considered the topic of motivation, about which
relatively little is known. Several theorists regard motivation as a trait, without relating scores
on their ‘motivation’ questionnaires to the well-known personality traits; this seems to me to
be dangerous. Five theories have been outlined, each of which seems to have its own set of
problems. It is an area which merits greater attention, and I suggest that there is plenty of
scope for research into expanding and replicating Cattell’s work.

None of the mood papers cited in the text are particularly challenging. In addition, Michael
Eysenck (2014) provides a lucid description of his cognitive theory about the origins of
anxiety, its relationship to personality and psychiatric disorder. Leander et al. (2009) similarly
examine some of the origins of mood.
Apart from Apter’s work, and the coverage of Vallerand’s and Ajzen’s work in social
psychology texts it is diffcult to recommend any texts on the psychology of motivation, as
Cattell’s last book on the subject (Cattell and Child, 1975) is both ancient and diffcult to read
and the measurement issues (discussed in Chapter 19) need to be frmly grasped. Paul Barrett
(1997) argues that ‘somewhere along the line psychometricians seem to have forgotten about
motivation’, a point with which I wholeheartedly agree.
SAQ 16.1
a. To ensure that a scale measures a state rather than a trait.
b. Compile a questionnaire consisting of a broad range of mood items (but
without synonyms). Ask a single person to complete this questionnaire
on a very large number of occasions (ideally more than 100) while
performing a number of different activities. Correlate the responses to
the individual items and factor analyse them in order to determine
whether any particular groups of items tend to rise and fall together.
SAQ 16.2
a. Their average level of mood should resemble their level of the
corresponding trait; in this example, if a person has an unusually high
level of Negative Affect, one would also expect them to have high scores
of trait Anxiety or trait Neuroticism.
b. Their mood variability – the extent to which their moods vary either side
of their average.
c. Whether or not their moods swing rapidly from low to high
374
d. Because some of the differences will be positive and some will be

negative
e. Whether their mood on one occasion can be predicted from their mood
on the previous occasion, or whether it is random.
Fourier analysis can, in principle, indicate whether people have regular cycles
of mood. However it requires rather a lot of data to be gathered at equal
time-intervals, and because of the need to sleep this would probably involve
measuring mood every 8 or 12 hours for several weeks.
SAQ 16.3
a. High delta, high alpha, low beta, low gamma.
b. It means that simply asking people about their attitudes is not suffcient,
as individuals may not even be aware of all of their attitudes. Thus,
theories (e.g. attribution theory) that are based on simple self-report
measures of attitudes may have severe limitations.
Notes
1 Or next-but one . . . or next-but-two . . .
2 This can be downloaded from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235913925_Student_
Attitude_Toward_Physical_Education_and_Physical_Activity_A_Review_of_Measurement_
Issues_and_Outcomes
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Chapter 17
Applications in health, clinical,

counselling and forensic
psychology
Introduction
One of the delights of working with individual differences is its applicability. Most if not all
branches of applied psychology seem to need to measure individual differences for one reason
or another and so this overview is necessarily selective: covering the whole of each area in
depth would require another book. This chapter and Chapter 18 are complementary, although
this chapter tends to focus more on understanding individuals (‘how can I tell if this person
is ft to stand trial’) whilst Chapter 18 tends to explore more general trends (‘what characteristics
should I look for if I want to employ someone who will move between several different roles
in my organisation’).
Learning outcomes
l Outline how personality theories can inform clinical and counselling
psychology, and suggest therapeutic interventions.
l Show familiarity with the issues and challenges of forensic psychology.
l Discuss some applications of personality theory in health psychology.
Clinical and counselling psychology

Two of the theories of personality discussed in Chapter 2 are tied to methods of therapy, and
these are considered below – although there are many other methods and schools of
381
Applications in clinical and related areas
psychotherapy discussed in Boswell et al. (2014) and elsewhere. There are also plenty of other
clinical issues which could have been mentioned in a chapter such as this (e.g., addictions and
personality disorders) but which have not been included as this book focuses on individual
differences in the general population. Barlow (2008) is one of many books which give an
excellent introduction to clinical psychology. Here we focus on the application of personality
theory to clinical psychology.
Psychological tests have been developed using the principles outlined in Chapter 20 to
measure a number of traits of clinical interest. The State Trait Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger,
1983) and the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, 1996) are widely used for research purposes,
as is the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (Zigmond and Snaith, 1983) – although
professional judgement needs to be used to determine whether a person is clinically depressed
or anxious according to the criteria laid out by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or
something similar.
Personality and clinical mood disorders

We have already discussed the relationship between Schizotypy and schizophrenia
(Chapter 10) and considered the possibility that the processes which underly them are broadly
similar; schizotypal behaviour seems to be a milder form of schizophrenia, rather than
something qualitatively different which has entirely different origins and mechanisms. Is the
same true of affective disorders, such as anxiety or depression? Are these just an unusually
severe form of Neuroticism (in which case the mechanisms described in Chapter 11 will apply)
or are they qualitatively different?
General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and clinical depression are frequently diagnosed
together in patients, and despite some earlier claims it does not seem to be the case that
anxiety gradually develops into clinical depression, or vice versa (Mofftt et al., 2007). They
often just seem to occur together, with no obvious causal link between them; about two-
thirds of the patients who are given a clinical diagnosis of GAD are also diagnosed with
clinical depression (Lamers et al., 2011). Someone who constantly worries about the effects
of global warming (GAD) or who feels that they will never fnd a partner will also tend to
feel depression.
We know from Chapters 6 and 16 that questionnaire items measuring anxious and
depressed mood measure a single trait (Neuroticism) or state (Negative Affect). However the
underlying biological mechanisms of anxiety and depression in clinical patients are different
(Rief et al., 2010) and consequently some drugs which treat GAD have little effect on clinical
depression, and vice versa, although some affect both. How can these apparent anomalies be
explained?
The consensus view seems to be that anxiety and depression (plus somatic disorders) are
distinct, but all are infuenced by a higher-order factor called ‘general distress’ or something
similar (Burton et al., 2015), which seems to closely resemble Neuroticism. Their genetically
informed model can also explain sex-differences in depression, and could explain why some
drugs are specifc to either anxiety or GAD whilst others infuence both (the general factor).
It all depends which of the variables in Figure 17.1 they infuence. A description of the
biological pathways associated with anxiety, depression and the general factor together with
the mechanisms by which anti-anxiety and antidepressant drugs are thought to operate is
beyond the scope of this book, however.
382
Figure 17.1 Hierarchical model showing that general anxiety disorder and
clinical depression are distinct entities, each of which may be
infuenced by Neuroticism (‘clinical distress’)

How might you discover whether the processes which cause some ‘normal’
people to feel more anxious than others are also responsible for Generalised
Anxiety Disorder (GAD) – a severe psychological condition? In other words,
how might you tell whether GAD is qualitatively different from the type of
anxiety which we all sometimes feel?
The personality trait of Neuroticism measures a mixture of anxiety and depressive

symptoms in clinical groups as well as population samples (Weinstock and Whisman, 2006).
Given that feelings of depressed mood in non-clinical groups seem to have much the same
neural and physiological basis as depressive illness (Kumar et al., 1998) it is interesting to
discover whether levels of Neuroticism are linked to individual differences in brain structure
383
which are known to be associated with major depression. They are. Neuroticism scores are
linked to damage to bundles of axons connecting the temporal lobe and pre-frontal cortex
(McIntosh et al., 2013). These authors found that Neuroticism (and low Extraversion) were
related to this ‘white-matter integrity’, and that these personality factors signifcantly
mediated the link between depressive symptoms and white-matter integrity. However
although they were statistically signifcant because of the large sample size (668) the effects
were small.
Levels of Neuroticism are also high in people diagnosed with anxiety disorders (Weinstock
and Whisman, 2006). Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) has appreciable heritability (>0.3)
and twin studies (multivariate genetic analyses) show that the genes which predispose someone
to GAD are virtually identical to those genes which infuence Neuroticism; GAD and
Neuroticism have a common genetic basis (Hettema et al., 2004). This study also showed that
environmental factors which infuence Neuroticism do not greatly resemble those which
infuence GAD. Thus environmental factors explain why some individuals with a predisposition
to developing high Neuroticism go on to develop GAD.
The role of trait-EI in mood disorder

One might expect trait Emotional Intelligence (trait-EI) to have its largest correlations with
variables such as life satisfaction, depression and other emotion-related criteria – and this is
what has been found. Austin et al. (2005) summarise the earlier work in this area, and also
demonstrate that the Bar-On and Schutte measures of trait-EI correlate with variables tapping
health and happiness, such as the size of one’s social network and satisfaction with life. Some
other statistically signifcant relationships were also found, but these were small. Petrides
et al. (2007) performed three studies to determine whether the Bar-On measure and the
TEIQue correlated with variables such as depression, the tendency to ruminate (think a lot
about how unhappy one is), life satisfaction, various measures of coping, and measures of
psychotic and neurotic tendency derived from a semi-structured interview. The results were
consistent. Even after allowing for the infuence of the Big Five personality traits, high levels
of trait-EI were associated with low rumination, high satisfaction with life, and a rational
coping style. Low levels of trait-EI were associated with feelings of depression, rumination,
maladaptive coping styles, psychosis and neurosis. The measures of trait-EI behaved almost
exactly as they were expected to, and it is clear that if one wants to understand and/or predict
psychological wellbeing, it is necessary to consider people’s scores on trait-EI as well as their
scores on the Big Five personality traits. A later meta-analysis (Martins et al., 2010) confrms
that there are substantial links between trait-EI and mental health, although without
controlling for the Big Five factors.
Stress, coping and personality

There is a substantial literature relating stress and coping to various health outcomes; the
model adopted by Lazarus (1991) suggests that people use different coping strategies to deal
with stress. Coping methods are things that an individual does when they feel stressed to try
to reduce their stress levels, either by changing the situation or by changing their reaction to
it. For example, the impact of fnancial worries can be reduced by fnding ways to economise
or earn more (problem-focused coping), or by telling oneself how much worse things could
be, or exercising to take one’s mind off things (emotion-focused coping). Although they are
activated by different events following a process of cognitive appraisal, it is possible that
people tend to use some coping mechanisms more than others. If a particular form of
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emotion-focused coping helped with one stressor last week, perhaps a person will feel that
the same mechanism will be useful in other settings too. Thus although coping mechanisms
are activated in response to a wide range of life events, it seems quite possible that each person
will have some mechanisms which they use frequently, and others which they use rarely. It
therefore seems sensible to ask whether the use of certain coping mechanisms refects
personality, since there may be stable individual differences in the extent to which people use
various coping mechanisms. The big question is whether these coping mechanisms are much
different from personality. Watson and Hubbard’s old (1996) paper is still highly relevant.
They argue that one would expect major overlap because:
l As people with high Extraversion scores prefer company they are more likely to turn to
others in times of stress – and so are likely to use emotion-focused coping strategies.
l Those with high levels of Neuroticism may be unable to identify or implement effective
coping strategies. People with high Neuroticism scores seem to experience more objectively
defned life events (divorce, etc.), suggesting that they effectively create problems for
themselves; indeed it has been found that becoming divorced is not a random event but has
a genetic basis (Jockin et al., 1996) showing that some people are just better at choosing
signifcant others and/or holding on to relationships than others. People with high
Neuroticism scores may perhaps also see threats where none exist (and so need to use
coping mechanisms frequently) and over-react to minor problems.
It is therefore unsurprising that Watson and Hubbard found substantial overlap between
scores on a widely used scale measuring coping strategies and the Big Five personality traits.
It seems that a person’s habitual coping styles resemble their personality traits – or perhaps
that a person’s personality leads then to prefer some coping styles rather than another, as with
the Extraversion example given above. It would make sense to measure personality as well as
coping styles when trying to understand how people deal with stressful life events – although
not many studies do so.

Might intelligence be related to coping? How could you tell?
Client-centred therapy
Rogerian, or client-centred, therapy involves the therapist entering into a relationship with
the client (‘client’, never ‘patient’). In order for therapy to be successful it is claimed that three
basic conditions need to be met (Truax and Mitchell, 1971; Rogers, 1992). These are:
l Genuineness/congruence. The client must feel that the therapist cares about them as an
individual, and that this is heartfelt – they are not acting the part of ‘being a counsellor’
and giving stock replies.
l Empathy. The client must feel that the therapist comes to understand their feelings and
experiences during the course of the therapy; that they are psychologically connected. This
is often shown through refection of feelings, where the therapist summarises what the
client has said and asks if this understanding is correct.
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l Unconditional positive regard. The client must feel that the therapist’s positive attitude
towards them will hold irrespective of what terrible things they (the client) may say. The
client needs to feel that therapist values them as an individual, and that their job,
background, fantasies, offences, wealth and personal circumstances are utterly unimportant.
There has been a considerable amount of research into the extent to which these and other
therapist characteristics infuence the outcome of therapy (e.g., Zuroff et al., 2010) which
frequently fnd that these genuineness, empathy and unconditional positive regard do, indeed,
infuence therapeutic outcome. However they are not the only variables which matter. For
example, a study which followed up over a thousand clients seen by 32 therapists in a
university counselling practice found that age and interpersonal skills infuenced self-reported
outcome. Interpersonal skills were assessed by a tool designed to ‘perceive, understand, and
communicate a wide range of interpersonal messages, as well as a person’s ability to persuade
others with personal problems to apply suggested solutions to their problems and abandon
maladaptive patterns’ by showing video clips of ‘diffcult’ clients (for example, those who were
aggressive or uncommunicative) and asking the therapists how they would deal with them
(Anderson et al., 2009).

How might a therapist show a client genuineness, empathy and unconditional
positive regard? Can they be trained to do so, do you think?
Therapy based on personal construct theory

We saw in Chapter 2 how the repertory grid may be used to understand how a person draws
distinctions between important people in their life – ‘elements’ – by presenting them with three
elements and asking them to articulate the most important way in which any one of them
differs from the other two. For example one of the individuals might be described as
‘untrustworthy’ whilst the other two are seen as ‘honest’. Untrustworthy/honest is therefore
one of the ways in which this person chooses to categorise people.
The method has been used extensively in several areas of clinical psychology by using
careful selections of elements. For example, to explore the personal world of someone with a
tendency to binge-drink alcohol, elements might include ‘myself after drinking heavily’,
‘myself just before drinking’, ‘myself the day after drinking’ as well as the names of various
family members, friends, work colleagues and others who feature in their lives. It might be
found that one construct differentiates ‘someone I admire’ from ‘myself after drinking’ and
‘someone I despise’ – which could form the basis of a useful therapeutic discussion.
It is also possible to use elements such as ‘myself’, ‘myself as I would like to be’, ‘myself in
ten years’ time’, ‘myself as a child’ alongside other elements to explore an individual’s view
of how they are developing, what problems they face, what their aspirations are, and so on.
The great beauty of this technique is that it is possible to tailor the list of elements to suit an
individual client’s needs, and perform analyses (such as described in Chapter 2) which show
which elements are seen as being similar, and/or which constructs are used similarly. For
example, someone might be surprised to discover that they construe their partner or their
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‘ideal self’ in a similar way to their father, or that the constructs of ‘untrustworthy/honest’
and ‘withdrawn/sociable’ are used similarly.
As well as using the repertory grid, Kelly suggested that if one wanted to learn what a
particular person was like, he or she should be invited to write a ‘self-characterisation’. For
Harry Brown the instructions would read:
I want you to write a character sketch of Harry Brown, just as if he were the principal
character in a play. Write it as it might be written by a friend who knew him very
intimately and very sympathetically, perhaps better than anyone ever really could know
him. Be sure to write it in the third person. For example, start out by saying, ‘Harry
Brown is . . .’
(Kelly, 1955)
The therapist then deduces the constructs that have been used.

Suppose that Harry Brown wrote the following. What types of questions
might you ask him to explore the personal constructs which he uses?
Harry is a real go-getter and has achieved a lot in his life. He has a fairly
boring job as an accountant, but he has made a great success of it and
made a lot of money. He doesn’t really mind the work, but he can think
of a lot of other things he would have wanted to do.
(Crittenden and Ashkar, 2012)
Once a person’s constructs are known (by repertory grid or self-characterisation) they
may be used therapeutically in ‘fxed role therapy’. Here the therapist asks that person to
‘playact’ being a very different person in every situation 24/7. For example, if a person
construed him- or herself as being ‘quiet’, ‘unemotional’ and ‘anxious’, the therapist might
ask them to try acting as if they felt the opposite (normally for a period of some weeks) so
that they could explore what it felt like to construe themselves differently and to try to
develop their construct systems. Bonarius (1970) gives an excellent account of how this
operates in practice.
The obvious question is whether fxed role therapy is effective in bringing about therapeutic
change; does acting happy for a while make a depressed person happy, for example? Strangely,
apart from a few dissertations, there seems to be almost no research on the effectiveness of
this form of therapy – either compared to a no-therapy control condition or compared to other
forms of therapy. This seems to be a sad omission.
Forensic psychology
Forensic psychologists are involved in some way with the legal, justice, prison or probation
systems, and their work covers a huge range of areas, some of which are extremely
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specialised – for example, the use of special tests and techniques to elicit evidence from
children who may have been sexually abused. The sorts of areas covered by forensic
psychologists include:
l Assessment of individuals’ cognitive abilities. For example, determining whether an accused

person is able to understand court procedures, whether a person is ft to give evidence, or
whether an accident has affected a plaintiff’s cognitive performance.
l Personality assessments. For example, in custody disputes, or when assessing damages for
injury (e.g., brain damage from a traffc collision, or psychological trauma).
l Assessment of the risk of re-offending – particularly violent re-offending or sexual offences.
l Developing an understanding of the psychological and social processes which lead to a
particular type of offending.
l Clinical assessments (e.g., to determine whether an offender was suffering a schizophrenic
episode at the time of the offence, or whether they are unft to stand trial on grounds of
insanity).
l General advice on evidence, such as problems with eye-witness testimony, false memories
or issues surrounding delayed recall of sexual or other abuse.
l Devising procedures for interviewing victims of crime, including children and those
with developmental and other disabilities, and developing methods of detecting false
confessions.
l Devising, implementing and evaluating treatment and rehabilitation programmes for
offenders.
Cognitive abilities
Assessment of cognitive abilities is a mainstay of forensic psychology. Expert witnesses will
use whatever methods of assessment they feel are appropriate to advise the court whether a
defendant is likely to be able to understand the nature of their offence, properly brief a legal
representative or is otherwise ft to stand trial. In practice individually administered ability
tests such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (described in Chapters 3 and 12) are widely
used. More specialised neurological tests may be used to determine problems with cognitive
functions following head injury.
One major application of ability testing concerns the assessment of ftness to plead. For
example, is a person who commits a murder (a) necessarily aware that this is wrong, (b) aware
of what the court process implies and what a plea of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ means and (c) able
to construct a case for his/her defence and instruct lawyers? These issues are known as the
Pritchard criteria and date back to 1836. Under the British legal system, if psychiatrists decide
that the person is unft to plead, they are compulsorily admitted to a secure hospital. In the
USA, the procedure is rather less subjective and several semi-structured interview techniques
have been developed to assess whether an individual should be tried in court. Blake et al.
(2019) describe and evaluate several such measures.
Intelligence has also been related to criminality, and a paper by Boccio et al. (2018) is
well worth reading. It drew on data from a large longitudinal study to explore the relationship
between verbal IQ, the number of crimes committed and the number of crimes for which
people were arrested. The research questions were whether intelligence was related to
criminal behaviour, and whether the less intelligent criminals were more likely to be caught
and arrested. Are smart criminals better criminals, in other words. Although the criminality
and arrest data were self-reported (and so might not be accurate), low verbal IQ was
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Figure 17.2 Probability of being arrested for various numbers of crimes

as a function of low (<85), average (85–115) and high (>115)
verbal IQ (Boccio et al., 2018)
associated with the number of arrests reported, and (for females only) the number of self-
reported crimes committed.
The chances of being arrested for a crime were more or less the same for low and average
IQ individuals – but high IQ criminals (those with IQs above 115) were appreciably less likely
to be arrested than the others. For example, Figure 17.2 shows that a low or average IQ
person who had committed 25 crimes had approximately a 58% chance of being arrested at
least once, whereas for a high IQ criminal this dropped to approximately 45%. Obviously
when the number of crimes committed became large this IQ-difference became smaller, as
prolifc criminals are very likely to be arrested at some stage whatever their IQ.
There are many possible explanations for this effect, which seemed to be restricted to male
offenders. Perhaps more intelligent criminals plan their crimes, rather than acting impulsively,
or perhaps they perform different types of crime which are less likely to be detected. Or they
might just be better at covering their tracks. Whatever the case, it seems that higher IQ
individuals are less likely to be caught unless they commit a lot of crimes. There are several
problems with this study, as its authors acknowledge. However it seems that IQ does have
some effect on success as a criminal.
Personality
In the United States at least, personality assessments tend not to be based on the fve-factor
model outlined above, and where personality questionnaires or ratings are used tests such as
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the MMPI-2 are frequently chosen (Archer et al., 2006). The MMPI-2 is a collection of 567
items which are not based on any particular theory. They resemble these:
l I like science magazines

l I think I would like to work as a lawyer
l My nose runs a lot
and each item is answered yes/no. Its scales are designed to differentiate between various
clinical groups (even though the names of some of the scales in the MMPI-2 and the MMPI-
2-RF are rather unusual and old-fashioned – ‘hysteria’, for example). The test manual contains
norms for various groups (e.g., ‘male, pre-trial criminal’) and so an individual’s score on each
of these scales can be compared with these norms to determine whether their level of
‘Behavioral/Externalising Dysfunction’ or ‘Hysteria’ is signifcantly higher than is usual for
members of that group. (There are so many scales in the test that you would expect some
differences to be signifcant by chance alone!)
One merit of the MMPI is that it contains a number of scales designed to discover whether
the person being assessed is providing valid data; these may indicate if they are answering
randomly or exaggerating their level of disability, for example.
The MMPI scales were not derived by factor analysis, but by identifying items which best
differentiated clinical groups (for example, those items which ‘hysterics’ answered differently
from ‘normals’). This procedure is known as criterion keying and has been severely criticised
by authors such as Kline (2000) and Nunnally (1978) who argue that the scales which result
from this procedure may be devoid of psychological meaning as they may measure a mixture
of two or more different traits. See also Chapter 20. There is also the problem that the patients
and offenders in the ‘criterion groups’ which were used to select the items must have been
diagnosed accurately in the frst place! Why is the MMPI scale is needed, if it is possible to
accurately diagnose people by other means . . .
Even projective tests such as the Rorschach or the Thematic Apperception Test are
sometimes used in the United States (Archer et al., 2006). These involve participants
interpreting what they see in an inkblot, or describing what is taking place in a somewhat
ambiguous picture, together with its antecedents and outcome. However as we saw in
Chapters 3 and 4, there are major problems with almost all such techniques. The choice of
which test(s) to use is entirely up to the practitioner; the American Psychological Association
guidelines merely state that forensic practitioners should use tests ‘whose validity and
reliability have been established for use with members of the population assessed. When such
validity and reliability have not been established, forensic practitioners consider and describe
the strengths and limitations of their fndings’ (American Psychological Association, 2013).
The defnition of what is ‘acceptable’ validity, etc. is left to the individual practitioner, which
explains the surprising (some might say alarming) use of projective techniques.
What should happen to people who have been convicted of extremely serious offences
(typically multiple murders, sex crimes or cannibalism) where a diagnosis of personality
disorder has been made? Such people are (in the UK) normally detained in ‘special
hospitals’ – highly secure units where psychiatric and psychological assessments and
interventions are carried out with the ultimate aim of returning offenders to society when
it is safe to do so.
Two types of personality disorder are particularly important in forensic psychology –
antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. These were discussed in
Chapter 10 along with the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (Hare, 1991), which consists
of four subfactors in addition to an overall measure of psychopathy, two relating to antisocial
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personality disorder and two to narcissistic personality disorder. It is administered by a

professional psychiatrist or psychologist and the items are answered following a structured
interview and a review of case notes. This is necessary because one of the key features of
psychopaths is that their tendency to lie and deceive others (and to show no remorse or even
grasp that they have done wrong). Administering a simple questionnaire would, therefore, be
doomed to failure as it is highly probable that the prisoners with high psychopathy scores
would recognise that, in order to be released, it is necessary to produce a ‘normal’ profle and
so would do their best to fake ‘good’. However, given the superfcial charm and often high
intelligence of such individuals, there is no guarantee that a psychiatrist would not be fooled
into thinking that a dangerous offender was ft for release, although the instrument does show
some predictive validity in that it can predict re-offending in less serious offenders to some
extent (Leistico et al., 2008; Walters et al., 2008). The factor that seems to work is the
antisocial lifestyle scale. People who have offended a lot in the past tend to offend again. Who
would have thought otherwise?
How, though, should one proceed to assess people with high levels of psychopathy? This
is an extremely diffcult question to address and, unlike most applications of psychology,
innocent people’s lives may well depend on the accuracy of the assessments that are made. If
objective tests of personality were more effective, this would be an ideal choice, if the individual
were truly unaware of what a questionnaire or other test measured or were physically unable
to alter their response (e.g., some physiological responses). A practical summary of some
methods is given by O’Rourke and Hammond (2007), but overall it is clear that this is an
extremely diffcult area and it seems that no one has yet found a method of assessing personality
in individuals who are determined to deceive.
Assessing the risk of re-offending

We consider this here because attempts to assess the likelihood of re-offending often involve
examining an offender’s case history and awarding ‘points’ for various aspects of their
behaviour. These do not look much like the tests considered in the previous chapters. However
the scores from such measures resemble psychological tests in that they need to be validated
just as described in Chapter 8 to ensure that they actually measure what they claim, and that
the scores are free from bias. For example, when assessing the risk of re-offending, the test
should be equally accurate for members of minority groups; if their scores are consistently
higher than members of a majority group on these assessments, their chances of re-offending
should be higher too. The reliability of these tests also needs to be considered; two independent
psychologists should be able to come to the same conclusion. There is, of course, the problem
that not all those who re-offend will be caught, and so the data will always be noisy; the
re-offending rate is likely to be higher than the statistics indicate, so the relationship between
test scores and recidivism rate is likely to be rather better than the fgures indicate. Singh
et al. (2018) provide a good overview of the measurement of recidivism for those who seek a
detailed understanding of the area.
The Hare Psychopathy Checklist has already been discussed (Chapter 10) alongside
other aspects of the Dark Triad, and Brook (2015) gives an overview of how it and other
scales may be used to predict violent re-offending. The problem is that although the
relationships between test scores and re-offending behaviour defnitely exist (e.g., Serin and
Amos, 1995) there are large margins of error. This creates problems for those who use these
tests to make recommendations about individuals. The correlation between scale scores and
recidivism was, at best, about 0.45 in a large meta-analysis of 19 tests in the United States
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(Desmarais et al., 2016), indicating that the very best scale can only predict about 20% of
the variance in re-offending. Is using a scale which frequently miscategorises people better
than using no scale at all?
Algorithms have been developed using artifcial intelligence and similar techniques to
attempt to more accurately predict which individuals are likely to re-offend. However it is not
always clear that these expensive commercial techniques outperform more traditional
assessments (Dressel and Farid, 2018). It may also be necessary to justify the basis for reaching
the assessment to the judiciary and legal professionals, and doing so for algorithms based on
machine learning may be diffcult or impossible.
Similar problems arise when trying to predict whether a male sex-offender is likely to
re-offend. Some forensic psychologists rely on their professional judgement to make this
prediction, whilst several scales have also been developed to predict re-offending. The risk
score produced by such scales are based on a number of different things – for example,
number of previous offences, victim characteristics (e.g., family or strangers), diagnosis of
psychiatric disorder, employment history, age and a range of other variables which each show
some relationship to re-offending. Combining them should allow for a more accurate
prediction than using any of these risk factors in isolation. It appears to be normal practice
to administer more than one of these measures, which raises the problem of what to do when
they yield different predictions.
There are several meta-analyses of the effectiveness of these scales (e.g., Hanson and
Morton-Bourgon, 2009) which show that they are more effective than psychologists’ clinical
judgements, and are quite good at differentiating recidivists from those who appear not to be;
the difference in test scores between the two groups is sometimes impressive. For example,
UK recidivists scored up to 0.8 standard deviations higher than non-recidivists on the Static-
99 scale in Hanson’s meta-analysis. However there is still the problem of how to convert risk
scores into policy. What constitutes an acceptable risk? Such issues are clearly important but
fall outside the remit of this book.
Health psychology
Ability
Twenty years ago virtually nothing was known about links between intelligence and health.
This all changed when Ian Deary from Edinburgh University and Lawrence Whalley from
Aberdeen came across a treasure trove of data. All Scottish children born in 1921 who were
still alive in 1932 (87,498 of them) were given an intelligence test in a research programme
known as the Scottish Mental Survey (SMS). It all happened again (using the same test on all
children born in 1936) in 1947 and some follow-up studies were also conducted on this group;
Maxwell (1961) summarises some fndings. Ledgers holding the names of the children and
their test scores (together with some family background information) were found mouldering
in a basement in 1997.
Why, you may ask, is this exciting? Deary and Whalley, both of whom had a background
in medicine (although Ian Deary is a psychologist as well), realised that because the cohort of
children was so large, many of them should still be alive and it would be possible to determine
whether scores on simple test of intelligence, administered to the children in groups when they
were aged 11, could predict what happened to the children 66 years later. For example, is
intelligence related to length of life? Or to the likelihood of developing heart disease, dementia,
etc.? And if so, why? These types of question are normally almost impossible to address. It is
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easy enough to identify groups of people who have lived to a ripe old age or who have developed
heart disease but the problem is that it is impossible to tell how intelligent they were when they
were younger or well. It would make little sense to test groups of old or sick people, because
(a) it is quite probable that ill health would affect intelligence test scores, so one could never
be sure that intelligence caused anything, and (b) because some people will have died, one can
never know whether the ones that are left in any particular age group are unusually high or
low on tests of g, especially when using tests that have been carefully normed. The SMS thus
gave rise to a new branch of psychology called cognitive epidemiology, which studies the effects
of intelligence on health and development. The results from this work are fascinating.
First, having high intelligence makes it likely that you will live longer. For the Scottish
11 year olds tested in 1932, having an IQ that is 15 points (one standard deviation) above the
average made them 21% less likely to die over the next 65 years than someone with an average
score. Women were 29% less likely to die. Put another way, 70% of women with IQs in the
top quartile were alive aged 76: less than half of the women with IQs in the bottom quartile
were still alive at that age (Whalley and Deary, 2001). It can be seen that a simple test
administered at age 11 seems to be a potent predictor of this outcome, at any rate. Much the
same was found for 66616 people who were born in 1936, tested in 1947 and were followed
up 68 years later (Cukic et al., 2017); 55% of the men with the lowest IQs (bottom 10%, or
IQ less than 80) died before age 79. Only 32% of men with IQs above 120 died by that age.
As these are (almost) population samples it does not really make sense to calculate signifcance
levels; suffce it to say that the effects are both real and substantial.

Why do you think intelligence might be linked to longevity? What possible
mechanisms might underly this link?
However, the interpretation of these data might not be that simple. It is well known that
measures of intelligence are correlated with social class (albeit with some fairly bitter
disagreements about whether social advantage/deprivation infuences intelligence or whether
intelligence infuences the type of work that is obtained and therefore determines social
advantage/deprivation). So it is possible to speculate that the more intelligent children in the
survey were also the most well to do and this caused them to live longer. It is also possible
that the Second World War may have distorted the fgures and one could conjecture that
perhaps those with lower IQs were sent to fght rather than being given safe desk jobs, for
example. (The hard data show that high IQ males had a greater chance of being killed during
that confict, however.) Such alternative explanations have been considered and are unlikely
to explain the results. Full descriptions of these studies and details of the analyses are given
in Deary et al. (2009), which cannot be recommended too highly.
Finding a relationship is, in one sense, the easy part. It is also necessary to discover why it
emerges. For example, are more intelligent people more likely to heed warnings about smoking
and drinking or be better able to identify and avoid dangerous activities such as driving too
fast and too close? Is high intelligence one of many signs of ‘biological ftness’ as authors such
as Prokosch et al. (2005) and Deary et al. (2010) have suggested: in other words, do adverse
biological factors during gestation and early development affect intelligence and also
predispose one to later health problems?
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David Geary (2019) suggests individual differences in the way that mitochondria work
might infuence both levels of intelligence and health-related outcomes. Mitochondria are
parts of cells which are responsible for converting glucose into energy for use by the cell, and
there are clear links between mitochondria function and general health. Geary suggests that
individual differences in mitochondria function might infuence g, health outcomes (e.g.,
immune function or cardio ftness) and physical effects of ageing (e.g., cognitive slowing or
physical frailty). This is highly speculative work, but it does provide one potentially testable
model to explain how and why individual differences in intelligence may be related to a variety
of health- and age-related outcomes.
This relationship between g and good health is not just a Scottish phenomenon or restricted
to those who generally die of old age. O’Toole and Stankov (1992) followed 46,000 Australian
ex-servicemen, whose mental abilities had been tested while serving with the military. They
focused on those who had died other than through illness: mostly people who died in accidents
such as car crashes. They found that in these middle-aged men, a lower level of intelligence was
a far better predictor of mortality than any of the health-related variables they had expected
to be relevant. Having an IQ of 85 as opposed to 115 made an individual approximately twice
as likely to die – a huge effect. This too has been replicated. In a study of more than a million
Swedish men, there was a clear link between IQ score and unintentional death by middle
age (Batty et al., 2009). A 1-standard-deviation decrease in IQ (e.g., from 100 to 85, or from
115 to 100) increased the chance of dying by 30%. These researchers grouped their participants
into four levels of intelligence; members of the lowest IQ group had a death rate from
unintentional injury that was more than twice as high as that of the highest IQ group. These
effects were essentially the same after controlling for social class.
Deary et al. (2009) describe a number of other analyses too – for example, showing that
a higher level of intelligence at age 11 made it less likely that one would receive psychiatric
contact during one’s lifetime. This book also summarises the results from a great swathe of
studies performed to try to discover precisely why these relationships exist. But one thing
is clear. Simple ability tests are surprisingly good at predicting health outcomes some
60 years later.
One other area ought to be briefy mentioned: that of compliance with drugs. This is a
particular problem where failure to take medication regularly may prove life-threatening.
It has been consistently found that cognitive performance is one of the variables that
infuences whether patients take their drugs at the correct times (Stilley et al., 2010) and
may also fail to understand the meaning of the dosage instructions on drug packets (Wolf
et al., 2007). Once again, it seems that cognitive ability can have far reaching implications
for wellbeing.
Personality
There have been some important links discovered between personality and illness (such as
heart disease) and also between personality and health behaviour (such as exercise). Thirty
years ago there was a huge focus on what became known as Type A behaviour – Type A
individuals being impatient, aggressive and ambitious ‘adrenalin junkies’ who always felt
under time pressure. This personality type was measured via a structured interview or the
Jenkins Activity Survey (Jenkins et al., 1971) which is a brief questionnaire. The Type B
personality was effectively the opposite of this: relaxed, and non-driven. Some years later
Eysenck et al. (2000) claimed that some ‘repressive’ personality types, people who were
reluctant to reveal their emotions, were more likely to develop cancers than other personality
394
types. This became known as the Type C personality. More recently a Type D personality has
come along. It can be measured by a short questionnaire (Denollet, 2005) and was again
thought to be related to heart disease – although this time to how well one typically recovers
after it. The Type D individual (depressed and socially inhibited) fared poorly following a
heart attack (Schiffer et al., 2008). However this trait also fails to live up to its initial promise
(Coyne and De Voogd, 2012).
The ‘Type A’ personality (particularly hostility, and the tendency to ‘talk over’ others
during conversation) may predict the age at which a person experiences a heart attack rather
than whether they experience a heart attack (Gallacher et al., 2003). However several
studies fail to fnd any relationship between type A personality and cardiac health (e.g., Lin
et al., 2018; Surtees et al., 2005; Myrtek, 2001). Whilst the evidence seems to suggest that
the Type D personality may be a useful concept, Type A and Type C personalities turned
out to be dead ends, with small effects and contradictory results and they are now rarely
mentioned. The evidence for the Type C personality may be unsafe or possibly fraudulent
(Pelosi, 2019).
These approaches are odd in two ways. First, they sought to type people. Thus, one is either
a Type A personality or a Type B personality: there is no continuous scale, like a trait. Second,
it is surprising (to put it mildly) that clinicians should be able to develop scales that are
completely different from those that personality psychologists have been developing for nearly
a century. One of the problems with the Type A personality is that the various components
did not correlate together the way that items in a personality test should. You may have
thought to yourself that the Type D personality certainly sounds like someone with a high
Neuroticism and low Extraversion score – and this is exactly correct (De Fruyt and Denollet,
2002). It looks as if it is a mixture of two traits, rather than a single novel one.
There are also plenty of papers which explore whether personality infuences recovery from
surgery, quality of life and suchlike (e.g., Siassi et al., 2009). These typically administer
personality questionnaires pre-operatively, and more questionnaires measuring quality of life,
degree of pain experienced or something similar some months afterwards. Regression or
something similar is used to determine whether personality affects the clinical outcome. The
problem with such studies is that they involve two questionnaires – and it is quite possible
that degree of satisfaction might be infuenced by personality; a patient high on the trait of
Neuroticism might report a lot of pain, feel dissatisfed with the treatment they received and
so on, whilst individuals who are more emotionally stable with higher Extraversion scores
who experience exactly the same physical symptoms might make little of them (Watson and
Pennebaker, 1989). It is much safer to look at the relationship between personality and
objective outcome measures.
This seems to show that Neuroticism and Conscientiousness infuence mortality of several
groups of patients. For those with kidney disease Christensen et al. (2002) showed that high
Neuroticism and low Conscientiousness led to an appreciable rise in mortality. These effects
were substantial; those who scored a standard deviation or more above the mean of
Neuroticism had a 37% higher risk of dying, whilst those scoring a standard deviation or
more below the mean of Conscientiousness had a 36% greater chance of dying. Neuroticism
also predicted the chances that older adults would die from any cause over a 19-year period
(O’Suilleabhain and Hughes, 2018); a one-standard-deviation increase in Neuroticism
increased the chances of dying by 14%. Conscientiousness infuences whether or not a person
eats, smokes or drinks to excess, and this affects mortality in middle age (Turiano et al., 2015);
there are many other studies too, and Smith and MacKenzie (2006) provide a useful summary
of the older literature relating personality to physical health.
395
Summary
This chapter has outlined some applications of individual differences research and demonstrated
the practical importance of this work. Neuroticism, general ability and conscientiousness seem
to be particularly valuable in understanding anxiety and depression, whilst client-centred
therapy seems to be effective as a means of treatment. Psychopathy seems to be of major
importance in predicting violent behaviour and repeat offending, whilst intelligence is related
to whether criminals get caught, although the personality measures that are used by forensic
psychologists tend not to resemble those used in mainstream individual differences research.
Intelligence also has surprisingly large links with health, predicting longevity and accident-
proneness amongst other things. (Not all accidents are accidental!) Neuroticism and (low)
Conscientiousness also seem to be consistently linked to poor health outcomes. However it is
not obvious that the mechanisms underlying these relationships are well understood.

Deary et al. (2009) provide an excellent summary of the literature linking abilities to health
outcomes: it is engrossing and remarkably easy to read. Smith and MacKenzie (2006) likewise
summarise the older infuence linking personality and health outcomes. Kebbell and Davies
(2006) provide an excellent introduction to forensic psychology, whilst Taylor’s (1990)
overview of health psychology is still relevant. Ozer and Benet-Martinez (2006) and Roberts
et al. (2007) describe a number of applications of personality to real-world situations
(including many of those discussed in this chapter and the next). Those who worry about the
reproducibility of some of the associations described in this chapter and the next might also
like to consult Soto (2019).
SAQ 17.1
There are many possible approaches. Here are four suggestions, but yours
may be equally useful.
l One could determine whether GAD is substantially heritable (it is) and
then check whether relations of patients diagnosed with GAD tend to
have above-average levels of anxiety. If so, ‘normal’ anxiety and GAD may
be infuenced by the same genes.
l One could determine whether highly anxious people are more at risk of
developing GAD than others; if so this suggests a common mechanism.
l One could determine whether drugs used to treat GAD also reduce
‘normal’ levels of anxiety in people who do not have GAD.
l One could compare the physiological bases of both GAD and ‘normal’
anxiety (MRI scans, etc.).
396
SAQ 17.2
Given that problem-focused coping requires some abstract conceptualisation,
it seems likely that this would be easier for those with higher levels of
intelligence. I cannot fnd any literature on this, but my own experience of
trying to measure coping in prisoners (whose mean IQ is approximately 80)
showed that many found it diffcult to think of how they might deal
with stress (Cooper and Berwick, 2001); they simply could not see that they
could do anything to moderate its impact. It is thus possible that there
might be an interaction between intelligence and the effectiveness of
coping mechanisms.
SAQ 17.3
l Genuineness. The therapist should feel self-confdent enough to relax
with the client and be themselves. They should give honest feedback
where they feel it is helpful and appropriate, and just be themselves
without wondering ‘should I say this?’, ‘should I hug them’ or ‘what’s the
right question to ask now’.
l Empathy. ‘Just to make sure that I’ve understood properly . . . you feel
terror whenever you see a cat, because you are frightened that it will
jump on you, is that right?’ This will probably be followed up by
questions such as ‘how far away does the cat have to be in order for you
to feel like this?’, ‘did you ever have any bad experiences with cats?’
and similar, in order to build up an understanding of the client’s feelings
and thoughts.
l Unconditional positive regard. The therapist should encourage the client
to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences honestly – and be
careful not to criticise them or belittle their feelings, hope or fears. They
would not say ‘but cats won’t hurt you’, ‘you’re behaving childishly’ or
‘what you did was so terrible that I can’t help you’.
Training therapists typically involves helping the therapists to better

understand themselves, their own prejudices, body-language and emotional
‘hang-ups’ so that they can show genuine acceptance of clients whatever
they may say. There are many books which try to develop these skills, such as
McLeod (2010), though ultimately some individuals might just be too forceful,
unempathetic, prejudiced or out of touch with their own emotions to become
effective counsellors.
397
SAQ 17.4
The therapeutic interview might start like this:
THERAPIST: Can you tell me some more about your image of a go-getter?
How would you describe someone like that?
HARRY: Well, you know . . . someone who achieves their goals . . .
who knows what he wants and gets it . . .
THERAPIST: And how would you describe someone who is not like that?
HARRY: Ahh . . . someone who is more easy-going I guess . . . someone
who doesn’t push . . . I suppose someone who is satisfied
with less . . .
(Crittenden and Ashkar, 2012)
This dialogue leads the therapist to infer the construct of ‘Go-getter/has

goals, gets what he wants’ vs ‘Easy-going/doesn’t push/satisfied with less’.
SAQ 17.5
There are many possible mechanisms including:
l Environmental issues which affect brain growth and other aspects of
development – e.g., drug and alcohol use during pregnancy, exposure to
heavy metals such as lead or mercury. These affect IQ and may also lead
to premature death (e.g., because of heart defects).
l Intelligence leading to better awareness of the effects of diet, smoking,
etc. on health, causing more intelligent individuals to live a healthier
lifestyle, take medication, etc.
l If IQ has a biological basis, it is possible that the biological factors
associated with a high IQ also influence lifespan.
l High IQ individuals may enter occupations which are safer – becoming
accountants rather than deep-sea fishermen.
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402
Chapter 18
Applications to education,
work and sport
Introduction
Like Chapter 17, this chapter considers just a few of the ways in which the measurement of
personality and ability traits have proved useful for helping practitioners (such as applied
psychologists) address real-life issues. As before the choice of topics is somewhat arbitrary
and necessarily brief; those who wish to expand their knowledge might be interested in books
such as Davey (2011) which consider issues in more detail and from perspectives other than
individual differences. Ozer and Benet-Martinez (2006) also give an excellent account of the
applicability of personality theory to a wide range of outcomes, ranging from relationship
quality to volunteering behaviour.
Learning outcomes
l Discuss the literature relating g and personality to school performance,
and show an understanding of why multivariate genetic analyses are
useful in this area.
l Show an understanding of the relationships between personality and
academic performance.
l Show a grasp of how personality, abilities, g, education and leadership
are related to performance at work.
l Discuss and evaluate the contributions which individual differences has
made to the psychology of sport.
403
Applications to education, work and sport
School and education

It is easy to fnd substantial correlations between scores on ability tests (and, on occasions,
personality tests) and real-life behaviour – for example, correlations between tests of general
ability and performance at school or at work. Deciding whether or not the trait is the cause
of the real-world behaviour is much more diffcult. This is because psychological traits are
often correlated with other variables. For example, there is a substantial literature showing
that general ability correlates with one’s parents’ social class. So, if general ability is found to
be correlated with educational performance, perhaps this correlation only really comes about
because socially disadvantaged children are less well nourished (or less well taught, less
encouraged at home, less well motivated at school, less likely to have suitable role models,
more likely to be under peer pressure to give up at school . . .) and this leads to poorer
educational performance. It could also be argued that performance on ability tests is
determined by educational performance rather than vice versa: Ceci and Williams (1997) give
examples of such suggestions, and we have already seen evidence that attending school boosts
intelligence (e.g., Cahan and Cohen, 1989). So although we simple-minded individual
difference psychologists may imagine that children differ in their levels of intelligence, and
having high levels of intelligence makes learning easy, this could be quite wrong. It could be
that social factors bring down some children’s educational attainment and their level of
intelligence.

This is more of a creative exercise than SAQs usually are, but think how
you might check whether schooling infuences intelligence or whether
intelligence infuences academic performance.
If you have read Chapter 15 already, you may now start to appreciate its relevance to this
debate. Social class will be a major infuence on the common family environment (as it will
affect all children in the family in the same way) and we saw that there is compelling evidence
that this has zero effect on adult intelligence. It is also possible to gather data about both
parents and their (grown-up, earning) children – e.g., parental income, parental educational
qualifcations, child intelligence, child income, child education – and perform some analyses
known as structural equation modelling (SEM) to determine which variables infuence which
others.
Figure 18.1 shows a number of boxes representing things that were measured from fathers
(shaded boxes) and one of their children (unshaded boxes). The curves with two arrows on
them show the size of the correlation between two variables (e.g., father’s education and
father’s occupation). An arrow with a number on it suggests that one variable causes the other;
the number on the line shows how large the relationship is. If you are familiar with regression
analysis, the numbers on these lines are similar to regression coeffcients. For convenience the
small relationships (less than 0.3) have been shown in light print.
This sort of analysis is incredibly important. It can show (for example) whether there is
a substantial direct link between the father’s occupation (a measure of social class) and the
child’s occupation – as one would expect if the sociologists are correct. You can see that
this relationship is tiny (a coeffcient of 0.12). Likewise the amount of education received
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Figure 18.1 Variables affecting a child’s level of education (adapted from

Duncan et al., 1972)
by the children is hardly infuenced at all by the parents’ occupation (0.04) or education
(0.19). It shows that the child’s intelligence infuences the level of education which they
experience (0.43).
Intelligence
There is a clear correlation between childhood intelligence and educational outcomes. For
example, Benson (1942) found a correlation of 0.57 between IQ and the age at which children
left school, while a meta-analysis of over 105 000 pupils (Roth et al., 2015) concludes that
the correlation between intelligence and academic performance is approximately 0.54 – a very
substantial relationship indeed.
The important question is whether high intelligence causes good educational performance.
We have seen that Figure 18.1 shows that it is, but there is another way of addressing the issue
too. Given the biological correlates of intelligence (discussed in Chapter 15) it is possible to
determine whether the genes which infuence g also infuence educational performance. If they
do this indicates a true causal infuence: what we measure using intelligence tests refects the
cognitive processes brought about by variations in a particular set of genes, and this also
infuences school performance in the future.
Twin studies show that educational performance is substantially heritable; the heritability
of English, mathematics and science performance in UK 11 year olds was 0.81, 0.66 and 0.51
(Haworth et al., 2008). It is also well known that children tend to perform at similar levels at
all school subjects, which raises the question of whether generalist ‘education genes’ infuence
performance in all areas. They do. Thompson et al. (1991) found a 0.98 correlation between
the genes which affected mathematics and the genes which affected language abilities in 12
year olds. Given the proper environmental conditions, some genes make children perform at
a similar level at several school subjects.
Given that a set of genes infuence various aspects of school performance in the future, are
these ‘generalist education genes’ the same as the generalist genes which defne intelligence?
Is g the reason why children tend to perform at a similar level in various school subjects?
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Calvin et al. (2012) show that many of the generalist education genes also infuence intelligence
(an overlap of 0.76 in the United Kingdom data). It really does look as if g has a genuine
causal infuence on school performance, and that this is substantially biological in nature. The
genes which infuence our levels of intelligence also infuence our educational performance –
and both of these relationships are very substantial. It is diffcult to overstate the importance
of this fnding. It shows that individual differences in school performance have much the same
biological origin as do scores on tests measuring g. Intelligence directly infuences school
performance.

Some countries (such as the UK) use performance on national examinations
rather than psychological tests the SAT to select people for college. Think of
some advantages and disadvantages for each approach.
Surprisingly, I cannot fnd any English-language papers which relate Gardner’s multiple
intelligences to academic performance. Given that a generation of teachers have been told that
multiple-intelligence theory is all-important, it seems odd that there has been no attempt to
determine whether they predict educational outcomes! We pointed out in Chapter 12 that
tests measuring multiple intelligences correlate together, meaning that they are far better
understood using a hierarchical model, with general intelligence at the top (Castejon et al.,
2010). Even if Gardner’s intelligences were found to relate to school performance, it would
be necessary to ensure that this was not just because of the effects of g. It would also be
necessary to ensure that the relationship between his ‘intelligences’ and performance was
causal.
Alloway (Alloway and Passolunghi, 2011; Alloway and Alloway, 2010) has argued that
working memory predicts some aspects of school performance over and above intelligence.
This is an interesting idea which needs to be replicated, as some of their fndings are unusual.
For example, a test of vocabulary only correlated 0.36 with reading ability (which was used
as a measure of school performance and which was administered at the same time). Some
might also quibble about the measures of IQ which were chosen; these correlated far more
weakly with the working memory tests than is usual (Giofre et al., 2013).
Personality
Correlations between personality traits and measures of school performance tend to be much
smaller than the correlations found with g, and so this work will be summarised only briefy. A
meta-analysis of the correlations between personality and academic performance at primary
school (aged under 11), secondary school (ages 11–18) school and at university by Poropat
(2009) shows that Conscientiousness affects academic performance at all ages, although the
correlations are not huge (between 0.21 and 0.28) which indicates that this trait explains less
than 8% of the person-to-person variation in academic performance. Surprisingly, perhaps,
agreeableness predicted performance at primary school (ρ=0.3) as did Extraversion (ρ=0.18)
and low Neuroticism (ρ=–0.20) but these had virtually zero infuence for the older individuals.
Openness had some infuence on the performance of the young children (ρ=0.24), a little
infuence on the performance of the older children (ρ=0.12) but no infuence on the tertiary
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students’ performance. In summary, Conscientiousness matters at all ages. Agreeableness and

low Neuroticism matter in primary school. The infuence of Openness declines with age. All the
other infuences were small (albeit statistically signifcant) and so are of little practical importance.
Why do these correlations arise? The impact of Conscientiousness on academic performance
is perhaps to be expected (care doing coursework, homework and paying attention in class,
perhaps), but it is not quite so obvious why low Neuroticism and high Agreeableness are
important for the younger children. Perhaps low Neuroticism refects greater self-confdence –
a greater degree of belief in one’s academic ability, which encourages students to engage with
learning. By the time that they reach secondary school children may know their academic
capability, and so self-belief is replaced by a realistic appraisal of their abilities. However all
this is mere speculation. Openness to experience used to be called ‘intellect’ and includes items
tapping curiosity, interest in abstract ideas and so on, all of which sound as if they may lead
to greater engagement with learning. The steady decline in the relationship between educational
performance and openness as pupils age may perhaps show that the educational system fails
to reward curiosity as pupils get older!
Does trait emotional intelligence (trait-EI) infuence school performance? The TEIQue
seems to be related to bullying and other anti-social behaviour in school rather than academic
performance (Mavroveli et al., 2009; Mavroveli and Sanchez-Ruiz, 2011; Petrides et al.,
2004) although Petrides et al. found that there was a substantial interaction between general
intelligence and trait-EI when predicting performance. Low-intelligence children with low
trait-EI performed particularly badly academically; low-intelligence children with high trait-EI
performed better than one might expect. However trait-EI had little or no infuence on the
academic performance of the more intelligent pupils.
Mancini et al. (2017) also found that trait-EI had little impact on academic performance.
They performed a hierarchical regression, and found that overall trait-EI added nothing to
the level of prediction offered by measures of intelligence, gender, personality and peer
acceptance/rejection. This suggests that trait-EI does not predict academic performance, which
was also the conclusion from a longitudinal study reported by Qualter et al. (2012, 2017).
These authors measured both forms of EI, personality and general intelligence in a sample
of 12 year old children and recorded their academic performance four years later. The results
are unusual in that male and female students showed rather different patterns of relationships.
For male students, trait-EI (particularly stress management and adaptability) correlated with
academic performance at age 16; correlations were in the order of 0.2. For female students,
these correlations were far smaller. General intelligence was (unsurprisingly) by far the best
predictor of subsequent academic performance, but after allowing for the effects of general
intelligence, ability-EI also infuenced academic performance fve years later. Trait-EI had a
small infuence for boys only. There were also small but statistically signifcant interactions,
and high ability-EI slightly raised the academic performance of low ability males and females.
It seems that some aspects of trait-EI may predict academic achievement to a small extent for
boys, but not for girls. The reasons for this are unclear, the work needs to be replicated and
the effects are in any case small.
As far as university students are concerned, one study shows that students who are high
on trait-EI (measured by the TEIQue) seem to outperform those low on trait-EI after
controlling for intelligence and the Big Five personality traits (Sanchez-Ruiz et al., 2013).
However on reading this paper carefully it is clear that the scales which were used to measure
the Big Five (consisting of two items per trait) had a great deal of measurement error associated
with them; see the discussion of low reliability in Chapter 8. This study may have erroneously
suggested that shown that EI adds to the predictive power of personality traits only because
personality was not measured very well. Richardson et al. (2012) performed a meta-analysis
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which linked EI and academic performance at university. This analysis was performed on a
mixture of ability-EI and trait-EI measures, which is unfortunate. The 14 studies which linked
emotional intelligence to university performance suggested that the correlation was
approximately 0.17 – again, a rather small effect.
Thus there is not much evidence that trait-EI has a substantial infuence academic
performance. But even if it did, we need a clear, coherent and testable model of why such a
link might be expected. Perhaps EI shows up in manipulating teachers into giving higher
marks than they otherwise would; it would presumably be possible to test this by determining
whether high-EI students are given higher marks when their identities are known to the
marker than when work is marked ‘blind’. However I do not know of any studies which have
attempted this. Perhaps trait-EI improves the cooperation of other students when performing
group work? In the absence of decent theories perhaps it is unreasonable to expect trait-EI to
predict educational outcomes.
Work psychology
Psychological tests are widely used in personnel selection, personnel development, etc. and as
well as the personality traits discussed earlier in this book, scales have been developed to measure
leadership potential, employee motivation and so on; these are generally viewed as traits, rather
than states, as discussed below. Tests are also used for personal development purposes; for
example, by knowing her own strengths and weaknesses, a senior employee may better decide
which types of activity should sensibly be delegated. However, as this involves one-to-one
counselling, it is beyond the scope of this book. Texts such as Aamodt (2016) give a broad
overview of what this branch of psychology entails. As one of the major applications of
individual differences is in the area of personnel selection, we will focus mainly on this. It is
important to note that in several countries it is only legal to use a test for selection purposes if
test scores can be shown to be related to some important aspect(s) of job performance.
The use of personality tests for employee selection and other purposes is still controversial,
because of the problems caused by faking; job applicants may well be able to identify
undesirable characteristics and play these down when flling in personality questionnaires, as
mentioned in Chapter 8. Care must also be taken to ensure that the tests are not biased against
members of minority groups. Furthermore, in the UK at least, equality laws require that
selection tests must not show any differences between the genders or racial groups, even if
these are genuine and not due to bias. Sometimes there are real differences in the test scores
of males and females, as with Eysenck’s psychoticism scale where males typically score at least
a third of a standard deviation higher than females (Eysenck et al., 1985). A test such as this,
which shows appreciable gender differences, presumably could not be legally used for selection
purposes, even if the reason for sex differences is reasonably well understood and the problems
with faking could be resolved.
Tests are rarely used in isolation. It is normal to use ability and personality tests as one of
the frst stages of a selection process, because they are generally cheap to administer. The
candidates who perform best then progress to other, more expensive, parts of the assessment
process, such interviews and background checks.
Abilities and intelligence

One of the big success stories of psychology concerns the use of psychological tests for
personnel selection. The basic premise is simple. One administers a set of tests, the scores on
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which have previously been shown to predict some aspect of job performance, the idea being
that if one only selects the applicants with the higher scores on the tests, the quality of job
performance should rise. There have been two main types of study used to determine the link
between abilities and job performance. One can either measure the test scores of people in
various occupations, to establish if there is a link between intelligence (or any other ability)
and the type of employment towards which people gravitate. Or one can correlate scores on
tests with performance within a particular type of job. For example, one could determine
whether level of spatial ability (as measured by a psychometric test) is higher in military pilots
who perform well than in pilots who struggle to complete their fying training.
Devising a battery of selection tests

Before using a test of any kind for selection purposes it is necessary to ensure that it is valid
and free from bias, as described in Chapters 8 and 21. It is also common for several different
tests to be administered to job applicants, and the question then arises of how to combine
these various scores in order to best predict future performance. Two main approaches have
been followed, regression and multiple hurdle.
The multiple hurdle approach is the simplest. It involves setting a minimum standard for
each test; an applicant is accepted only if they exceed this score for each and every test. There
are three problems with this approach.
l It is diffcult to establish a particular cutoff for each test. For example, you need to justify
why you think that a score of 38 on a test measuring spatial ability is acceptable whilst a
score of 37 is not. One could gather test data from groups of people who are in post, and
also measure their performance. This might show that (for example) the performance of
engineers with scores below 38 on the spatial ability test is markedly lower than those who
score higher. Or one can play around with different levels of cutoffs to fnd those which
would have selected the best employees and rejected the worst, had the tests been used
when they were selected. However it would be rare to fnd a clean cutoff such as this given
that test scores tend to follow a bell-shaped distribution.
l These cutoffs need to be set at a fairly low level (typically a standard deviation below the
mean) if the number of tests is large and the correlations between them are small. Otherwise
almost everyone will fail to meet the cutoff standard for at least one test, and virtually no
one will be selected.
l No test is perfectly accurate (reliabilities are often considerably less than 1) which means
that some people who should exceed the cutoff for a test actually fail to do so – and are
therefore automatically rejected.
A regression approach is the other option. Here poor performance at one test can be
compensated by good performance at another. An index score is calculated for each person
which looks something like the following:
Index = 11 + 0.1 × Spatial Ability test score + 0.2 × Verbal Ability test score
The three numbers in the above equation (11, 0.1 and 0.2) come from the multiple regression
procedure and maximise the predictive power of the index score. In other words, these values
are chosen so that the correlation between the test score and the performance score is likely to
be as large as possible, based on the test results of the group of people who are already in post.
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Differential aptitude testing is another widely used technique. It might be possible to

analyse the skills required for a particular job by watching employees in action, and
determining which traits and which aspects of knowledge the job requires. One can also
estimate the level of each skill required. An air traffc controller and a driver presumably
both need good spatial skills, but the air traffc controller would probably require a higher
level of them. To see an example of the traits measured in real life, search for ‘Canadian
Forces Aptitude Test – Practice Version’ (https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/dnd-mdn/
documents/jobs/20170906-preparing-for-aptitude-test.pdf). If one repeats the job analysis
for several different traits or skills one can draw up a profle of the skills needed for a
particular job, as shown in Figure 18.2. These data are hypothetical, as I was unable to trace
genuine skill profles.
Having measured these abilities in a sample of people, it should be possible to draw up a
‘skills profle’ for each person. For the example shown in Figure 18.2, someone whose levels
verbal/spatial/problem-solving skills is 3/4/2 fts the profle for ‘driver’ quite well.
This sounds straightforward but in practice there is a major problem – g. This tends to
make people’s ability profle fairly fat, as people tend to perform at a similar level on all ability
tests. Indeed the Canadian Forces Aptitude Test correlates over 0.7 with a standard ability
test (Vanderpool and Catano, 2008). It will thus be rare to fnd someone whose profle shows
many peaks or troughs. This presents problems for profle matching – since the whole purpose
of developing profles for various jobs is to identify different patterns of skills for each job –
profles which may have many peaks and troughs. The technique can however work better
for personality traits, where there is no strong general factor (Kulas, 2013).
Given the problems with differential aptitude testing, we frst consider whether and why
general intelligence relates to job performance.
Figure 18.2 Hypothetical levels of abilities/skills required for four

occupations
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Intelligence levels of various

occupational groups
The literature on the frst type of study goes back a long way and some interesting information
came from the assessment of recruits in the Second World War. Soldiers who were recruited
into the United States Army had their general intelligence assessed and this was related to their
prior occupation as shown in the left-hand section of Table 18.1. Another way of establishing
the relationship between occupation and intelligence is simply to test a sample of the
population. This happens each time an IQ test is standardised and the data in the right-hand
section of Table 18.1 are from Reynolds et al. (1987).
The differences between these groups are statistically highly signifcant: it seems that
general intelligence is related to the status of one’s occupation. It is, however, important to
also look at the standard deviations. These tend to be lower for the ‘high status’ occupations
(particularly in the 1945 data), suggesting that there is quite a narrow range of scores on either
side of the mean, whereas the standard deviations are larger for low status jobs. Why? One
possibility might be that in order to succeed as a lawyer, teacher, etc., everyone has a similar
degree of intelligence, whereas it is possible that some intelligent individuals did not have the
opportunity to study in order to become professionals and so may have ended up in manual
jobs such as mining or driving trucks, perhaps because they needed to leave school as early
as possible in order to help to support their family fnancially. Another meta-analysis, which
Table 18.1 General intelligence for various occupational groups from

Harrell and Harrell (1945) as cited by Schmidt and Hunter
(2004) and from Reynolds et al. (1987)
Occupation Mean IQ Standard Occupation Mean IQ Standard

deviation deviation
Lawyer 128 11 Professional 111 13

and technical
Teacher 123 13
Clerk 117 13 Manager, 104 13
clerical, sales
Electrician 109 15 Skilled 99 13
workers
Plumber 102 16
Tractor driver 99 19 Semi-skilled 93 14
workers
Cook 97 21
Truck driver 96 20
Farmhand 91 21 Unskilled 89 15
workers
Miner 91 20
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produces similar conclusions about the substantial correlation between childhood intelligence
and career status, is given by Strenze (2007).
It is tempting to look at Table 18.1 and infer that in order to become a lawyer one needs
a high level of intelligence. However, this may not be correct. As we saw in Figure 18.1 there
is a substantial causal link between general intelligence and educational attainment; parental
occupational status did not greatly infuence educational attainment. Children who obtain the
highest educational qualifcations will thus tend to be the most intelligent, not the most
affuent. And, of course, to enter training as a lawyer, teacher, etc., one needs to have good
academic record. Although there is a substantial correlation between intelligence and the
status of one’s job, this might only happen because intelligence is one of the factors that affect
the number of academic qualifcations obtained and academic qualifcations are the passport
to training courses for the professions.
Just because certain professional training courses require high educational qualifcations
to enter them and high levels of intelligence are required to obtain these qualifcations, it does
not follow that high levels of intelligence are necessary to function well within the profession.
Suppose that medical schools only selected individuals with large feet (analogous to high
academic achievements). After a few years, the average foot size of doctors would be well
above that of the general population (cf. Table 18.1). But it does not follow that it is necessary
to have large feet to function effectively as a doctor.
Intelligence and performance with

each occupational group
Given that colleges and universities tend to select individuals on the basis of their
educational qualifcations, we need another way of testing the relationship between
intelligence and occupational performance. The obvious thing is to look at correlations
within each job. For example, is there a correlation between general ability and effectiveness
of managers? Are the most effective delivery drivers the most intelligent delivery drivers,
for example? Schmidt and Hunter (2004) famously performed a meta-analysis showing the
correlations between general intelligence and job performance based on many thousands
of studies.
One obvious problem is knowing which studies to combine. For example, is it reasonable
to bundle all types of job together? It could be that g matters for jobs that require intellectual
effort (such as computer programming) but not for managing people or manual work.
Hunter and Hunter categorised jobs as shown in Table 18.2 and found that, in all cases, a
simple test of general intelligence predicted all types of job performance rather well. They
also analysed the effectiveness of other measures, such as interviews, references and academic
qualifcations. These were considerably less useful than ability tests and these authors
demonstrate that using ability tests (rather than random selection of job applicants) saved
the US government alone over $15 billion a year in improved productivity. The humble
ability tests even worked better than letting someone try out the job and then deciding
whether to hire them based on their performance and were more useful predictors than
previous experience on the job.
Schmidt and Hunter (2004) have extended this work and the correlations between g and
job performance from 12 meta-analyses are shown in Table 18.3. (Several military meta-
analyses are included because they used different criteria: e.g., technical profciency or general
soldiering performance.) The two columns show the correlations between g and performance
on the job itself and the correlation between g and performance in training.
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Table 18.2 Correlations between general ability (g) and job performance
for nine classes of occupation (adapted from Table 1 of
Hunter and Hunter, 1984)
Job Correlation between job performance and g
Manager 0.53
Clerk 0.54
Salesperson 0.61
Protective professions worker 0.42
Service worker 0.48
Trades and crafts worker 0.46
Elementary industrial worker 0.37
Vehicle operator 0.28
Sales clerk 0.27

Why do you think the correlations between g and the various occupations
shown in Table 18.2 vary?
Table 18.3 Correlations between g and performance within various jobs

(from Schmidt and Hunter, 2004)
In job In training
Medium complexity 0.51 0.57

Clerical 0.52 0.71
Law enforcement 0.38 0.76
Military – enlisted 0.63
First-line supervisors 0.64
Administrative clerks 0.67
Computer programmers 0.73
Refnery workers 0.31 0.50
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Why are ability tests so good at predicting

job performance?
Intelligence has a causal infuence on the type of job that one obtains some years later, even
after controlling for variables such as parental social class (SES) and parental education. Von
Stumm et al. (2010) looked at the intelligence and social backgrounds of 6000 boys aged 11
and followed them up 35–40 years later. Their analysis showed that:
l g infuenced educational qualifcations (0.46)

l educational qualifcations infuenced SES later in life (0.32), and this infuence was greater
than the infuence of the parents’ SES on the children’s SES (0.20)
l there was a large direct link between intelligence (measured at age 11) and SES in later life
(0.29).
Intelligence thus infuences SES in two ways: directly, and via educational qualifcations – a
fnding which is similar to the Duncan et al. (1972) study shown in Figure 18.1.
Why do ability tests prove so successful? There is actually quite a degree of misunderstanding
about this. Following my ‘Test the Nation’ television shows, which administered a standardised
intelligence test over the television and internet, comments on the BBC website showed clearly
that the public at large believed quite frmly (and without any evidence) that because the sorts
of problem that feature in tests of intelligence or other cognitive abilities do not resemble the
sorts of problem that people solve in everyday life, intelligence tests can be of no use in
predicting job performance. The assumption that they make is that ability tests can only work
because the items in these tests form a sample of the sorts of problem that people encounter
at work.
Some occupational psychologists (‘organisational psychologists’) do indeed put together
samples of work like this and assess how well applicants cope with it. For example, applicants
for a customer services management position might be asked to deal with a (simulated) angry
customer on the telephone, work out how to resolve a dispute about holiday dates and prepare
a summary of sales fgures and calculate bonuses. This approach, sometimes called the ‘work
sample’ or ‘work basket’ approach, is totally atheoretical, requires that different tests must
be devised for each position (which is expensive) and also cannot logically predict how an
individual is likely to perform should the requirements of the job change or should they be
promoted into another role within the organisation.
This sort of thinking is shown in Figure 18.3. Here the orange boxes at the top represent
variables that might be related to the outcomes shown on the right. An line with an arrow
indicates a direct relationship, so according to this model, genetic makeup, nutrition and
socioeconomic status (SES) all have a direct infuence on both health and school performance.
They also all infuence general ability, g. But there is no line with an arrow showing that g
infuences either school performance or health. So, according to this model, although g might
be correlated with educational performance, for example, it would be quite wrong to ever try
to use g in order to explain why children differ in educational performance. It implies that g
exists, but it is of academic interest only, and does not infuence any important real-world
behaviours.
The model shown in Figure 18.4 is an alternative explanation. It suggests that genes,
nutrition and socioeconomic status may directly infuence a person’s level of general
intelligence, g, and that their level of g infuences both their performance on other ability tests
(green boxes) and various aspects of real-life behaviour (yellow boxes). Rather than there
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Figure 18.3 Model where genes, nutrition and SES infuence real-life
behaviour (school performance and health) and also general
intelligence (g). g infuences performance on ability tests
(green boxes) but does not mediate the relationship between
genes (etc.) and real life. (Curves with two arrows represent
correlations.)
Figure 18.4 Model where genes, nutrition and SES infuence intelligence (g)
and g infuences performance on both ability tests (visualisation,
etc.) and real life (health, school performance, etc.)
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being direct links between (say) genetic makeup and educational performance as shown in
Figure 18.3, this model suggests that genes infuence g and g infuences behaviour.
This has implications for how tests should be used to predict behaviour. If g has a causal
infuence on real-world behaviour, then to predict real-world behaviour (e.g., a child’s likely
level of educational attainment, or a person’s job performance) then one should use any
convenient, accurate test of g. Unlike the work basket approach, it matters not a jot that
the material in that test looks different to the performance that one is trying to predict.
According to Figure 18.4, it is perfectly sensible to measure g using tests of abstract thinking
(analogies, etc.) to predict educational performance or job performance, even though the
items in that test do not look as if they are relevant. The items may well not resemble
anything which is taught in school, or anything which resembles what a person will do at
work, yet they should still prove potent predictors of performance. The work of Schmidt
and Hunter (2004) suggests that this model is appropriate for occupational performance,
at any rate.
According to the frst view, to determine how good a pilot an applicant will be, they should
logically be taken to a fight simulator, given some standard training and then evaluated to
see how well they can perform. According to the second view, it would be suffcient to give
some paper-and-pencil or more abstract tests (e.g., asking people to fnd their way through a
life-size maze, having been shown a map beforehand).
A paper by Thorndike (1985) makes an interesting point. Suppose that a test of spatial
ability is a potent predictor of success in a particular job. This could be because spatial ability
is a useful skill for the worker to possess. Or it could be because spatial ability correlates with
general intelligence, g, and high levels of g are important for job success. Thurstone’s analyses,
and some later analyses by Schmidt and Hunter (2004), show that the data strongly support
the second option. These analyses show that the only reason that ability tests correlate with
occupational performance is because they all measure g to some extent: this is the ‘active
ingredient’ that runs through each and every ability test that allows them to predict
performance.
Schmidt and Hunter conclude that: ‘[W]eighted combinations of specifc aptitudes (e.g.,
verbal, spatial or quantitative aptitude) tailored to individual jobs do not predict job
performance better than GMA [General Mental Ability – g] measures alone, thus disconfrming
specifc aptitude theory’. This viewpoint suggests that detailed job analyses may be rather a
waste of time (as far as tests of cognitive ability are concerned, anyway) and that a good test
of general ability should be able to predict success at almost anything. Why, then, do employers
spend large amounts of money using tests which are specially developed for them, rather than
a cheap, well-validated test measuring g? The only answer seems to be a lack of familiarity
with the literature, the belief that the more money that is spent the better the product is likely
to be, and susceptibility to slick salesmanship.
Leadership effectiveness
Brief mention must be made of leadership ability that is not apparently measured by the
standard ability tests, but which is thought to be of great importance for the world of work.
The suggestion is that some individuals can inspire others to work hard and effectively, can
identify the various problems that arise within the organisation and develop effective and
appropriate solutions (perhaps varying their style of leadership depending on the nature of
the problem), and can plan effectively for the future. There have been many attempts made
to measure these skills, many involving rather straightforward questionnaires, as any literature
search will show.
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Leader effectiveness is generally measured through ratings, and these ratings correlate
substantially with the Big Five personality traits (Judge et al., 2002). According to this meta-
analysis, a good leader has above average scores on Extraversion, Openness, Conscientiousness
and a low Neuroticism score; Agreeableness did not seem to matter. However as the multiple
correlation was only 0.39, it is clear that leadership is not just (or even mainly) a mixture of
these personality traits, but is something unique – assuming that the ratings used to measure
leadership are themselves accurate.
An alternative approach was followed by Lock et al. (2015) whose Leadership Judgement
Indicator allows individuals to demonstrate whether they can identify effective solutions to
problems; it also shows the extent to which they prefer to use four leadership styles: delegation,
direction, consensus, consultation.
An example will make it clearer. This is taken from the publicity material for the Leadership
Judgement Indicator (LJI) with permission:
You have a meeting with a member of your team arranged for tomorrow. You have led
the team for three months, a role for which this person applied. An important project
has landed on your desk for which you will need her experience and support. The
problem is that she now appears to have little relish for her work, a quality for which
she was previously renowned. For a variety of good reasons you want her to lead the
project, although you are prepared to do so yourself if you have to. Please rate each of
the following options for their appropriateness using the 1–5 rating scale shown below.
a. Tell her that you understand how she must have been feeling but insist she now puts
these feelings behind her and leads this project.
b. Ask her to tell you how she is feeling, listen, but reserve the right to insist that she
does not dwell on the past and leads the project.
c. Ask her to describe how she is feeling, listen and then come to a joint decision about
leadership.
d. Tell her what you have noticed and give her some time to refect on who should lead
and then come back to you. Go along with what she decides.
(1) Totally inappropriate (2) Inappropriate (3) Unsure (4) Appropriate (5) Highly
appropriate.
(Lock et al., 2015)
The LJI consists of a number of scenarios like this, each of which has been administered
to experts – chief executives of major organisations – who have been shown to generally agree
about the merits of each of the possible strategies. The similarity of the candidate’s responses
to those of the experts is taken as a measure of how well they can identify the most promising
solutions to each of these intractable problems. The problems themselves have been chosen
so that a variety of different leadership strategies are appropriate. Some will require the leader
to take a ‘hands on’ approach, while others will beneft from delegation, consultation or
working in cooperation with others. The advantage of this approach seems to be that it allows
a more nuanced assessment of leadership skills than a simple rating, and tests how well
individuals can identify appropriate leadership strategies in various situations. It also allows
stylistic preferences to be measured; for example, some people may never choose to delegate.
Personality
The Big Five personality factors have been correlated with job performance in several studies.
Barrick and Mount’s (1991) meta-analysis shows the correlations between each of the Big Five
417
traits and job performance for professionals, police, managers, sales staff and skilled/semi-
skilled workers. They are uniformly unimpressive. Conscientiousness is the most predictive
trait, but its average correlation with job performance is just 0.13. (The authors perform some
corrections which massage this up to 0.22, which is still far lower than for general ability.)
The next most useful trait is Extraversion (average correlation 0.08).
Multiple regression can be used to determine how the fve scores (or the 30 facet scores)
should be combined in order to best predict performance. Ones et al. (2007) summarise some
of these relationships, which once again show that the Big Five personality factors (combined)
are not nearly as useful for predicting job performance as are tests of general ability. For
example, the multiple correlation with overall job performance is about 0.12.
Faking may be a problem for personality inventories such as the NEO-PI(R). The question
is whether it is possible to overcome this issue. Some tests that have been developed for
occupational selection ask participants to choose between two items from different scales that
have previously been matched for social desirability by simply showing groups of people the
items when the test is being developed and asking them to rate how socially desirable each of
them is. Then two items from different scales that are equal in terms of social desirability are
put together as alternatives for a test item. This should mean that social desirability will not
infuence which one is chosen.
A typical item might be:
If I won the lottery, my frst priority would be to:

i throw a big party, or
ii visit exotic parts of the world.
I made up this item, so it has not been validated, but you can see that the frst option may
indicate Extraversion, while the second one might measure Openness to Experience. To score
this sort of test, one simply adds up the number of times that each scale is chosen. There are
problems with the analysis and interpretation of these ‘ipsatised’ tests, because the total score
for each person (summed across all scales) is always equal to the number of items in the test
which makes factor analysis and the calculation of coeffcient alpha inappropriate (see Chapter
19). Some tests constructed this way such as the Occupational Personality Questionnaire
claim to have considerable success in predicting job performance (Robertson and Kinder,
1993). Although the authors score the test rather differently and claim that it measures their
own model of personality, it seems to measure the Big Five personality traits (Beaujouan,
2000). However major psychometric problems have been identifed with this test which led
Meade (2004) to conclude that these issues may ‘pose too great a threat to the validity of the
selection tools to make it a useful instrument for selection on a trait-by-trait basis’.
Several tests of socially desirable responding have been developed. The Marlowe-Crowne scale
(Crowne and Marlowe, 1960) and the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (Paulhus,
1984) are widely used and effective; the items are reproduced in the journal articles. These can
be used to ‘design out’ social desirability when the test is being constructed by correlating scores
on each item with scores on the social desirability scale: items with large correlations should be
removed and so will never appear in the version of the test that is published.
An alternative procedure involves including a social desirability scale with the main test.
The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire has a ‘lie scale’ which does exactly this: a set of
questions measuring social desirability is scored alongside the three main Eysenckian
personality factors. Costa and McCrae (1997) argue (without much evidence) that social
desirability scales are of limited use and so the NEO-PI(R) does not include any form of
dissimulation index, although Schinka (Schinka et al., 1997; Young and Schinka, 2001)
418
developed some, based on responses to the more socially desirable items in all scales of the
NEO-PI(R). However the problem remains of what to do with applicants who appear to be
giving socially desirable responses. Should they automatically be dropped from the selection
process? Is this fair and/or legal?
Reid-Seiser and Fritzsche (2001) have studied whether individuals who gave highly socially
desirable scores on the NEO-PI(R) when being selected for a real job – and so who may have
been trying to give a good impression of themselves – performed any worse on the job than
did applicants who appeared to be more honest. Surprisingly, perhaps, they did not, although
the data in this paper show that this is probably because the NEO was itself only a very weak
predictor of job success.
We earlier noted that scores on tests measuring ability-EI are strongly correlated with
intelligence, and so when scrutinising correlations between (say) school performance and
ability-EI it is important to correct for the fact that intelligence might affect both of them. The
same sort of thing applies to trait-EI, only here it is necessary to correct for the infuence of
personality. Some studies (e.g., Dawda and Hart, 2000) fnd correlations between trait-EI and
the Big Five personality factors all in excess of 0.4. and we noted in Chapter 7 that van der
Linden argued that trait-EI is not much more than a mixture of the Big Five traits. We really
need to ask whether knowing a person’s level of trait-EI allows us to predict their behaviour
any better than if we just knew their levels of the main personality traits.
Van Rooy and Viswesvaran (2004) performed a meta-analysis based on 60 studies. Several
substantial correlations were found: for example, that there was a correlation of about 0.23
between scores on trait-EI measures and work performance (without correcting for individual
differences in personality). Joseph et al. (2015) summarised the more recent literature linking
trait-EI to job performance, and concluded that the correlation between trait-EI and job
performance is typically 0.47, whilst ability-EI is much less useful (r = 0.17).
Adding a measure of trait-EI to scores on the Big Five personality traits improved the
prediction of job performance by 7–14% (Joseph and Newman, 2010; O’Boyle et al., 2011),
although not all studies suggest that trait-EI brings anything new to the table. Joseph et al.
(2015) demonstrate that if we know people’s levels of ability-EI, self-effcacy (belief in their
ability), general intelligence and self-rated performance in addition to their scores on the Big
Five traits of Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Neuroticism adding trait-EI to the mix does
not help to predict supervisors’ ratings of work performance. This study once again shows
that the correlation between personality traits and trait-EI are often very substantial indeed
(e.g., 0.53 with emotional stability and 0.46 with Extraversion, based on samples of over 5000
people). Thus its authors conclude that trait-EI correlates with job performance simply
because it is a mixture of existing well-known traits, each of which is related to performance,
rather than being a ‘new’ personality trait in its own right.
Overall, it is diffcult to be enthusiastic about the use of personality questionnaires for
personnel selection, because they generally do not appear to predict performance very well.
Conscientiousness and trait-EI may be exceptions to this generalisation, but even these should
probably be administered alongside tests of cognitive abilities, rather than in place of them.
Sports psychology
Intelligence and executive functioning
There is a surprising lack of research into the link between general intelligence/IQ and sports
performance. One might expect there to be a positive correlation between these variables,
419
particularly for sports which involve rapid reactions (fencing, squash, martial arts, etc.) whose
players do indeed show fast reaction times (see the review in Hulsdunker et al., 2016). This
omission is surprising given that reaction time and intelligence are correlated as discussed in
Chapter 13. Performance at sports which involve planning or visualisation (e.g., soccer, motor
racing) and in which low-level visual or cognitive processing demonstrably play an important
role (e.g., Craig et al., 2009) might also beneft from high g.
The relationship might work the other way around too, as it is frequently asserted that
sports and ftness training improve cognitive skills. Although this seems to be true for the
elderly and those recovering from strokes (Voss et al., 2011), the effects of acute exercise on
cognitive functioning are otherwise rather small (Chang et al., 2012; Daugherty et al., 2018).
There are some studies linking executive functioning and sport performance (e.g., Jacobson
and Matthaeus, 2014) although sample sizes tend to be small and a meta-analysis by Voss
et al. (2010) concludes that more work should be done exploring the links between such ‘higher-
level’ cognitive abilities and sporting performance. Executive functioning is a broad term
covering many cognitive operations, such as decision-making, problem solving and the ability
to inhibit responses, and some studies fnd that executive function is virtually indistinguishable
from g (van Aken et al., 2016) whilst others do not; it all depends on how ‘executive function’
is defned, for some tasks that are used to assess it are more strongly related to g than are others
(Brydges et al., 2012). This makes it diffcult to tell whether g has a link to sporting performance.
Many of the older studies relating g to sports performance lack control groups, or use small
samples. One exception is a study of 700 professional (American) football players explored
whether g was related to how well these athletes performed (Lyons et al., 2009). No appreciable
correlation was found, but as all these elite athletes were performing at a very high level, the
lack of variation in performance data might be a problem.
Personality
There seem to be three main issues in this area: does personality infuence whether or not one
participates in sport, does it infuence one’s choice of sport, and does it infuence the level of
achievement in one’s chosen sport?
To address the frst issue, it has been found that Extraversion and Conscientiousness
correlate about 0.2 with the amount of exercise which people undertake (Rhodes and Smith,
2006) although as Allen et al. (2013) observe, exercise is not the same as sport. The former
might be performed for health reasons, and sport for love of competition. The Allen et al.
review observes that those who participate in sport tend to show higher levels of Extraversion
and Openness and lower levels of Neuroticism than those who do not.
Does personality infuence which sport one chooses? Sensation seeking is frequently linked
to participation in risky sports such as base-jumping (leaping from high places wearing a
parachute) although as Cohen et al. (2018) note, some sports (such as kayaking or boxing)
are not generally perceived as being particularly dangerous, even though in reality they are.
People’s perception of what constitutes a ‘risky sport’ is not particularly accurate, and studies
which correlate objective measures of risk with personality may thus need to be interpreted
with caution.
McEwan et al. (2019) show that when compared to those who do not play sport, or who
play something safe (e.g., golf), those who participate in thrilling sports show high levels of
Sensation Seeking, Extraversion and Impulsivity and low levels of Neuroticism. However as
some of the items in the Sensation Seeking Scale ask about participation in exciting activities
such as parachute jumping, some caution is needed when interpreting this work; parachute
jumpers will have to agree with such items, which will lead to the over-estimation of the
420
relationship between sensation seeking and parachute jumping. These results are nevertheless
what one would expect given the description of these traits in Chapter 6 and 9.
One would also expect Extraversion to infuence whether one participates in team sports
or individual sports, and this has been found to be the case (Eagleton et al., 2007).
Finally, just as with education and work, Conscientiousness seems to be a key determinant
of sporting success. For example, in female college soccer players Conscientiousness correlated
with performance as indicated by both coaches’ ratings and game statistics (Piedmont et al.,
1999) whilst low Neuroticism was also associated with better performance. Some of these
correlations were substantial (>0.4) and regression analysis showed that the fve factor model
of personality could explain 23% of variance in performance within this group. Similar results
have been found with other sports (e.g., Steca et al., 2018). However the precise mechanisms
involved are unclear. Does high Conscientiousness motivate some individuals to try to win,
so as not to let their team-mates down? Does it result in more assiduous attention to the
training regime? Does low Neuroticism mean that players react better to pressure and can
focus more on the game, rather than worrying about what might go wrong, or how the crowd
or their team-mates will feel about their performance? It is not obvious that these issues have
been explored. Or is it all biological – with personality determining one’s physiological
responses to stress, and hence one’s performance? There is a literature (Jonassaint et al., 2009;
Hughes et al., 2011) which suggests that this is possible, too. It has also been found that
Narcissism predicts anti-social behaviour in sport – for example, verbal abuse, or breaking
the rules by ‘dirty tackles’ and the like (Jones et al., 2017).
Allen and Laborde (2014) give a concise summery of the older literature linking personality
and sport for those who wish to follow up these issues and there is an extremely comprehensive
review of the literature by Allen et al. (2013) who note that although many of the effects seem
to be small, athletes seem to be more extraverted than non-athletes, and that team-players are
more extraverted than those who play individual sports. They note ‘that these are the most
noteworthy fndings after nearly 70 years of research is a little disappointing’.
Motivation
Several scales have been developed to measure motivation towards sport, for example the
Sport Motivation Scale (SMS; Pelletier et al., 1995) and the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory
(McAuley et al., 1989). There are others, too. The items in these questionnaires explore why
people practise sport; items include ‘for the excitement’, ‘for the pleasure of learning about
the sport’, ‘to keep in shape’, and so on. The SMS is designed to measure three aspects of
intrinsic motivation:
l Knowledge: pleasure of learning

l Accomplishments: mastering new skills
l Experiencing Stimulation: sensory pleasure and excitement
as well as three forms of extrinsic motivation:
l External Regulation: participating to receive praise or avoid criticism from others

l Introjection: participating to avoid feeling guilt or anxiety about one’s lack of ftness or
some other factor
l Identifcation: participating in order to grow and develop as a person.
There is also an amotivation scale, where athletes do not know why they continue to train.
421
This approach clearly

resembles Vallerand’s self-
determination theory discussed
in Chapter 16. Vallerand and
Losier (1999) suggest that
social factors, such as success
or failure and feedback from
others, affect one’s perception
of one’s own competence,
autonomy and relatedness
according to self-determination
theory. Autonomy seems to
mean perceiving that one is in
control, and can decide what
to do, whilst relatedness refers
to friendships and bonds with others. These self-perceptions are then hypothesised to infuence
motivation; for example, perceived competence is thought to infuence levels of intrinsic
motivation, whilst feedback which stresses the need to win at all costs (rather than ‘doing the
best that one can’) may lead to extrinsic motivation. These forms of motivation in turn are
thought to affect various aspects of performance, such as persistence, sportsmanship and
feelings of happiness, and intrinsic motivation seems to lead to better performance than does
extrinsic motivation.
The logic of this approach seems to be that if I succeed when playing a sport I come to
believe that I am good at it, and this supposedly leads me to develop intrinsic motivation
which in turn affects my enjoyment, persistence, etc. This is not my area of expertise, for the
self-perceptions are really the stuff of social psychology. However it seems strange that this
model does not try to explain why I chose to play the sport (or any sport) in the frst place.
Putting motivation as the third step in a sequence of events seems a little odd. However these
models seem to be widely used and well regarded in sports and social psychology.
Summary
This chapter has outlined some applications of individual differences research and demonstrated
the practical importance of this work. General ability, g, turns out to be particularly useful as
a predictor of real-life behaviour. Surprisingly, perhaps, the reason why ability tests predict
behaviour seems to be that they are all imperfect measures of g: for example, tests of spatial
ability are not just useful for predicting performance on tasks that require people to visualise
things. Thorndike’s work shows that g is the ‘active ingredient’ found in all tests which tends
to be responsible for the predictive power of that test in organisational psychology.
A consequence of this is that those tests which are the best measures of g and are thus the
most effective predictors of educational and work performance (for example) will not resemble
the sorts of tasks that students or workers perform. This point seems not to be grasped by
many professionals.
Multivariate genetic analysis shows that the genes which infuence g also infuence school
performance – both relationships being very substantial. This provides strong evidence for the
idea that the biological processes measured by intelligence tests are a major infuence on
school performance.
422
Conscientiousness is the personality trait which best predicts performance at work, school
or when playing sport – although in the frst two cases it is a far weaker predictor than general
intelligence. Trait emotional intelligence may perhaps be important for work, where it
modestly enhances the predictive power of an ability battery consisting of the Big Five
personality factors plus general intelligence.

Deary et al. (2007) give a clear account of a massive study linking intelligence to later school
performance; you may need to read the confrmatory factor analysis section of Chapter 19
frst, however. Ozer and Benet-Martinez (2006) give an excellent (if dated) overview of some
applications of personality assessment. The other obvious source is the classic Hunter work
on abilities and job performance (Hunter and Hunter, 1984; Schmidt and Hunter, 2004) or
Thorndike’s (1985) paper on the central importance of g as a predictor of job success. Kuncel
et al. (2010) give an excellent and non-technical account of some links between intelligence,
schooling and work performance – although they assume causation from correlations.
However apart from the behaviour-genetic papers, none of the references shown below is
particularly technical.
SAQ 18.1
To test whether schooling infuences education, the sensible strategy would
involve measuring the intelligence of groups of children, some of whom
have attended school and some of whom have not. Of course, these groups
should be as similar as possible. (It would make no sense testing the ability
of 18 year olds, some of who left school at 18 and others who went to
college, as these could well have self-selected on the basis of intelligence
and so the fnding that the older students are more intelligent would not
imply that college has made them so.) There are, however, two types of
study that may prove useful here. Some children in Holland did not attend
school for 18 months during the Second World War and their IQ was then
found to be fve points lower than the norm, suggesting that schooling may
infuence intelligence (De Groot, 1951). However, (a) after a few years the
scores returned to their expected level and (b) these children may have
suffered in other ways from the effects of warfare (malnutrition, etc.).
Another source of evidence considers the variation in IQ between schools of
differing quality (after controlling for SES, etc.). The rationale for this
approach is that if schools truly infuence IQ, the better schools should
produce highly intelligent children and the worst schools should produce
children who are less intelligent than one would expect. According to Jencks
(1972), this is simply not the case.
423
SAQ 18.2
I would argue that, for fairness, the system that should be used ought to be
the one that shows the highest validity: in other words, the one with the
highest correlation between test/exam performance and performance at
university or college. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find many recent
data on this for the UK system. However, a system such as the SAT seems to
have advantages in that it:
l is consistent nationally as opposed to having several different examination
boards, which might set papers differing in difficulty
l measures potential (g) as well as attainment
l may perhaps be easier and more reliable to score (as at least partly
multiple choice).
Contrariwise, some might argue that:
l the idea of a national syllabus is perhaps too restrictive
l if minority groups perform poorly on the cognitive ability section of the
SAT, this part of the test merits both scrutiny for bias and a political
decision about what to do about any group differences that are found
after accounting for bias.
SAQ 18.3
The most likely reason concerns the demands of the individual jobs. For
example, in a job that is largely manual, such as building, it is possible that
the only aspects of the job that require thought rather than strength might
be planning ahead (so that equipment, etc. is available when needed),
scheduling the order in which tasks should be performed, troubleshooting
when things go wrong, etc. By way of contrast, a managerial post may be
almost entirely cognitive. So, crudely put, the proportion of time that is spent
thinking might differ between jobs.
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Chapter 19
Performing and interpreting

factor analyses
Introduction
While Chapter 5 gave an overview of the basic principles of factor analysis, it deliberately
omitted some of the detail needed either to perform factor analyses or to understand the
results of published studies. In addition, some journal articles that employ factor analysis are
technically fawed so it is vital that one should be able to identify (and discount) such studies
when reviewing the literature.
Learning outcomes
l Tell whether a set of data is suitable for analysis using exploratory factor
analysis.
l Perform a factor analysis, using parallel analysis to determine the number
of factors to be rotated.
l Interpret the results from a factor analysis.
l Show a conceptual understanding of confrmatory factor analysis.
Although it is quite possible to perform small exploratory factor analyses by hand, and
older texts such as Cattell (1952) provide detailed instructions for doing so, such exercises
are best suited to the enthusiast (or masochist) who has several weeks to spare. The calculations
involved are lengthy and repetitious, so are best performed by computer. Statistical packages
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Performing and interpreting factor analyses
such as SPSS contain exploratory factor analysis routines that run seconds. However by far
the best package (for Windows users) is the Factor Program (Lorenzo-Seva and Ferrando,
2006) which may be downloaded free of charge. It offers important improvements over SPSS.
Confrmatory factor analyses (which will be described at the end of this chapter) requires
specialised packages. All of the analyses described here can also be performed in the
R-environment (R Core Team, 2013) – a free suite of statistical routines which can perform
just about any analyses; its disadvantage is that it is not user-friendly. Readers who need more
detail might like to read Chapters 9–12 of Cooper (2019).
Exploratory factor analysis

No matter whether the analysis is being performed using an abacus or a supercomputer, there
are eight basic stages involved in performing an exploratory factor analysis, each of which is
discussed in the following sections:
l Stage 1. Ensure that the data are suitable for factor analysis, and that the sample size is
large enough.
l Stage 2. Decide on the model – factor analysis or component analysis.
l Stage 3. Decide how many factors are needed to represent the data.
l Stage 4. If using factor (rather than component) analysis, estimate the communality of each
variable.
l Stage 5. Produce factors giving the desired communalities (factor extraction).
l Stage 6. Rotate these factors so that they provide a replicable solution (‘simple structure’).
l Stage 7. Optionally compute factor scores.
l Stage 8. Optionally perform hierarchical analyses, if appropriate.
These terms should be familiar from Chapter 5.

One of the problems with factor analysis is its power. The computer programs used will
almost always produce an answer of some kind and by trying to analyse the data using many
different techniques, taking out different numbers of factors and concentrating on different
subsets of variables, it is possible to pull something semi-plausible from the most ghastly study.
One occasionally encounters journal articles in which the technique has clearly been used in
a desperate attempt to salvage something from a poorly designed experiment. Thus it is vital
that those who use the technique or read the literature should have an understanding of the
design and execution of factor analytical studies. Nowhere is the computer scientists’ maxim
of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ more appropriate than in factor analysis, so the present chapter
begins with a look at the types of data which may usefully be factor analysed.
Suitability of data for factor analysis

Not all data can be factor analysed. Factor analysis may be appropriate if the following
criteria are fulflled.
1. None of the variables is categorical such as colour of hair (black/brown/red), country of

residence, voting preference or occupation. It is sometimes possible to choose codes for
categorical data that will convert them into some kind of scale that can legitimately be
factored. For example, support for a communist party may be coded as ‘1’, for a social
democratic party as ‘2’, for a conservative/republican party as ‘3’ and for a right-wing
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party as ‘4’. These numbers form a scale of ‘right-wingness’, which could legitimately be
factored.
2. Each variable has many possible values – for example, a score on a test where values can
range between 0 and 100, or (perhaps) a score on a 7-point Likert scale. Problems arise
when the number of possible values of a variable is small. Table 19.1 shows one common
case – where answers to ability items are scored as either correct or incorrect.
Table 19.1 Two-valued responses to two ability-test items. 0 indicates

that the item was answered incorrectly, and 1 that it was
answered correctly
Item 1 Item 2
Person 1 1 1
Person 2 0 0
Person 3 1 0
Person 4 1 0
When such items are correlated together, the correlation can only approach 1.0 if the
proportion of people scoring ‘1’ on Item 1 (its ‘diffculty’)1 is the same as the diffculty of
Item 2. Thus a small correlation will could mean that either:
l there is no relationship between items of similar diffculty, or

l the two items have widely differing diffculties.
It follows that if the usual (Pearson) correlations are factor analysed, the factors which
emerge will tend to contain items of similar diffculties, which are the only ones which
can correlate together. To circumvent this problem, the Factor program (Lorenzo-Seva
and Ferrando, 2006) calculates ‘dichotomous’ or ‘polytomous’ correlations. Polytomous
correlations should be calculated when the number of possible values of one or more of
the variables is fve or fewer. They should not be used where a variable is categorical, e.g.,
‘sex 1 = male, 2 = female’.
3. All the variables are (approximately) normally distributed, with outliers properly
identifed and dealt with; see, for example, Tabachnick and Fidell (2018). Skewed data
can be transformed if necessary; see, for example, Tabachnick and Fidell, or Howell
(2012).
4. The relationships between all pairs of variables are approximately linear, or at any rate
not obviously U-shaped or J-shaped.
5. The variables are independent. The easiest way to check this is to go through all of the
formulae and ensure that each measured variable affects no more than one score that is
being factor analysed. If individuals produce scores on four test items, it would be
permissible to create and factor new variables such as:
(score 1 + score 2) and (score 3 + score 4)

or (score 1 + score 2 – score 3) and (1 – score 4)
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but not (score 1 + score 2 + score 3) and (score 1 + score 4)

or (score 1) and (score 1 + score 2 + score 3 + score 4)
as in the last two cases, one of the observed test scores (‘score 1’) affects two of the
variables being factored.
One sometimes fnds scales where the answer to one item determines how other items
must be answered, for example:
Item 1 I am an optimist
Item 2 I generally look on the bright side
Item 3 I usually expect things to go badly
Someone who agrees with the frst item must surely also agree with the second and
disagree with the third – just because of the meanings of the words. The three items are
not independent, and so are bound to form a factor; I can see little or no point in gathering
data to show that they do so. However this is a minority view, and some psychologists
develop and interpret ‘scales’ built from items such as these.
It is not possible to factor analyse all the scores from any test where it is impossible for
a person to obtain an extremely high (or extremely low) score on all of its scales (known
as ‘ipsatised tests’), as all the scales of such tests are bound to be negatively correlated.
Advocates of these tests claim that it is possible simply to drop one of the scales before
factoring. However, the interpretation of the results will be affected by the (arbitrary) choice
of which scale to omit; see Cornwell and Dunlop (1994) if you encounter ipsatised data.
6. The correlation matrix shows several correlations above 0.3. If all the correlations are
tiny, then one should seriously question whether any factors are there to be extracted.
If the correlations are small because of the use of tests with low reliability, it may be
appropriate to correct for the effects of unreliability as shown by Guilford and Fruchter
(1978) among others. Likewise, if poor experimental design led to data being collected
from a group of restricted range (e.g., ability scores being obtained from a sample of
university students rather than from a sample of the general population), it might be
appropriate to correct the correlations for this using the formula of Dobson (1988) before
factor analysing. However, such pieces of psychometric wizardry should be used with
caution and are really no substitute for sound and thoughtful experimental design.
The Bartlett (1954) test of sphericity tests the hypothesis that all of the off-diagonal
correlations are zero and it is routinely computed by packages such as SPSS. However,
the test is very sensitive to sample size and minuscule correlations between variables from
a large sample will lead the test to indicate that factor analysis is appropriate. It is much
safer just to look at the correlation matrix.
7. Missing data are distributed randomly throughout the data matrix. It would not be wise
to factor analyse data where a proportion of the sample omitted to take complete blocks
of items. For example, some people may have taken tests A, B and C. Others may have
taken tests A and C only and others may have taken only tests B and C. Because of this,
it would not be legitimate to factor analyse these data, although several statistical
packages will do so without a murmur.
8. The sample size is large. Experts vary in their recommendations, but factor analysis
should not be attempted if the number of people is less than 100. Otherwise the
correlations computed from this sample of people will differ substantially from those that
would have been obtained from another sample, giving unreplicable results that are not
good approximations of what the relationship between the variables really is in the
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population. It used to be thought that it is also necessary to relate sample size to the
number of variables being analysed. For example, Nunnally (1978) advocates that there
should be at least ten times as many cases as variables. More recent studies, such as those
by Barrett and Kline (1981) and Guadagnoli and Velicer (1988), show that, as long as
there are more subjects than variables, the ratio of subjects to variables is not as important
as absolute sample size and the size of the factor loadings. Thus if the factors are well
defned (e.g., with loadings of 0.7, rather than 0.4), one needs a smaller sample to fnd
them. If the data being analysed are known to be highly reliable (e.g., test scores, rather
than responses to individual items), it should be possible to relax these guidelines
somewhat. However, attempts to factor analyse small sets of data (such as repertory grids)
are doomed to failure, as the large standard errors of the correlations ensure that the
factor solution will be both arbitrary and unreplicable.

A colleague is studying the mathematical skills of a sample of 100 11 year old
children as part of her project work. She has collected data on 120 test items,
each of which she has scored as being answered correctly or incorrectly. She
has also coded the county of residence for each person, and is keen to factor
analyse all of these responses in order to (re)discover the basic dimensions of
mathematical ability and to investigate any differences in these dimensions
from county to county. What advice would you offer her?
Factor analysis vs component analysis

One school of thought maintains that factor (rather than component) analysis should never
be used because of the diffculty in estimating communalities – the estimation of factor scores
also turns out to be surprisingly tricky. The second school of thought maintains that, as the
factor model is a priori much more likely to ft the data, any attempt to estimate communalities
is better than none. The principal components model, they would argue, is simply inappropriate
when applied to test items and other data which one would expect to contain unique variance.
Interested readers should see Velicer and Jackson (1990).
Tests for the number of factors

Several tests have been developed to help analysts to choose the ‘correct’ number of factors.
These tests require careful consideration – one cannot rely on computer packages to make
this important decision, as most of them (e.g., SPSS) use a technique that is known to be
fawed and fail to incorporate some of the more useful tests. Determining the number of
factors to be extracted is the most important decision that one has to make when conducting
a factor analysis. A faulty decision here can produce a nonsensical solution from even the
clearest set of data. There is no harm in trying several analyses based on differing numbers of
factors and in using several different tests to guide the choice of factors.
The frst guides are theory and past experience. One may sometimes want to use factor
analysis to ensure that a test is performing as expected when used within a different culture,
patient group or whatever. Confrmatory factor analysis can be used for this purpose (see
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later), but if exploratory factor analysis is preferred, the previous results can be used to guide
one in deciding how many factors to extract. If a (technically adequate) factor analysis of a
test in the USA revealed seven factors, any attempt to factor analyse the tests in another culture
should at least consider the seven-factor solution.
Theory and past practice are all very well, but most factor analyses are truly exploratory
in nature. The researcher will often have no good theoretical rationale for deciding how many
factors should be extracted and previous studies will sometimes be so technically fawed as to
be useless. There are a number of other tests that can be used in such circumstances, all of
which seek to determine the number of factors that should be extracted from a correlation
matrix. The problem is that few of them have been implemented in the computer packages
such as SPSS. Second, the various techniques do not always yield consistent results. One test
may point to six factors, another to eight and previous research to nine! In circumstances such
as this, it is safest to consider a number of solutions and check them for psychological
plausibility. Users should also consider whether:
l Increasing the number of factors increases the ‘simplicity’ of the solution (such as decreasing
the proportion loadings in the range of –0.4 to 0.4). If increasing the number of factors
does little or nothing to increase the simplicity of the solution, it is arguably of little value.
l Any large correlations between factors emerge when performing oblique rotations. These
can indicate that too many factors have been extracted and that two factors are trying to
pass through the same cluster of variables. Correlations between factors larger than around
0.5 could be regarded as suspect.
l Any well-known factors have split into two or more parts. For example, if myriad previous
studies show that a set of items form just one factor (e.g., Extraversion), yet they seem to
form two factors in your analysis, it is likely that too many factors have been extracted.
The Kaiser—Guttman criterion One of the oldest and simplest tests for the number of factors
is that described by Kaiser (1960) and Guttman (1954) and known as the ‘Kaiser–Guttman
criterion’. It has the advantage of being very straightforward. One simply performs a principal
components analysis on the data, extracting as many factors as there are variables, but without
performing an operation known as ‘rotation’ (to be discussed later). The eigenvalues are
calculated as usual by summing the squared loadings on each component. One then simply
counts how many eigenvalues are greater than 1.0 – this is the number of factors to be used.
There are many problems with this technique, the most obvious being its sensitivity to the
number of variables in the analysis. As each eigenvalue is simply the sum of the squared factor
loadings, if the number of variables is large, so too will be the eigenvalue. A test for the
number of factors should really give the same result whether or not there are four or
40 variables representing each factor and the Kaiser–Guttman test manifestly will not do
so. Furthermore, Hakstian and Mueller (1973) observed that the technique was never intended
to be used as a test for the number of factors. Because it is extremely easy to implement
automatically, most statistical packages will perform a Kaiser–Guttman test by default.
It should always be overridden.
The scree test The scree test, devised by Cattell (1966), is also conceptually simple. Like the
Kaiser–Guttman criterion, it is based on the eigenvalues of an initial unrotated principal
components solution. However, it draws on the relative values of the eigenvalues and so
should not be sensitive to variations in the number of variables being analysed. Successive
principal components explain less and less variance and so the eigenvalues decrease. The scree
test is based on visual inspection of a graph showing the successive eigenvalues, such as that
illustrated in Figure 19.1.
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Figure 19.1 Scree test showing eigenvalues from an unrotated principal

components analysis of nine variables. The graph indicates
that two factors should be extracted
The basic idea is simple. It is clear that the points on the right-hand side of Figure 19.1 form
a straight line, known as a ‘scree slope’. It is possible to put a rule through these points and to
determine how many eigenvalues lie well above this line. This number of factors should then be
extracted. Thus Figure 19.1 depicts a two-factor solution. Further examples of the interpretation
of scree tests are given in the literature (e.g., Cattell and Vogelman, 1977). Some popular texts
on factor analysis describe the scree test incorrectly, by asserting that the number of factors
corresponds to the number of eigenvalues above the scree line plus one. They would thus
advocate extracting three factors from Figure 19.1. It is not obvious where this confusion arose.
One problem with the scree test is that it does rely on subjective judgement and may
sometimes have several possible interpretations, particularly when the sample size or the
‘salient’ factor loadings are small (Gorsuch, 1983). Sometimes more than one clearly
identifable straight scree slope is found. In such cases, one simply looks for the eigenvalues
that lie above the leftmost scree slope.

Suppose you performed a factor analysis and discovered that the frst ten
eigenvalues were 11, 6, 3.1, 2.1, 1.5, 1.3, 1.1, 0.9, 0.7 and 0.5. Plot a graph to
determine how many factors the scree test and the Kaiser–Guttman criterion
would indicate.
437
Parallel analysis Simulation studies show that parallel analysis is the most accurate way of
determining the correct number of factors to extract (Velicer et al., 2000; Zwick and Velicer,
1986) provided that the data being analysed are measured on a continuous scale or a Likert
scale with more than two values (Tran and Formann, 2009). Now that computers are powerful
enough to enable its use, it should be the method of choice. The basic principle is quite simple.
It involves checking whether each of the eigenvalues that emerges from a principal components
analysis is larger than you would expect by chance.
Suppose that you gather data on ten variables and 100 people and perform a principal
components analysis (but without rotating the factors). The program will produce a list of
eigenvalues, as many eigenvalues as there are variables.
Now perform another principal components analysis, but rather than using the data that
you have collected, just analyse random data (again using ten variables, 100 people). You
could literally just type in numbers at random into the computer program that you use. Then
run the principal components analysis again, based on this random data. You would expect
the correlations between these random variables to be roughly zero – although some will be
a little larger than zero and some smaller than zero by chance. (The size of your sample will
affect how close to zero they are: with a small sample, you might fnd that some correlations
are as large as 0.3 or as small as −0.3; with a large sample few if any will be above 0.1 or less
than −0.1.) This approach, generating lots of sets of data and seeing what happens when you
analyse them in a particular way, is known as Monte Carlo analysis.
It should hopefully be obvious that if all the correlations are zero, no factors are present
in the data. In this case, then you would expect each of the eigenvalues to be 1.0 (just take
this on trust or try factor analysing a correlation matrix containing zeros yourself to check).
So factor analysing the correlation matrix of random numbers and looking at the size of each
of the eigenvalues will give you an idea of how large the frst, second, third, etc. eigenvalues
typically are if there are, in reality, no factors present in the data.
The problem is that we have only looked at one set of random data – and, of course,
correlations (and eigenvalues) will vary depending what set of random numbers we typed in.
It is therefore necessary to repeat the principal components analysis many times – a thousand
times, for example – to get an idea how large the eigenvalues typically are: a statistician would
say that you fnd the ‘sampling distribution’ of the eigenvalues. You could even, if you were
cunning, generate these random data so that the diffculties of each set of random items are
the same as for the ‘real’ data.
Then you simply work out the average size of the frst eigenvalue, the second, etc. by
averaging across all 1000 analyses. You also fnd the 95% confdence limit: that is the value
of each eigenvalue that is only exceeded on 5% of the 1000 trials. We call this the critical
value.
That is all there is to performing parallel analysis. You just look at the frst eigenvalue from
a principal components analysis of the real data and compare it to the critical value from the
random data. If the real eigenvalue is larger than critical value for the frst eigenvalue from
random data, you conclude that there is at least one factor in the real data and repeat the
process for the second, third, fourth factors, etc. – until one of the eigenvalues is smaller than
the corresponding critical value.
For example, Table 19.2 shows all ten eigenvalues calculated from the principal
components analysis of ten random variables and 100 participants. Suppose that when you
analysed real data based on ten variables and 100 participants, you found that the frst few
eigenvalues were 2.9, 1.63, 1.27, 1.14 and 0.97. How many factors are present in these
data? To answer this question using parallel analysis, simply look at the critical values in
the fnal column of Table 19.2 and compare them to those obtained for real data. You can
438
see that the frst eigenvalue from the real data (2.9) is larger than the critical value for the
frst eigenvalue in the table (1.68), so it is unlikely that you would get such a large eigenvalue
by chance (i.e., by analysing random data). You would thus conclude that there is at least
one principal component in your data. Likewise the second eigenvalue (1.63) is bigger than
1.47, so there are at least two components present. The third eigenvalue (1.27), however,
is smaller than the critical value of 1.31: it is therefore quite possible that a third eigenvalue
as large as 1.27 could have arisen by chance. So you would conclude that there are just two
principal components present. Then you analyse the data again, probably using factor
analysis (rather than principal components analysis) specifying that there are two factors
in your data.
You should be concerned about where the numbers in Table 19.2 came from. I did not
spend days typing 1000 sets of random numbers (each involving ten variables and 100
participants) into an SPSS spreadsheet and performing 1000 factor analyses, laboriously
tabulating the results. Several computer programs and websites (search for ‘parallel analysis’)
have been created to produce these tables. It is just necessary to specify the number of variables
and participants in your real data and the number of replications to be performed and the
program or website will produce a table such as that shown in Table 19.2 within seconds.
Then just analyse your ‘real’ data using your favourite statistical package and specify that it
should extract this number of factors (rather than using the default test). Better still, use
Lorenzo-Seva and Ferrando’s (2006) Factor program instead of SPSS, as it performs parallel
analysis automatically.
One word of warning. The critical values for the eigenvalues depend on the number of
variables and the number of participants in the analysis. The values shown in Table 19.2 will
only be correct should you want to fnd the number of factors present when analysing ten
variables and have gathered data from 100 participants. It will be necessary to produce your
own version of this table for every set of real data that you need to analyse.
Table 19.2 Eigenvalues obtained from factor analysing 1000 random cor-
relation matrices based on 10 variables and 100 participants
Eigenvalue Average eigenvalue Critical value based on 95% confdence

number from analysis of 1000 sets limit: only 5%, or 50, of the random
of random data eigenvalues were larger than value shown
1 1.53 1.68
2 1.36 1.47
3 1.23 1.31
4 1.12 1.20
5 1.02 1.09
6 0.93 1.00
7 0.84 0.91
8 0.75 0.82
9 0.66 0.74
10 0.56 0.64
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Other techniques The MAP test (Velicer, 1976) is another fairly accurate technique for
estimating the appropriate number of factors (Zwick and Velicer, 1986). Revelle and Rocklin’s
(1979) ‘Very Simple Stucture’ test for the number of and reliable component analysis (Cliff
and Caruso, 1998) may perhaps also be of interest; the R-environment (R Core Team, 2013)
provides many such routines for the statistically sophisticated.
Estimation of communalities
The communality of a variable is the proportion of its variance that can be shared with the
other variables being factor analysed. In the case of component analysis, it is assumed that
this is potentially 100% – that is, that the correlations between variables are entirely
attributable to common factor variance and measurement error. In the case of factor models,
it is further assumed that each variable has some amount of reliably measured variance that
is ‘unique’ to that variable – and so cannot be shared with any of the other variables in the
analysis. This is the variable’s ‘unique variance’, so in factor analysis models the variables’
communalities are in general less than 1.0, because of the ‘unique variance’ associated with
each variable.
The estimation of communalities is a process that worries factor analysts, as there is no
easy way of checking that one’s estimates are correct. Sometimes the procedures used lead to
ridiculous estimates of communalities, such as those that are larger than 1.0 (‘Heywood
cases’). Indeed, the problems associated with this can drive many analysts to use the simpler
principal components model.
Different techniques for factor extraction differ in the way which the communalities are
estimated. The simplest is principal-factor analysis, in which communalities are frst of all
estimated through a series of multiple regressions, using all of the other variables as predictors.
Since the communality is defned as the proportion of a variable’s variance that can be shared
with the other variables in the analysis, it has been claimed that this gives the lower bound
for the communality – the smallest value that the communality could possibly have, although
a paper by Kaiser (1990) challenges this view. Many packages (such as SPSS principal axis
factoring) then modify these values several times through a process known as ‘iteration’, until
they become stable. Unfortunately, however, the theoretical rationale for repeated iteration
is dubious and there is no guarantee that it will produce sensible estimates of the true values
of the communalities. It is also possible to specify the communalities directly and some
packages allow users to choose other values, such as the largest correlation between each
variable and any other. Maximum likelihood estimation arguably tackles the communality
problem in the most sensible way. That said, it rarely seems to matter much in practice which
technique one uses.
Factor extraction
There are a number of techniques available for extracting factors, all with different theoretical
backgrounds. Most statistical packages offer users a choice between principal-factor analysis,
image analysis (also known as ‘Kaiser’s second little jiffy’), maximum likelihood analysis,
unweighted least squares (‘MINRES’) and generalised least squares. Most of these techniques
have their own individual methods of estimating communalities. In practice, given the same
number of factors and communality estimates, all methods will usually produce results that
are nearly identical.
However, we must now admit that Chapter 5 oversimplifed the way in which factors are
moved through the clusters of variables. In practice, this is a two-stage process. First, the
440
factors are placed in some arbitrary position relative to the variables, and then another
procedure (called factor rotation) is used to move the factors through the clusters of
variables.
All these techniques for factor extraction therefore place the factors in essentially arbitrary
locations relative to the variables. Typically, the factors are positioned so that each successive
factor is placed:
l At right angles to previous factors.

l In a position where it ‘explains’ a substantial proportion of the variance of the items (i.e.,
where its eigenvalue is large).
Figure 19.2 shows the correlations between four variables V1 to V4. It can be seen that V1
and V2 are highly correlated, as are V3 and V4. Inspection of the fgure shows that a two-
factor solution would be sensible, with one factor passing between V1 and V2 and another
between V3 and V4. However, the initial extraction does not place the factors in this sensible
position. Instead, the frst factor passes between the two clusters of variables, rather than
through the middle of either of them. All the variables will have moderate positive loadings
on this factor. The second factor is at right angles to the frst and has a positive correlation
with V3 and V4 and a negative correlation with V1 and V2. In neither case does a factor pass
through the middle of a pair of highly correlated variables.
Figure 19.2 Typical position of the two factors relative to four variables
following factor extraction
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Factor rotation
Factor rotation changes the position of the factors relative to the variables so that the solution
obtained is easy to interpret. As was mentioned in Chapter 5, factors are identifed by
observing which variables have large and/or zero loadings on them. The solutions that defy
interpretation are those in which a large number of variables have ‘mediocre’ loadings on a
factor – loadings of the order of 0.3. These are too small to be regarded as ‘salient’ and used
to identify the factor, yet too large to be treated as if they were zero. Factor rotation moves
the factors relative to the variables so that each factor has a few substantial loadings and a
few near zero loadings. This is another way of saying that the factors are rotated until they
pass through the clusters of variables, between V1 and V2 and between V3 and V4 in Figure
19.2, for example.
Thurstone (1947) was probably the frst to realise that the initial position of the factor axes
was arbitrary and that such solutions were diffcult to interpret and harder to replicate. He
coined the term ‘simple structure’ to describe the case in which each factor has some large
loadings and some small loadings and likewise each variable has substantial loadings on only
a few factors. His ‘rules of thumb’ are summarised in Cooper (2019).
Table 19.3 demonstrates how much easier it is to interpret rotated rather than unrotated
factor solutions. The unrotated solution is diffcult to interpret, as all of the variables have
modest loadings on the frst factor, while the second factor seems to differentiate the
‘mathematical’ from the ‘language’ abilities. After rotation, the solution could not be clearer.
The frst factor looks as if it measures language ability (because of its substantial loadings
from the comprehension and spelling tests), while the second factor corresponds to numerical
ability. The eigenvalues and communalities of the variables are also shown. This indicates
that, during rotation, the communality of each variable stays the same, but the eigenvalues
do not.
One crucial decision has to be made when rotating factors. Should they be kept at right
angles (an ‘orthogonal rotation’) or should they allowed to become correlated (an ‘oblique
rotation’)? Figure 19.3 shows clearly that an oblique rotation is sometimes necessary to
allow the factors to be positioned sensibly relative to the variables. However, the computation
and interpretation of orthogonal solutions is considerably more straightforward, which
accounts for their popularity. I suggest that as researchers rarely want to assume that their
factors are orthogonal it makes far more sense to perform oblique rotations in almost all
cases.
Table 19.3 Unrotated and rotated factor solutions
Unrotated Rotated (VARIMAX) h2
Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 1 Factor 2
Comprehension 0.40 0.30 0.50 0.00 0.25

Spelling 0.40 0.50 0.64 0.00 0.41
Addition 0.40 –0.40 0.13 0.55 0.32
Subtraction 0.50 –0.30 0.06 0.58 0.34
Eigenvalue 0.73 0.59 0.68 0.64 1.32
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Figure 19.3 Six variables and two correlated factors
Kaiser’s (1958) VARIMAX computer program is the overwhelmingly popular choice for
orthogonal rotations and many computer packages will perform it by default. For those who
are interested in such detail, its rationale is quite straightforward. Table 19.4 shows the
squares of each of the loadings of Table 19.3 (squaring is performed to remove the minus
signs, if any). The bottom row of Table 19.4 shows the variance (the square of the standard
deviation) of these four squared loadings. You will see that, because some of the loadings in
the ‘rotated’ matrix were large whereas others were small, the variance of the squared rotated
loadings is much greater than the variance of the loadings in the unrotated solution (0.041
and 0.034, as opposed to 0.002 and 0.006). Thus, if the factors are positioned so that the
variance of the (squared) loadings is as large as possible, this should ensure that ‘simple
structure’ is reached. And this (with a minor modifcation which need not concern us here) is
how the VARIMAX program operates. It fnds a rotation that MAXimises the VARIance of
the (squared) factor loadings. If using the Factor program to perform VARIMAX rotation,
choose the ‘Normalised VARIMAX’ option.
Oblique rotation is more complicated. The frst problem is in detecting whether a rotation
has reached simple structure. You will recall that the ‘factor structure matrix’ shows the
correlations between all the variables and all the factors. In Figure 19.3, it is clear that,
although each factor passes neatly through a cluster of variables, because the factors are
correlated it is no longer the case that each variable has a large loading (correlation) with just
one factor. Because the factors are correlated, the correlations between V1, V2 and V3 and
factor 2 are not near zero. Likewise, although V4, V5 and V6 will have a massive loading
on factor 2, they will also have an appreciable correlation with factor 1. This means that the
factor structure matrix can no longer be used to decide whether simple structure has been
reached.
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Table 19.4 Squared loadings from Table 19.3 to demonstrate the principle
of VARIMAX rotation
Unrotated Rotated
Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 1 Factor 2
Comprehension 0.160 0.090 0.250 0.000

Spelling 0.160 0.250 0.410 0.000
Addition 0.160 0.160 0.017 0.302
Subtraction 0.250 0.090 0.003 0.336
Variance of 0.002 0.006 0.038 0.034
squared loadings
Another matrix, called the factor pattern matrix, can be calculated for this purpose. It does
not show correlations between the variables and the factors – indeed, the numbers it contains
can be larger than 1.0. Instead, it shows regression weights. Thus it can be used to determine
whether simple structure has been reached. For the data shown in Figure 19.3, the factor
pattern matrix would resemble the VARIMAX-rotated entry of Table 19.3. (In the case of
orthogonal rotations such as VARIMAX, the correlation between the factors is always zero
and so there are no correlations between factors to correct for. Hence the pattern matrix is
the same as the structure matrix.)
Alarmingly, opinions are divided as to whether the factor structure matrix or the factor
pattern matrix should be interpreted in order to identify the factors, or to report the results
of factor analyses. For example, Kline (1994) states that ‘it is important . . . that the structure
and not the pattern is interpreted’, yet Cattell (1978) and Tabachnick and Fidell (2018) hold
precisely the opposite view. Brogden (1969) suggests that if the factor analysis uses well-
understood tests or items but the interpretation of the factors is unknown, then the pattern
matrix should be consulted. Conversely, if the nature of the factors is known, then the structure
matrix should be consulted. Brogden’s justifcation for this position seems to be sound.
Readers may wonder how one would ever be able to identify a factor, but not the variables
which load on it (Brogden’s second point). However, this is possible. For example, a selection
of behavioural or physiological measures may be correlated and factored. Factor scores might
be computed for each person and these may be correlated with other tests. If a set of factor
scores shows a correlation of 0.7 with the subjects’ scores on a reputable test of anxiety, it is
fairly safe to infer that the factor measures anxiety. Alternatively, a few well-trusted tests may
be included in the analysis to act as ‘marker variables’. If these have massive loadings on any
of the rotated factors, this clearly identifes the nature of those factors.
Several programs have been written to perform oblique rotations and Clarkson and
Jennrich (1988) and Harman (1976) discuss the relationships between the various methods.
Direct Oblimin (Jennrich and Sampson, 1966) is probably the most popular technique. Almost
all such programs need ‘fne tuning’ in order to reach simple structure, usually by means of a
parameter controlling how oblique the factors are allowed to become. This is set by default
to a value which the program author rather hoped would be adequate for most sets of data.
Using this value blindly is a dangerous, if common, practice. Harman suggests performing
several rotations, each with a different value of this parameter, and interpreting that which
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comes closest to simple structure. The Index of Factorial Simplicity (Kaiser, 1974) is a statistic
that shows how well a solution has reached simple structure; unfortunately, its values are
rarely computed by statistical packages or reported in the literature. It is important because
if the factor solution has not reached simple structure, the results are unlikely to replicate in
another sample of people.

What is simple structure and why is ‘rotation to simple structure’ almost
always performed during the course of a factor analysis?
Factors and factor scores

Suppose that one factor analyses a set of test items that measure some mental ability, for
example the speed with which people can visualise what various geometric shapes would look
like after being rotated or fipped over. Having performed a factor or component analysis on
these data, one might fnd that a single factor explains a good proportion of the variance, with
many of the test items having substantial loadings on this factor. It is possible to validate this
factor in exactly the same way as one would validate a test (as discussed in Chapter 8). For
example, one can determine whether the factor correlates highly with other psychological tests
measuring spatial ability, measures of performance, etc. However, in order to do this it is
necessary to work out each person’s score on the factor – their ‘factor score’.
One obvious way of calculating a factor score is to identify the items that have substantial
loadings on the factor and to simply add up each person’s scores on these items, ignoring those
with tiny loadings on the factor. For example, suppose that we measured how much people
agreed with four statements, using a Likert scale. These data (called V1 to V4) were factor
analysed and a single factor was found; the items had loadings of 0.62, 0.45, 0.18 and 0.90
on this factor. This suggests that items 1, 2 and 4 measure much the same construct. Therefore,
it would be possible to go through the data and add together each person’s scores on items 1,
2 and 4 only. It would be inappropriate to include variable 3, as the factor analysis shows that
it measures something different to the others. These ‘factor scores’ are based on the three items
which have substantial loadings on the factor.
Another way of looking at this is to say that each person’s scores are ‘weighted’ using the
following numbers: 1, 1, 0 and 1. A weight of ‘1’ is given if the factor loading is substantial
(above 0.4, for example), a weight of −1 would be given if the variable has a loading less than
–0.4, and a weight of zero corresponds to a small, insignifcant factor loading. Thus a person’s
factor score can be calculated as:
1 × V1 + 1 × V2 + 0 × V3 + 1 × V4 or V1 + V2 + V4
where V1 to V4 are the responses to items 1 to 4, respectively. The ‘weights’ (the 0s and 1s) are
called ‘factor score coeffcients’. If each person’s factor scores are calculated, they can be
correlated with other variables in order to establish the validity of this measure of spatial ability.
While this technique for calculating factor scores is sometimes seen in the literature, it does
have its drawbacks. For example, although items 1, 2 and 4 all have loadings above 0.4, item
4 has a loading which is very substantially higher than that of item 2. That is, item 4 is a very
445
much better measure of the factor than is item 2. Should the weights – the ‘factor score
coeffcients’ – refect this? Rather than being 0s and 1s, should they be linked to the size of
the factor loadings? This approach clearly does make sense and factor analysis routines will
almost invariably offer users the option of calculating these factor score coeffcients – one for
each variable and each factor. Having obtained these, it is a simple matter to multiply each
person’s score on each variable by the appropriate factor score coeffcient(s) and thus to
calculate each person’s ‘factor score’ on each factor. Most computer packages will perform
this calculation for you.
For completeness, I ought to mention that factor score coeffcients are not applied to the ‘raw’
scores for each item, but to the ‘standardised’ scores. The actual mechanics of the calculation
of the factor score coeffcients need not concern us here. Good discussions are given by Harman
(1976), Comrey and Lee (1992) and Harris (1967) for those who are interested. Whereas it is
a straightforward matter to compute factor scores when principal components analysis is used,
the problem becomes much more complex in the case of any form of factor analysis. Here there
are several different techniques available for calculating factor scores, each with its own
advantages and disadvantages. Bartlett’s method is one of the better ones (McDonald and Burr,
1967) and is available as an option on many factor analysis packages.

Suppose that a personnel manager factor analyses applicants’ scores on a
number of selection tests. How might she use this analysis to decide which
traits predict how well employees will perform?
Hierarchical factor analyses

When one performs an oblique factor rotation, the factors obtained are generally correlated.
The ‘factor pattern correlation matrix’ shows the cosines of the angles between the factors.
This matrix of correlations between factors can itself be factor analysed – that is, the correlations
between the factors can be examined and any clusters of factors identifed. This is what is meant
by a ‘second-order’ or ‘second-level’ factor analysis (factoring the correlations between the
variables being the ‘frst-order analysis’), and researchers such as Cattell have made considerable
use of the technique. An example may illustrate the usefulness of the method.
Chris McConville and I once wondered what the basic dimensions of mood might be
(McConville and Cooper, 1992). We accordingly factor analysed the correlations between
over 100 mood items and extracted and obliquely rotated fve frst-order factors, as discussed
in Chapter 16. We then factor analysed the correlations between these frst-order factors and
discovered that four of these fve frst-order factors correlated together to form a second-order
mood factor called ‘negative affect’. The ffth mood factor had a negligible loading on this
factor. Thus there was a hierarchy of mood factors as shown in Figure 19.4.
If there are plenty of second-order factors and these show a reasonable degree of correlation,
it would be legitimate to factor the correlations between the second-order factors to perform
a third-order factor analysis. The process can continue either until the correlations between
the factors are essentially zero or until just one factor is obtained.
446
Figure 19.4 Example of hierarchical factor analysis (after McConville and

Cooper, 1992)
It can be remarkably diffcult to identify or conceptualise second- and higher-order factors.

Whereas frst-order factors can be tentatively identifed by inspecting the items with substantial
loadings, the second-order factor matrix shows how the frst-order factors load on the second-
order factor(s). Because of this, it can be quite diffcult to identify the second-order factors.
For example, what would one make of a factor that seemed to measure the primary abilities
of spelling, visualisation and mechanical ability? It would be much easier to see what was
going on if a dozen or so variables could be shown to have large loadings on a second-order
factor, rather than trying to interpret the second-order factor in terms of just a couple of large
loadings from frst-order factors.
Several techniques have been devised to overcome this problem. They all relate second- and
higher-order factors directly to the observed variables (Schmid and Leiman, 1957). In the
example given earlier, the second-order factors would be defned not in terms of the primary
factors (spelling, visualisation, mechanical ability, etc.), but in terms of the actual variables.
The Factor program (Lorenzo-Seva and Ferrando, 2006) performs Schmid-Leiman analyses;
it is not built into the SPSS factor analysis routines. More detail about this and other methods
(e.g., bifactor analysis) is given in Cooper (2019).
A second problem with these analyses concerns measurement error. Sometimes several
quite different positionings of the frst-order factors are almost equally satisfactory so far as
the criterion of meeting simple structure is concerned. However, the more or less arbitrary
choice of one such solution will have a powerful effect on the correlations between the factors
and hence the number and nature of the second-order factors. Factor analyses should be
performed with above average care if hierarchical solutions are to be produced.
447
Factor analysis in matrix notation

This section is only intended for readers who have some background in matrix algebra. Factor
analysis can be expressed simply in matrix notation; indeed, this is how all the statistical
packages compute their solutions. Suppose n variables are administered to a large sample of
people. The correlations between these n tests may be represented by a matrix R which has n
rows and n columns (‘rank n’). We decide to extract m factors. The factor matrix, F, therefore
has n rows (variables) and m columns (factors). When the factors are orthogonal, the aim of
factor analysis is simply to fnd a factor matrix, F, such that:
R ≅ FF’
where F’ indicates the transpose of F and ≅ means ‘approximates’. For example, if there are
four variables and two factors, if you multiply the two matrices on the right-hand side of the
following equation, you will fnd that they roughly approximate the correlation matrix – except
for the 1’s on the diagonal. The more factors there are, the better the approximation is; when
there are as many factors as variables, the product of the factor matrix and its transpose equals
the correlation matrix.
R ≅ F · F’
1 0.1 0.00 0.68 0.96 0.01
0.10 1 0.55 0.05 0.00 0.76 · 0.96 0.00 0.09 0.70
0.00 0.55 1 0.12 ≅ 0.09 0.72 0.01 0.76 0.72 0.07
0.68 0.05 0.12 1 0.70 0.07
The problem is that an infinite number of factor matrices, F, give equally good
approximations. For example, try multiplying the following matrix by its transpose and
comparing the result to the approximation shown earlier.
–0.76 –0.58
F = 0.45 –0.61
0.36 –0.63
–0.52 –0.48
You should fnd that this factor solution produces an identical result. Factor rotation provides
one way of choosing between these alternatives, by identifying the one factor matrix that best
meets the ‘simple structure’ criterion.
As we performed a factor analysis (rather than principal components analysis) the values
that appear in the diagonal of the correlation matrices when we multiply the factor matrix by
its transpose approximate the communalities of the variables.
Confrmatory factor analysis

A complete treatment of this topic is beyond the scope of this text. The purpose of this section
is merely to mention that the technique exists and to give an example of its usage, as it may
be encountered in journal articles that you read.
448
Whereas exploratory factor analysis seeks to determine the number and nature of the
factors that underlie a set of data through rotation to simple structure, confrmatory factor
analysis (as its name suggests) tests hypotheses or rather it allows the user to choose between
several competing hypotheses about the structure of the data. For example, suppose you were
interested in using a questionnaire to measure attitudes to eating. On reviewing the literature,
you might fnd that one piece of previous research claims that ten of the 20 items form one
factor, the remaining ten items form another factor and that these factors have a correlation
of 0.4. Another piece of research with the same test might indicate that all 20 items of the test
form a single factor. It is vitally important to know which of these claims is correct. The frst
will lead to two scores being calculated for each person, while the second will produce only
one score. Confrmatory factor analysis can be used to determine which of these competing
models is more appropriate for the data.
It is possible to specify either factor analytical or principal components models for
confrmatory factor analysis. However, almost all studies are based on factor models, where
the communality of each variable is estimated. Indeed, it is possible to perform hierarchical
factor analyses and to test a huge range of models using the technique. Good descriptions of
confrmatory factor analysis and its parent technique, structural equation modelling, are given
in Loehlin (2004 – my favourite) or R. B. Kline (2015); there are many others, too.
A number of computer programs have been written to perform confrmatory factor
analysis. The best known is LISREL, written by Karl Jöreskog, the statistician who devised
the technique. Others include Amos (part of the SPSS suite) and Lavaan, which runs in the
R-environment and is free (R Core Team, 2013). Finch and French (2015) is an excellent guide
for analysing data using Lavaan.
Confrmatory factor analysis views the basic data (test scores, responses to test items,
physiological measures, etc.) as being brought about or caused by one or more factors (often
known as ‘latent variables’). Thus a set of equations can be drawn up, each showing which
factor(s) are thought to infuence which variable(s).
For example, suppose we postulate two factors – general intelligence (g) and test anxiety (‘TA’).
Also suppose that the scores on a test, Test 1, are infuenced by both of these factors – but more
by general intelligence than by test anxiety. We can represent this by a simple equation, such as:
Test1 = 0.8 × g + 0.1 × TA + unique variance [+ error variance]
The numbers 0.8 and 0.1 show the size of the relationship between the variables and each
factor – the factor loadings. Each of these numbers can be:
l specifed directly, as a number (as in our example)

l estimated by the computer program
l or set equal to other values that are then all estimated. For example, one could specify that
all of the scores are affected by test anxiety to an equal but unknown extent. (This option
can be problematical in practice.)
In confrmatory factor analysis, one normally draws up an equation for each variable,
showing which factor (or factors) are thought to infuence scores on this variable – although
not normally the size of the loadings. Any factor loadings that are not specifed are assumed
to be zero. It is also necessary to specify that the variance of each factor is 1.0. The computer
program then estimates the best possible values for each of the loadings and also computes
statistics showing how closely the postulated structure fts the actual data. It is common
practice to try out several different models and to choose the one which gives the best ft – that
is, which is best supported by the data.
449
Hu and Bentler (1995) give a good discussion of how to interpret the various indices of
goodness of ft. While these measures of goodness of ft are useful for choosing between
competing models, they are not particularly effective for working out the absolute goodness
of ft of a particular model. That is, the technique cannot easily determine whether or not a
pattern of factors and factor loadings is found in the data, but can be useful in deciding which
of several competing models is the most appropriate.
It is common practice to represent the relationships between the variables, common factors
and unique factors by means of a diagram. Ignoring the numbers for now, Figure 19.5 shows
two factors, F1 and F2, each of which is thought to infuence some observed variables (V1 to
V6). You will notice that V4 is infuenced by both of the factors and the other variables are
infuenced by just one of them. Also shown are the unique variances of each variable (U1 to
U6). Each of the lines linking a factor to an observed variable has an arrow at one end,
indicating that the factor is presumed to cause a particular observed score (rather than vice
versa). The curved line between F1 and F2 represents a correlation – factor 1 and factor 2
may be correlated. Thus this diagram shows an oblique factor solution.
The numbers on each of the lines represent the factor loadings (in the factor pattern matrix)
or, in the case of the curved line, the correlation between these factors. Some of these values
might have been specifed by the user at the start of the analysis. More usually, however, all
of the numbers will have been estimated by the program.
0.3
F1 F2
0.8 0.7 0.8 0.6 0.5 0.7 0.9
V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6
0.20 0.50 0.33 0.41 0.38 0.17
U1 U2 U3 U4 U5 U6
Figure 19.5 Diagram showing how two correlated factors (F1 and F2)
infuence the value of six observed variables (V1–V6). The
variables’ unique variances (U1–U6) are also shown
450
Several other plausible models can be drawn up on the basis of theory or previous research
and each can be tested in order to determine how closely it fts the data. In this way, the
researcher can choose between various competing theoretical models. However, there are
some risks involved in the use of these techniques. It is all too easy to embark on a ‘fshing
trip’, modifying a model over and over again in order to improve its goodness of ft, regardless
of its psychological plausibility. Indeed some programs encourage this practice by suggesting
those parts of the model that need modifcation. However, the computer program knows
nothing about psychology or the theory of factor analysis and will frequently suggest
something nonsensical, such as allowing the unique variances of quite different variables to
become correlated. Such a model may ft the data from a particular sample wonderfully well,
yet make little psychological sense (and be unlikely to replicate in other samples). However,
whenever there is a need to choose between competing theoretical models, confrmatory factor
analysis can prove to be a very useful tool.
Summary
Factor analysis is a tremendously useful technique for clarifying the relationships between a
number of interval-scaled or ratio-scaled variables. It can be applied to all such data – from
physical and physiological measures to questionnaire items. This chapter has described how to
perform a technically sound factor analysis and has highlighted some common errors that
occasionally creep into published papers. Finally, it has introduced confrmatory factor analysis
as a useful technique for choosing between various competing factor analytical models.

This has been largely indicated in the text.
SAQ 19.1
There are problems with this proposal, the most obvious one being that
‘county of residence’ is not an interval-scaled variable. When the numerical
codes were being allocated, it was entirely arbitrary whether a ‘1’ referred to
Cornwall or Cumbria, so the codes do not represent a scale of any kind.
Therefore they must be excluded from the factor analysis. (To check for
differences in mathematical ability between counties you could suggest that
your colleague calculates factor scores on each of the factors and then
performs an analysis of variance using ‘county’ as the between-subjects factor.)
The other problem is that there are more variables being analysed than
there are people in the sample. Thus although the number of participants is
greater than the ‘magic’ number of 100, these data are not suitable for factor
analysis. You could suggest that your colleague collects some more data so as
to increase the sample size to at least 150. You could usefully warn her about
451
the problems inherent in factoring dichotomous data such as these – where

the only possible answers are 0 or 1 – and if the items are found to differ
drastically in their diffculty values (the proportion of individuals answering
each item correctly), you could consider consulting the literature for alternatives
to the Pearson correlation which are suitable for factor analysis.
Finally, you could usefully check with your colleague that the children were
given plenty of time to attempt all of the test items and ask whether the
items that were not attempted have been coded as being answered incorrectly
or given a special code and treated as missing data. If items that were not
attempted are given the same code as ‘incorrect answer’ (e.g., ‘0’), it is clear
that problems can arise if not all of the children managed to fnish the test
in the time allocated. The items towards the end would appear to be more
diffcult than they really are, simply because only a few children managed to
reach them. In circumstances such as these, it might be better just to analyse
the frst 50 items (or whatever), in which case there is no need for your
colleague to collect any more data, as the sample of 100 would be adequate
for this number of items.
SAQ 19.2
452
The scree test shows four factors, and the Kaiser-Guttman seven. You should
probably extract four factors, given that the scree test has been found to
perform better than the Kaiser–Guttman technique.
SAQ 19.3
Simple structure is a measure of the extent to which each factor passes
through a cluster of variables. Let us suppose that the factors are being kept
at right angles – an orthogonal rotation. If the rotation has reached simple
structure, each factor will have few sizeable correlations (above 0.4 or below
–0.4) with some variables, and correlations close to zero (e.g., ±0.1) with the
rest. There should be very few medium sized correlations, in the range of
±0.1–0.4. Similarly, when the rows of the factor matrix are examined, each
variable should have a large loading on only one or two factors. The position
is much the same for oblique rotations (where the factors are not kept at
right angles), except that the ‘factor pattern matrix’, used to assess the
simplicity of the solution, does not contain correlations between the variables
and the factors, although it is interpreted in the same way.
Since the initial position of the factors relative to the variables is essentially
arbitrary, different researchers would report quite different results if rotation
to simple structure were not carried out. It is thus important for ensuring that
factors can be consistently identifed across several different studies.
SAQ 19.4
The factor analysis will show the nature and the extent of the overlap
between the test scores and will probably produce several factors measuring
personality and/or ability. Scores can be calculated for each applicant on each
of these factors (‘factor scores’) and each of these factor scores can be
validated in precisely the same way that tests are validated, as described in
Chapter 8. For example, the applicants could be followed up and their factor
scores correlated with measures of productivity or with supervisors’ ratings
of performance. Alternatively, analysis of variance may be used to determine
any differences in factor scores between various groups of employees, e.g.,
those who are later promoted or those who leave.
If some of the factor scores do seem to be useful in the selection process,
the tests that have high loadings on the factors in question could usefully be
retained. Those which do not load on any of the useful factors could probably
be dropped from the assessment battery
453
Note
1 This is not a misprint – in psychometrics ‘item diffculty’ means the proportion of people who
answer the item correctly (not incorrectly) The reasons for this ‘back-to-front’ defnition are
shrouded in mystery and history.
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455
Chapter 20
Constructing a test
Introduction
This chapter is included in case readers are either interested to learn how scales are constructed
or feel the urge to develop their own scale to measure some personality or ability trait. Please
do not do so! In my experience, most students who decide to construct a scale do not appreciate
how much work is involved in developing, refning and validating it.
Learning outcomes
l Write items for a scale measuring ability or personality.
l Outline and evaluate four methods of item analysis.
l Use classical item analysis to identify items which should be dropped
from a scale to improve its reliability.
Many readers will have encountered scales that are quite different from those that have
been described in this text. Social psychologists, in particular, measure dimensions of
personality that seem to be quite different from the traits that were discussed in Chapters
6–10 and readers may wonder why I have not yet discussed locus of control and the like.
The problem is that most of these scales are simply not very satisfactory. Some (e.g.,
measures of locus of control) do not appear to measure a trait at all, but are situation-
specifc (Coombs and Schroeder, 1988). Some involve items that are so similar that they
form a ‘bloated specifc’ – a trait that appears simply because all of the items in a scale are
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Constructing a test
paraphrases of each other (see Chapter 8 for an example). Worse still, when the items are
factored, they often fail to form a single scale. Some of these scales measure mixtures of
several distinct personality traits, which, as we saw in Chapter 8, makes their interpretation
almost impossible.
In the unlikely event of my becoming a dictator, my frst edict would be as follows: It is
a penal offence for any psychologist to publish any scale if more than 70% of the reliable
variance of that scale can be predicted by existing scales. In other words, I feel strongly that
any new scale must be shown to tap some aspects of personality or ability that are really
rather different from any combination of traits that we already know and understand.
Otherwise, scales will simply proliferate. One scale will measure two parts Extraversion and
one part Neuroticism, while another will measure two parts Extraversion and one part
Psychoticism. Enormous theories will be built up around these personality dimensions and
then someone will have the bright idea of correlating the two scales together and (because
they both measure Extraversion to some extent) the correlation will be large and positive.
Ripples of excitement will run through the journals, reputations will be made and yet more
complicated theories will spring up to explain what seems rather obvious to us simple-
minded psychometricians.
However, there must be something wrong with this description, since most psychologists
take exactly the opposite view and the proliferation of scales continues – even though
the evidence often suggests that this is really not a good idea. Consider scales measuring
self-esteem – a widely used concept in social psychology. There is evidence (summarised
in Kline, 2000) that scales claiming to measure ‘self-esteem’ tap a mixture of anxiety (or
Neuroticism) and Extraversion – and not much else. Since it is diffcult to imagine why
any psychologist would want to measure a mixture of two quite distinct traits in a single
scale, the continued use of these scales has always rather baffed this author. It is quite
permissible to combine scores from several different scales, for example by adding together
individuals’ standardised scores on scales measuring Extraversion and Neuroticism if there
is a need to identify extraverted neurotics. The point is that, by doing this, scale users are
forced to become aware of what traits are really being assessed, rather than building
elaborate theories on what are wrongly believed to be entirely novel aspects of individual
differences.
Despite these dire warnings, it is useful to know the merits (and drawbacks) of several
techniques for developing scales, so that one can understand and evaluate the merit of
published scales.
Writing items
Writing the items is the crucial step in designing a scale. If the items are poorly written,
then no amount of psychometric wizardry will be able to produce a reliable and valid scale.
You may well also like to re-examine your professional association’s guidelines for
the construction and use of psychological scales, which may resemble those shown in
Appendix B.
Problems arise when developing ability scales that are designed to be used with very
restricted time limits. Since some candidates may not reach the items at the end of the
scale, it is very diffcult to estimate the diffculty of those items, which becomes confused
with the candidates’ speed of answering. It is better to administer the scale with unlimited
time at the development stage and to impose time limits when putting together the fnal
version.
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Constructing a test
General principles
The main points to be kept in mind when writing items are as follows:
l The items should be properly sampled and should tap every single aspect of the concept.
An arithmetic scale should not be based solely on ‘addition’ problems. A depression
inventory should enquire about behaviours (e.g., disturbed sleep and eating habits) as well
as feelings. It is advisable to draw up a list of the main ‘facets’ of the phenomenon to be
assessed and write equal numbers of items to tap each facet. For example, a teacher may
decide to assess arithmetical ability on the basis of ability to perform long division, long
multiplication, geometry/trigonometry, solution of simultaneous equations, fnding roots
of quadratic equations, differentiation and integration, as these are the topics which have
been covered in the syllabus. It may often be necessary to conduct a literature search (or
examine diagnostic manuals such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM-IV)) to ensure that you have a full and complete understanding of the
topic that is to be assessed.
l Decide on the population with which the scale is to be used before writing the items. Items
in an ability scale designed to select between graduates would clearly need to be harder
than one designed for use with the general population. When writing items for a personality
scale designed for children, it is necessary to bear in mind that their vocabulary and/or
knowledge will be restricted.
l The scale should be long enough to ensure that it covers all aspects of the topic and is
reliable. As a rule of thumb, you may wish to start with at least 30 items per scale and
reduce these down to a list of no fewer than 20 items, although if there are many facets
you may well need more.
l Items should be short and clear.
l Check words using a dictionary to ensure that an item does not have several possible
interpretations. One personality questionnaire used to include the item ‘do you enjoy gay
parties?’, ‘gay’ then meaning ‘lively’.
l Ideally, each item should assess only the trait that it is designed to measure. Items should
thus be written so that the responses are unlikely to be affected by individual differences
in vocabulary, by social desirability, by any other similar sources of systematic bias or by
any other traits.
l The cultural appropriateness of each item should be carefully considered. This will typically
include the implicit knowledge required to understand (or solve) the problem. In the
arithmetic scale example, the teacher assumes that all children will be able to add, subtract,
multiply and divide and to understand the order in which arithmetic operations are
performed in equations, etc.
l It is important to ensure that the items are logically independent. In the case of personality
scales, check that if a logically consistent person answers any item in a particular way, then
this does not ‘force’ them to give any particular answer to any other item(s) – that is, no
two items should mean the same thing. In the case of ability scales, you should never base
one item on the answer to a previous item such as ‘item 1: what is 2 + 3?’, ‘item 6: what is
the answer to item 1 multiplied by 4?’. Item writers need to examine every possible pair of
items and check that the way a person answers one item does not force him or her to
answer any other item in a particular way, other than through the infuence of the trait that
the scale is designed to measure. Thus although ‘do you sweat a lot?’ and ‘do you have bad
dreams?’ are both infuenced by anxiety, they refer to different behaviours, and so both can
be used.
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Constructing a test
Items for ability scales

l Decide on the response format, e.g., free response (2 + 2 =?) or multiple choice (2 + 2 = (a)
4, (b) 22, (c) 5, (d) 3) and, if a multiple choice format is chosen, decide how many alternatives
should be offered. There should be at least four alternatives in order to reduce the effects of
lucky guessing. Do not use ‘none of the above’ as one of the possible distractors.
l Write an equal number of items for each facet, taking care to construct good, plausible
distractors (possibly based on an analysis of common errors from an earlier, free-response
pilot version of the scale if using a multiple choice format). Ensure that the items in each
facet appear to span a similar and appropriate range of diffculty.
l Make sure that you are not tempted to test the trivial just because it is easy to do so. For
example, if you were designing a scale to assess students’ statistical ability, the easiest type
of item to write would concern formulae and defnitions, e.g., ‘what is the equation for
calculating the sample standard deviation from a set of data?’ The problem is, of course,
that the instructor should be interested in testing how well students understand and can
apply the concepts – repeating defnitions parrot fashion is rarely what is wanted. The
driving test provides another good example. I can remember learning and reciting stopping
distances, although the examiners never seemed to check that candidates knew what those
distances actually looked like when they were driving.
l If the scale is to be timed, then it is necessary to carry out a pilot study to choose an
appropriate time limit.
l Ensure that the instructions for the scale are brief, clear and unambiguous. They should
cover how to solve the problems, how to record the chosen answer, whether or not to guess
if unsure of the answer and should specify the time allowed.
l Ensure that there are several practice items and that the answers to these are given before
the main test, so that test takers can check that they understand what to do.
Gulliksen (1986) is an excellent, non-technical paper on the assessment of abilities and

attainment. It considers several other forms of test items and despite its age makes vital
reading for anyone interested in constructing scales in this general area.
Items for personality scales

l The frst step is to decide how you want respondents to answer your questions – there
are several popular formats. The scale may present statements with which people agree,
are neutral or unsure or disagree, e.g., ‘I lie awake at night worrying about the day’s
events’. You might also consider adding ‘strongly agree’ and ‘strongly disagree’ to the
list, but do not use any more than seven categories. If you are using this type of scale,
always use words such as ‘agree/?/disagree’ on the questionnaire and not just numbers.
Statistical problems can arise if less than three categories are used (see Chapter 19 and
Appendix A). With this type of item, try to keep to an odd number of choices, since
this ensures that there is a central, neutral answer; participants like this. Alternatively,
the scale may give several possible answers, e.g., ‘in the last week, my worries kept me
from falling asleep immediately on (a) no days, (b) 1 or 2 days, (c) 3 or 4 days, (d) 5
or more days’.
l Try to write items that are clear, unambiguous and require as little self-insight as possible.
Wherever possible, you should refer to behaviours rather than to feelings, as in the last
example in the previous paragraph.
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Constructing a test
l Ensure that each item asks only one question. For example, do not use a statement such as
‘I sometimes feel depressed and have attempted suicide’, since extremely depressed people
who have not (quite) got round to attempting suicide would have to disagree with it, which
is presumably not what is intended.
l Try to avoid negatively phrased items such as ‘I dislike anarchists: yes/?/no’, since choosing
‘no’ requires the participant to interpret a double negative.
l Try to avoid questions asking about frequency or amount. Instead, refer to specifc rather
than general behaviour. Instead of asking ‘do you read a lot?’, try asking ‘how many books
have you read for pleasure in the past month?’ – or, better still, ‘list the books that you
have read for pleasure in the past month’ (which may reduce socially desirable responses)
and simply count the number of books listed.
l Try to ensure that about 50% of the items in each facet are keyed so that a ‘yes/strongly
agree’ response indicates a high score on the trait and the others are keyed in the opposite
direction. For example, ‘I generally fall asleep at night as soon as the light is turned off’
would be scored so that ‘strongly disagree’ indicated anxiety.
l If you must ask about something socially undesirable, consider phrasing the item from
another person’s point of view, e.g., ‘some people might describe me as mean’ rather than
‘are you mean?’
l Ensure that the instructions ask respondents to give the frst answer that springs naturally
to mind, rather than looking for hidden meanings.
l Draft instructions so that participants are clear about what you want them to do, whether
they should answer all questions, whether there is a time limit.
More detailed guidance is given by Kline (1986, 2000), Most and Zeidner (1995) and
Spector (1992).
Preparing for item analysis

Having compiled a draft scale, it is necessary to ensure that all of the items measure the same
construct before proceeding to check that the scale is reliable and valid. In order to do this,
the scale should be administered to a large (n >200) sample of people, similar in nature to the
individuals who will ultimately use the scale. For example, if a scale is to be used to select
graduate applicants for a particular organisation, it would be appropriate to try out the scale
with undergraduates, but not with 16 year old school pupils (because of their different
academic background) or pensioners (because of their different age). Using smaller samples
is most unwise, for, as Nunnally (1978) shows, the estimate of reliability that is calculated
from a sample of data is only reasonably close to its true value when large samples are used.
Cooper (2019) contains a spreadsheet which estimates the accuracy of coeffcient alpha for a
particular sample size.
Responses are then scored as discussed in Chapter 3. In the case of ability scales, this will
typically involve giving one point for a correct answer and zero points for an incorrect response
or an omitted item. In the case of Likert scaled items (e.g., strongly agree/agree/neutral/disagree/
strongly disagree), the response is converted to a number indicating the strength of the response.
Suppose the scale was supposed to assess squeamishness and someone wrote ‘disagree’ to the
item ‘I feel physically sick at the sight of blood’. Strongly agreeing with this item would gain
fve points (since a fve-point scale is used), so ‘disagree’ gets two points. These scored items
would then normally be entered into a computer package such as SPSS. And yes, you do need
to enter the score for each individual item – not the total score for the scale.
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Constructing a test
The next stage is to examine the mean score for each of the items, together with its standard
deviation. In the case of an ability scale (where a correct answer is awarded one point and an
incorrect answer is given zero points), the mean score indicates the diffculty of each item. A mean
score of 0.95 shows that 95% of the sample gave the correct response to an item. In the case of
personality scales, the mean score shows the extent to which individuals tend to agree or disagree
with statements. As a general rule of thumb, it would be undesirable to have too many very easy
or very diffcult items in the scale, so if more than about 10% of ability-scale items have mean
scores above 0.8 or below 0.2, it would be prudent to consider removing some of them.
For items answered on a Likert scale it is better to look at the frequency distribution of
responses (the number of people who answered ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’ and so on) and check
the standard deviation. If an item has a very small standard deviation, almost everyone has
answered it in the same way and the item is therefore clearly not tapping any kind of individual
differences and should be removed from the scale.

Why is it inadvisable to have too many very hard or very easy items in an
ability test? Or items with which most people strongly agree or strongly
disagree in the case of personality questionnaire?
Although checking the items’ means and standard deviations is a necessary frst step, this
cannot reveal any items that are fawed in content. For example, suppose that one item in a
personality scale used language that was too diffcult for the participants to understand, so
causing them all to guess an answer. Another item might be badly affected by ‘social
desirability’, or might measure the wrong trait entirely. We shall mention four techniques of
item analysis for identifying items that, for whatever reason, simply do not measure the same
thing as the other items in the scale.
When using any of the four techniques described later to eliminate items from the scale, it
is important to try to ensure that the scale retains approximately equal numbers of items in
all of its facets (as described earlier). Suppose, for example, that a teacher started off by
writing fve items in each of seven facets of mathematical attainment: long division, long
multiplication, geometry/trigonometry, solution of simultaneous equations, fnding roots of
quadratic equations, differentiation and integration. Item analysis will remove some of the
35 items (those that are too easy, too hard or which simply do not seem to work), but it would
clearly be unfortunate if the analysis led to the removal of all the long division items and all
the long multiplication items, since the teacher believes that these are two important
components of the pupils’ mathematical attainment. Item analysis is an art as well as a science
and when removing items it is important to try to ensure that approximately equal numbers
are left in each of the facets.
Item analysis by criterion keying

Suppose that we are asked to construct a psychological scale to select aeroplane pilots. The
goal is to develop a scale whose total score will be able to predict the pilots’ fnal score on
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Constructing a test
their training course and which may therefore be used to identify applicants who are likely to
perform poorly on this course. Having no clear idea of which personality and ability
characteristics are related to piloting, we might put together a vast questionnaire consisting
of 600 items that we hope will measure all of the main abilities and personality traits that can
be assessed. But which ones actually predict pilot performance?
Suppose that the draft version of the scale has been administered to several hundred
trainees. The most obvious way of identifying the good (i.e., predictive) items in the scale
is to validate each item directly against the criterion. For example, suppose that at the end
of their training, each trainee pilot is awarded a mark of between 0 and 100, indicating
their overall level of performance in the pilot training course. Surely the item analysis
process would simply involve correlating the trainees’ scores on each of the items in the
scale with their scores on the training course. Items that have substantial correlations
would appear to be able to predict the criterion and those that do not would be dropped
from the scale.
This procedure, which is known as criterion keying, has been used in the construction
of several well-known scales, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,
the MMPI and MMPI-2 (Graham, 1990; Hathaway and McKinley, 1967) which were
briefy mentioned in Chapter 17, and the California Psychological Inventory (Gough,
1975), the scales of which can supposedly discriminate between various clinical groups.
Do not use this method of item analysis. As Nunnally (1978) reminds us, it has several fatal
faws.
First, it is very likely to produce scales that have very low reliability – that is, scales
containing items that measure a number of different things. For example, suppose that
success in the pilot training course depended on mathematical ability, mechanical ability,
spatial ability, low Neuroticism and Extraversion. If criterion keying were to be applied to
a large sample of items, it would produce a scale that measured a mixture of all these
things.
Second, it is rarely possible to identify a single criterion to be used when selecting items.
For example, consider a typical university professor’s schedule. This will probably involve
lecturing, research, applying for funding, writing research papers, taking tutorials,
administration (e.g., planning courses), marking essays and examination papers, coordinating
certain laboratory activities, supervising PhD students and a host of other activities. Which
one of these should be used as the criterion against which their performance should be judged?
If they are to be averaged in some way, how many scientifc papers or how much course
planning are equivalent to supervising one PhD student? If one criterion is used, one particular
set of predictive items will be identifed – if another criterion is chosen, the chances are that
quite a different selection of items will be indicated.
The third point is a little more statistical. In order to select the ‘best’ items by criterion
keying, one correlates responses to particular items with the criterion – if the scale consists of
400 or so items (as does the MMPI), then one calculates 400 correlations. Without going into
details, if large numbers of correlations are being calculated, we would expect several of the
correlations to be appreciably larger than their true (population) values. In other words, some
of the items that we select by this procedure are unlikely to work for other groups of applicants.
Finally, this procedure gives us no real understanding of why the scale works – it is
completely atheoretical. Without an understanding of what psychological constructs are being
measured by the ‘useful’ items, it is impossible to tell whether the scale is likely to be useful
in other applications (e.g., for selecting air traffc controllers) and it becomes very diffcult to
‘fx’ the scale if it suddenly stops predicting performance. For all these reasons, criterion
keying should be avoided.
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Constructing scales by factor analysis of items

Psychologists such as Cattell advocate the use of factor analysis to construct scales, although
others (e.g., Nunnally, 1978) have identifed some problems with this approach. Here the
correlations between the (scored) items are factor analysed, and the factor(s) that emerge are
tentatively identifed on the basis of their loadings on the rotated factors, as described in
Chapters 5 and 19. When putting together a set of items to measure one particular construct,
we would of course hope that just one factor will emerge and that all of the variables will
have large loadings on that factor. In practice, there may be more than one factor and some
variables may not have loadings above 0.4 on any factor and so should be dropped. This
method of constructing scales simply involves identifying and retaining those items that have
a substantial loading on the main factor(s).
Constructing scales using classical item analysis

This is the simplest effective technique. You will recall that high reliability is generally
thought to be an excellent feature of a scale. It therefore seems sensible to try to estimate
the extent to which each of the items in a scale correlates with individuals’ ‘true scores’,
which are the scores that each individual would have obtained had he or she administered
all items that could possibly have been written to measure the topic. If we somehow identify
items each of which has a substantial correlation with the true score, when we add up
individuals’ scores on these items, the total scores on the scale are bound to show a
substantial correlation with the true score. This is, of course, another way of saying that
the scale has high internal consistency reliability. If it is possible to detect items that show
appreciable correlations with the true score, it is also possible to choose those items that
will produce a highly reliable scale.
The problem is that we can rarely if ever know individuals’ true scores, because we can
almost never administer all of the items which could possibly be written to assess the trait
of interest. However, there is one piece of data that can be shown to approximate to this,
namely, the individual’s total score on all of the items in the scale. Classical item analysis
therefore simply correlates the total score on the scale with the scores on each of the
individual items. Consider, for example, the data shown in Table 20.1, which represent the
responses of six people to a fve-item scale (where a correct answer was scored as 1 and an
incorrect answer as 0), together with each person’s total score on the scale. The row marked
‘r with total’ simply correlates the responses to each of the items with the total scores on
the scale. You may wish to check one or two of these so that you can see how they have
been calculated. Here Item 4 appears to be the best measure (that is, it correlates well with
the total score) while Item 3 is the worst. It is probable that dropping Item 3 will improve
the reliability of the scale.
The correlations between each item and the total score are as close as we can get to
estimating the correlation between each item and the true score, so it seems sensible to drop
those items that have low correlations with the total score – keeping a careful eye on which
facet of the trait is measured by a particular item and ensuring that the items that are left
contain approximately equal numbers of items from each of the facets. While the item analysis
procedure involves removing an item which has a low correlation with the total score at each
stage, this will not always be the very lowest correlating item.
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Constructing a test
Table 20.1 Data for item analysis
Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 4 Item 5 Total
Person 1 1 0 1 1 1 4
Person 2 0 1 1 1 0 3
Person 3 0 0 1 0 0 1
Person 4 0 0 1 0 0 1
Person 5 0 1 0 1 1 3
Person 6 1 0 1 1 0 3
r with total 0.63 0.32 –0.20 0.95 0.63
Corrected r with total 0.11 0.22 –0.48 0.87 0.50
There is one obvious problem associated with correlating items with total scores and this
is the fact that each item contributes to the total score, so we are to some extent correlating
each item with itself. In order to circumvent this diffculty, we usually base the item analyses
on ‘corrected item–total correlations’, or the ‘Guilford-corrected item–total correlations’,
which are simply the correlations between each item and the sum of the other remaining items.
In the present example, Item 1 would be correlated with the sum of Items 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Item 2 would be correlated with the sum of Items 1, 3, 4 and 5, and so on. Other techniques
for performing such corrections have been proposed, but may create as many problems as
they solve (Cooper, 1983).
Each time an item is eliminated, the reliability of the scale (alpha) should be recalculated.
As items that have low correlations with the total score are eliminated, the value of alpha will
rise. As more and more items are removed, the value of alpha will eventually start to fall, since
alpha depends on both the average correlation between the items and the number of items in
the scale. Of course, removing a ‘poor’ item boosts the average correlation between the
remaining items – but it also shortens the scale. Items are successively removed (on the basis
of a consideration of their corrected item–total correlations and the facets from which they
originate) until the scale is short, well balanced and highly reliable.
One annoying feature of this method of analysis is that it is not possible simply to look at
the table of corrected item–total correlations and decide which items should be eliminated on
the basis of this. This is because each person’s total score will inevitably change each time an
item is dropped and consequently each of the correlations between the remaining items and
the total score will also change. Therefore it is necessary to decide which item to drop,
recompute the total scores and recompute all the remaining item–total correlations, as well
as recomputing alpha at each stage. Such analyses can be performed relatively painlessly using
the SPSS Reliability procedure or similar – or even a spreadsheet, such as the one included
with Cooper (2019).
Item analysis has one disadvantage. Whilst factor analysis will show if the items measure
two (or more) factors, item analysis assumes that they only measure one factor. This can cause
problems if two factors are highly correlated, as item analysis will create a scale which is a
mixture of items from the two factors.
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Constructing a test

a. What can factor analysis alone reveal about the structure of a scale?
b. In classical item analysis, why is it necessary to recompute all the item–
total correlations after removing an item?
c. Name four problems associated with constructing scales by criterion
keying.
Item response theory

Item response theory is a statistical technique which allows one to estimate (a) the diffculty
of each item and how well each item differentiates between people who have different levels
of the trait, and (b) each person’s level of the trait. For example, it can show that one item is
good for differentiating between people who have a near-average level of the trait, whilst
another item is good for differentiating between people whose level of the trait is high. It might
sound as if this can be achieved simply by looking at the frequency distribution of responses;
easy ability items will differentiate between low-ability participants, whilst high ability
individuals will all answer them correctly. However item response theory is extremely powerful
in that these estimates do not depend on the distribution of levels of the trait in the sample
who were tested.
Imagine you give an ability scale to 100 of people in the street, and discover that 50 of
them answered item one correctly. You then give the same item to 100 university students and
discover that 80% of them answer item one correctly. If we use the proportion answering the
item correctly as our estimate of the diffculty of the item, it is clear that this will vary
depending on the ability level of the sample.
Item response theory (IRT) is different. IRT estimates of the diffculty of each item do not
depend on the abilities of the people taking the scale. In the previous example, the estimates
of the diffculty of the item should be the same, no matter whether the scale was given to a
sample of the general population, a sample of university student, a sample of
schoolchildren . . . any ad hoc sample will suffce. It can also estimate the ability of each person
directly – without using norms. (The same principles can be applied to Likert scaled items,
too, although the maths is a little harder.)
One of the beauties of IRT is that it can be used to design scales which discriminate between
any ability ranges that one chooses. For example, one employer may which to discriminate
between highly able applicants; the technique will identify which items should be used to do so.
The technique is too complex to discuss in any depth here; I mention it in case you encounter
it in your reading or wish to use it in a research project. Hambleton et al. (1991) is old but
still an excellent introduction for those who want to explore it and there is a non-technical
introduction in Cooper (2019). Software to perform IRT includes jMetrik (for Windows) and
TAM (for R).
Next steps
The test constructor’s task is far from fnished once the item analysis has been completed.
Instructions (and possibly answer sheets) should be refned and example items should be
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Constructing a test
developed and checked before the revised (shorter and hopefully more reliable) scale is given
to another sample of about 200 individuals and its reliability and factor structure rechecked.
Its validity should also be established at this stage (e.g., by construct validation) as described
in Chapter 8. In the case of ability scales, the amount of time that individuals take to complete
the scale should be noted and a decision taken as to what time limits (if any) should be
imposed. A test manual should be prepared showing the results of these analyses, the
administration instructions, the marking scheme and as much evidence as possible that the
scale is reliable and valid.
Summary
This chapter has covered some basic principles of item writing for both ability scales and
personality scales. Item analysis has been introduced as a procedure for detecting and
eliminating items that are inappropriate and that detract from the scale’s reliability and/or
validity. Four techniques for performing item analysis have been discussed, namely criterion
keying, factor analysis, item response theory and classical item analysis. Major problems have
been identifed in the all-too-common technique of criterion keying and factor analysis and/
or classical item analysis are recommended for producing short, reliable and potentially valid
scales. There are many examples of item analysis in the journals; Lee et al. (2017) is typical,
and shows item-total correlations as well as the results from a factor analysis.

Gulliksen (1986) is still essential reading for anyone who is interested in the assessment of
abilities or educational attainment. Most and Zeidner (1995), Kline (1986) and Spector
(1992) are also well worth reading.
SAQ 20.1
If an ability scale contains many very easy or very diffcult items, you will not
obtain very good discrimination between the individuals in the sample. The
trait that the scale supposedly measures is probably normally distributed
(that is, the frequency diagram is bell-shaped). If your scale contains many
diffcult items, then it is drawing fne distinctions between the high ability
participants (of whom there are relatively few in the sample). You would
normally want to discriminate between the great majority of individuals in
the sample, and this implies having plenty of items that between 20% and
80% of the sample answer correctly.
Similar principles apply to personality scales. If items are answered on a
fve-point Likert scale and are scored from 1–5, you would not want to have
many items where almost everyone scored 1 or 2, or 4 or 5, as this shows that
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Constructing a test
the item is too ‘extreme’ for most people and does not discriminate between
those with average or near-average levels of the trait. For example, I imagine
almost everyone would agree or strongly agree with the item ‘I occasionally
need a little time to myself’. If everyone (or almost everyone) answers the
item in the same way, it is not particularly useful for measuring individual
differences.
SAQ 20.2
a. Factor analysis can show how many distinct constructs are measured by
a set of items – other techniques assume this is just one. Sometimes a set
of items can measure two quite highly correlated but distinct abilities,
e.g., fuid and crystallised ability, and indeed Cattell (1971) claims that
these two factors can be found when factor analysis is used to examine
scales that were constructed using classical item analysis.
b. Every time an item is removed, each person’s total score changes and so
all the other items’ correlations with this total score will also change.
c. The scale will have a very low (probably zero) reliability, as it will almost
certainly measure a mixture of traits. The arbitrary choice of which
criterion to measure will greatly infuence the items that make up the
scale. Because so many correlations are calculated between the scale
items and the criterion, some of these correlations will be seen as
signifcant purely by chance. Likewise, some items that should be included
will not be. It is also very atheoretical – having constructed the scale, we
have no real understanding of why it works or what it measures.
References
Cattell, R. B. 1971. Abilities, Their Structure Growth and Action. New York: Houghton
Miffin.
Coombs, W. N. & Schroeder, H. E. 1988. Generalised Locus of Control: An Analysis of
Factor-Analytic Data. Personality and Individual Differences, 9, 79–85.
Cooper, C. 1983. Correlation Measures in Item Analysis. British Journal of Mathematical and
Statistical Psychology, 32, 102–105.
Gough, H. G. 1975. The California Personality Inventory. Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists
Press.
Graham, J. R. 1990. MMPI-2: Assessing Personality and Psychopathology. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Gulliksen, H. 1986. Perspective on Educational Measurement. Applied Psychological
468
Constructing a test
Hambleton, R. K., Swaminathan, H. & Rogers, H. J. 1991. Fundamentals of Item Response

Theory. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Hathaway, S. R. & Mckinley, J. C. 1967. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
Manual (Revised). New York: Psychological Corporation.
Kline, P. 1986. A Handbook of Test Construction. London: Methuen.
Kline, P. 2000. The Handbook of Psychological Testing (2nd Edn). London; New York:
Routledge.
Lee, E. H., Lee, S. J., Hwang, S. T., Hong, S. H. & Kim, J. H. 2017. Reliability and Validity of
the Beck Depression Inventory-II among Korean Adolescents. Psychiatry Investigation, 14,
30–36.
Most, R. B. & Zeidner, M. 1995. Constructing Personality and Intelligence Instruments:
Methods and Issues. In D. H. Saklofske & M. Zeidner (eds.) International Handbook of
Personality and Intelligence. New York: Plenum.
Spector, P. E. 1992. Summated Rating Scale Construction. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
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Chapter 21
Problems with tests
Introduction
When we considered reliability theory in Chapter 8, each person’s score on a test was assumed
to have some measurement error associated with it. According to this model the square root
of the reliability of the test is a close approximation to the correlation between people’s scores
on the test and their ‘true score’ on the trait being assessed. The crucial assumption made there
is that measurement error is essentially random. If an individual took several tests measuring
the same trait, one might overestimate their scores slightly, another might underestimate their
score slightly, but, on average, the tests would provide accurate estimates of the person’s
ability. In this chapter, we shall instead consider systematic errors of measurement – the type
of measurement error that will cause tests to consistently overestimate some people’s true
scores and underestimate the true scores of others. For example, a test might underestimate
immigrants’ IQ because they do not have the language skills which the test-designer assumed
that everyone has. This consistent over- or under-estimation of scores is known as test bias.
There are a number of response styles which can infuence people’s scores on personality
scales. Apart from deliberate falsifcation (for example, trying to make oneself appear
wonderful in a personality test administered to job applicants) more subtle infuences can also
distort people’s scores on personality questionnaires. These include a tendency to give the most
socially desirable answer to questionnaire items, or to use the response scale in an idiosyncratic
way – for example, always (or never) choosing answers at the extreme ends of a Likert scale.
This chapter explores methods for detecting bias, and examines the infuence of response
styles on personality-test scores.
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Problems with tests
Learning outcomes
l Show a knowledge of bias in ability testing, and outline ways of detecting
internal and external bias in ability tests.
l Discuss various response styles which infuence the way in which people
answer personality questionnaires, and show awareness of how their
effects may be minimised when designing and using tests.
l Outline the infuence of test anxiety on test performance.
Bias in ability tests

The fnding that some groups of people achieve different scores on some psychological tests
clearly has serious implications for those who use such tests to assess individuals (e.g., in
forensic or educational psychology). It also has implications for those who use tests as part
of a selection procedure as it will clearly lead to group(s) with the lower mean scores on the
test being underrepresented in the workforce. But what if differences are genuine, and not due
to some fault with the test? The average height of women is genuinely lower than the average
height of men, and one can hardly say that a measuring tape is faulty because men and women
tend to achieve different scores! We need to fnd a way of distinguishing between bias
(consistently misjudging the scores of one group relative to another) and group differences
(genuine differences between the distributions of scores of various groups of people).
In practice, most defnitions focus on differences in average scores between groups, though a
case could be made for considering the variance of scores and other aspects of the score
distribution too.
Grave doubts have been expressed in both the popular press and the psychological journals
about the ‘fairness’ of various tests. For example, Kamin (1974) drew the attention of a
generation of psychologists to the way in which some early ability tests were used to identify
‘feeble-minded’ immigrants to the USA during the 1920s and argued passionately that any
attempt to assess individual differences was and is unfair and discriminatory.
In the case of those early tests, Kamin was completely correct. Rather than being tests of
abstract reasoning, these tests included items assessing factual knowledge about the American
culture (e.g., knowledge of past presidents). It is unsurprising that immigrants (many of whom
could not even read or speak English, far less have a knowledge of the culture of a nation on
the other side of the globe) failed to show their true ability on these tests. The tests were unfair
to members of these cultures in that they grossly underestimated their true potential.
When tests systematically underestimate or overestimate the true scores of groups of
individuals, they are said to be biased against (or in favour of) these groups. Thus the IQ tests
that Kamin cites were, without doubt, biased against all those who did not speak English
fuently and/or had little knowledge of the American way of life; these people scored lower
than they should have because they did not have the background, knowledge and language
skills which were assumed by the test developer.
Note, however, that bias was found in this case because of the way in which the test was
used – someone, somewhere, selected an inappropriate test for this particular application. The
test used in this example might have been perfectly adequate for other uses in school and
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Problems with tests
occupational psychology in the United States, where everyone had developed language skills
in English, and had been taught about American culture and history in high school. Hence it
is important to appreciate that bias can creep into an assessment procedure because of a
fawed choice of an otherwise perfectly satisfactory test, although tests themselves can also be
at fault, as will be seen later.
External bias in tests

External bias refers to the detection of bias by comparing scores on a test to some external
criteria for various groups of people. What Kamin omits to mention in his discussion of
ability tests is that the problems inherent in the immigrant screening programme would have
been recognised if and when the tests had been validated. If scores on the tests had been
plotted against subsequent criteria (e.g., annual income, school performance of children),
the uselessness of the tests would quickly have become obvious. For example, follow-up
studies might have shown a relationship such as that shown in Figure 21.1, which illustrates
the (hypothetical) annual income of immigrants (denoted by circles) and second-generation
Americans (denoted by crosses) 10 years after IQ testing, as a function of their scores on
the IQ test.
In Figure 21.1 you will notice that most immigrants (circles) had very low scores on the
IQ test – their scores are to the left of the graph. The crosses represent the second-generation
Americans and it is clear that there is a substantial correlation between IQ test score and
income for these individuals only. The fgure shows the ‘line of best ft’ to the data for the
second-generation Americans, calculated using a statistical technique called regression
Figure 21.1 Hypothetical links between scores on an IQ test and income

10 years later for two groups of individuals
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Problems with tests
analysis. This allows one to predict subsequent income from the IQ test scores of the second-
generation individuals. It is merely necessary to fnd the point on the x axis that corresponds
to a person’s score on the IQ test and move vertically upwards until one meets this regression
line. The individual’s estimated income can then be read off the y axis at this point.
If the test were fair to the immigrants, you would expect the same underlying relationship
to apply, and so the regression lines for the two groups should lie on top of each other. This
can be used to detect external bias in a test.
If IQ is important in determining subsequent income (as seems to be the case in the second-
generation group), then the low IQs of the immigrants would imply that they will subsequently
earn relatively little. The immigrants’ scores should lie close to the same regression line as that
of the majority group in Figure 21.1. You can see that this is far from being the case. Immigrants
who have low scores on the IQ test tend to earn far more than would be expected on the basis
of a regression analysis and, if you consider the immigrant group alone, you can see that there
is virtually no correlation between their scores on the IQ test and their subsequent income –
which is hardly surprising given that the IQ test is meaningless for members of this group.

Try to make up some data plotting income as a function of IQ for two groups
of people where:
a. there is the same substantial link between income and IQ for both the
‘circles’ and the ‘crosses’ but where the ‘circles’ tend to have both lower
IQs and lower incomes
b. there is again a substantial link between income and IQ for the ‘circles’
and ‘crosses’, but the ‘crosses’ of all IQs have an income that is $2000
above that of the ‘circles’.
The frst graph produced in answer to self-assessment question 21.1 demonstrates a very
important principle. Here, there is a clear group difference in IQ scores (circles score lower),
but members of this group also earn less. This suggests that there is a genuine difference in
the IQ scores of the circles and the crosses, for while the circles achieve low scores on the IQ
test, this graph (unlike Figure 21.1) shows that the IQ test does not appear to underestimate
their potential.
The important lesson to learn from this is that the presence of group differences does not
necessarily imply that a test is biased. This point cannot be made too strongly – it is fundamental
and universally agreed by measurement specialists (Berk, 1982; Jensen, 1980; Reynolds, 1995;
Reynolds and Suzuki, 2012). Test bias implies that test items are too diffcult for members of
certain groups for reasons that are unrelated to the characteristic being assessed – for example,
because items in an IQ test require an ability to read and write English or assume cultural
knowledge that a recent immigrant simply will not possess. It is possible that there will be
genuine differences between the abilities or personality scores of different groups, and it is
important not to confuse this with bias. For example, there is a substantial literature on sex
differences in Psychopathy. Men also go on to kill and assault more people than women.
Hence the difference in test scores is mirrored by the behaviour; this is a genuine group
difference, and not an example of bias.
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Problems with tests
If regression lines between test scores and criterion performance are the same for two groups,
then it does not matter if there are differences in the mean scores of the groups. Bias can be
inferred when different groups follow different regression lines (differing in either slope or height)
or when the scores of members of some groups fall further from the regression line than the scores
of members of other groups (i.e., there is a lower correlation with the criterion). Using a test of
low reliability automatically produces a larger spread of scores on either side of the regression
line, so it is also sensible to check that the reliability of the test is similar in both groups.
It is possible to examine external bias in personality scales by once again checking whether
low scores on the test are related to low (or high) scores on some criterion behaviour. For
example, it would be possible to check whether sex differences on one of the Psychopathy
scales discussed in Chapter 10 is genuine, or whether it refects some form of biased
responding; perhaps men feel that they have to make ‘tough’ or ‘macho’ responses to the
items, so ensuring that their scores are overestimated. One could determine whether the
higher Psychopathy scores of men are refected in other behaviours which are thought to
be related to Psychopathy – incidence of violent crime, lack of remorse, emotional coldness,
risk-taking and so on by using the same regression approach as discussed above. (These
behaviours would need to be assessed by means other than self-report questionnaires,
otherwise people who downplay their true levels of Psychopathy when answering the
questionnaire will also tend to deny psychopathic behaviours!)
If the higher scores on the Psychopathy scale are refected in commensurately higher scores
on the objective measures indicating psychopathy, then the gender-difference is real, and does
not imply that the test is faulty. If a personality test is used for selection in the workplace, and
is fair for both genders and for members of every minority group, then the relationship
between scores on each scale of the test and objective measures of work performance should
be the same. If a regression analysis is performed for each sex and each minority group
separately, the regression lines should be identical, showing that (for example) a score of
30 on one personality scale predicts the same level of job performance (value of goods sold,
for example) for each and every group.
In practice matters are not so simple.
l There might be problems establishing objective criteria of performance in many jobs;

supervisors’ ratings might themselves be biased, for example.
l Unless the organisation is large, the number of people in each group is likely to be modest,
which makes it diffcult to be sure that bias is present – particularly as we have seen from
Chapter 18 that correlations between scores on personality scales and job performance
tend to be fairly small. This means that the points on scatter-diagrams will be more
dispersed, making it harder to be certain of the true position of the regression line for each
group. This makes it harder to tell if the regression lines are identical.
Although I have used the regression model as an example because it is simple, there are
other statistical techniques (structural equation modelling) which allow much the same sorts
of analyses to be performed but which can simultaneously compare the links between scores
on one or several scales and performance for two or several groups.
Bias and group differences

Some psychologists are intensely interested in group differences (generally racial differences)
in personality and ability. Thus we read that the Japanese tend to have above average spatial
ability skills compared to Europeans and that black Americans tend to have lower scores on
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Problems with tests
IQ tests than white Americans. The lack of references to these papers is deliberate because,
personally speaking, I cannot see the academic appeal of this area. Even if there are clear
differences between groups which cannot be explained by test bias, it is not entirely obvious
why they have arisen. Do the Japanese have better skills because they eat more fsh, because
their educational system develops such skills more than in the west, because they write using
Kanji (pictoral) characters, because of genetic differences or because they had to hunt for food
during the ice age and so there was natural selection for this characteristic (although, strangely,
not for running fast to escape predators)? These have all been offered as explanations for the
group differences and it is not easy to test any of these hypotheses, particularly the last one.
It is also easy to become obsessed with group differences and to forget that individual
differences within groups of people far outweigh the relatively small differences between
groups of individuals. The political dangers of a doctrine of group differences, racial inferiority
and the like can hardly be overlooked.
Even if group differences are found and are thought to be real, it is diffcult to tell why they
arise; social deprivation, cultural attitudes to education/testing, quality of schooling, nutrition
and medical care could all be implicated. The difference between white and black Americans’
IQ sccores has in any case been decreasing (Dickens and Flynn, 2006).
A transracial adoption study (Scarr and Weinberg, 1977; Weinberg et al., 1992) followed
up mainly-black children who were adopted before the age of 12 months by white parents.
This is unusual, as adoption agencies usually place children with same-race adoptive parents
and it creates its own problems. Everyone will recognise that the child has been adopted,
adoptive parents were screened and did not form a random sample of the population, the
children who were adopted may not have formed a random sample of the population, and
the number of adopted children was only 101. It may thus be dangerous to draw any frm
conclusions from these analyses. Skin colour and gender nevertheless do appear to have a
strange fascination for some psychologists.
Applied psychologists also have to be aware of the implications of group differences in
ability when using selection tests. For although I argued earlier that group differences need
not necessarily imply that a test is biased, the legal system takes the opposite view and adopts
what is known as the ‘egalitarian fallacy’. It assumes that all ethnic and gender groups must
have the same underlying levels of all abilities and that, if tests suggest otherwise, there must
be something wrong with the tests. Those using tests for selection, guidance and placement
are therefore obliged to ensure that their tests refect few group differences.

Earlier in this chapter it was stressed that it is wrong to infer that a test is
biased merely because it shows group differences. Suppose that you
administer a test in order to select applicants for a particular job, fnd that a
particular test predicts job performance quite well (r = 0.3) but discover that
male applicants score appreciably lower than female applicants (e.g., half a
standard deviation lower):
a. What would happen if the test were used in its present form?
b. What non-psychological factors might account for the observed difference
in performance between the two genders?
c. What steps might you take?
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Problems with tests
Internal bias
It is not necessary to have an external criterion to detect bias in a test, for it is possible that a
test may contain just a few items that are demonstrably biased against one or more groups –
that is, they are substantially more diffcult for members of some groups than others. (Or in
the case of personality items, members of some groups are more likely to agree to them than
are members of other groups.) Several techniques have been developed to detect this ‘internal
bias’ and Berk (1982) and Osterlind (1983) provide an excellent discussion of these issues;
more recent books tend to be rather technical. I shall only mention one simple approach as
these days most attempts to detect bias in tests rely on item response theory to detect differential
item functioning which is beyond the scope of this text. It analyses whether the relationship
between ability and item diffculty is the same for each group, which it should be if the item
is unbiased.
However it is possible to perform something similar using analysis of variance (ANOVA).1
Suppose that many people complete a personality scale, consisting of Likert-scaled items. We
score the scale so that a score of 5 indicates a high level of the trait, and a score of 1 a low
level. Each individual is classifed as members of one or more groups (e.g., according to gender
and ethnic origin). To keep matters simple, we shall just concentrate on gender differences
and will assume that the test consists of 30 items. It is possible to perform a mixed-model
(one-between-and-one-within) analysis of variance on the item scores, using ‘gender’ (two
levels) as the between-subjects factor and ‘item’ (30 levels) as the within-subjects factor. That
is, we treat the responses to all 30 items in the test as different levels of a single within-subjects
factor. The ANOVA table resulting from this analysis will show:
l the signifcance of the ‘item’ effect

l the signifcance of the ‘group’ effect
l the signifcance of the ‘group × item interaction’.
The ‘item’ effect tests whether the average scores of all of the items are the same. They will
almost certainly not be; some will be phrased to measure a more extreme version of the trait
than others (‘I invariably feel nervous in enclosed spaces’ vs ‘I occasionally feel anxious in
lifts, small rooms, etc.’). Thus this term of the ANOVA will almost certainly be very signifcant
indeed. This term is of no interest whatsoever for detecting bias.
The ‘group’ effect tests whether males and females tend to have the same average score on
the test items; it shows whether there is a difference between the mean scores of men and
women, indicating a group difference. This is of no great interest either, although the presence
of substantial group differences will be a problem if one intends to use the test for selection
or placement.
The ‘group × item interaction’ term is the really interesting one. If this effect is statistically
signifcant and the effect size is substantial, it implies that members of one group answer some
items differently to members of the other group. This test shows whether there is a statistically
signifcant degree of bias in the test items. It is possible to fnd out precisely which items are
implicated by plotting the interaction, testing simple effects, etc. The items can then be
removed from the test. The presence of a signifcant group × item interaction can thus indicate
that some test items are problematical.
One diffculty with this approach is, of course, that the statistical power of the procedure
affects the signifcance of this interaction. In practice, this means that if the analysis is
performed on a small sample of individuals, it is unlikely to detect subtle degrees of bias whilst
if the sample is large any test will show a statistically signifcant (albeit small) degree of bias.
477
Problems with tests
There are known to be some problems with this approach, as has been mentioned by
Osterlind (1983) among others, but it is a simple way of detecting bias when there is no
criterion available and item response theory cannot be used.
It is advisable to consider internal (item) bias whenever developing or using a test. Suppose,
for example, that a 40-item test consisted of 20 items that were much easier for females than
for males, and 20 items that were much easier for males. If one merely looked for a signifcant
difference in the total scores of the males and females, it is quite possible that no difference
would be found. Thus it is quite possible for a test to be riddled with biased items, yet for the
analysis of group differences or regression analyses of the type shown in Figure 21.1 to give
the scale a clean bill of health. It is only by going down to the level of test items that one can
really see what is going on and identify items that are biased and so should be removed from
the scale.
Causes of bias in ability tests

What can cause members of some groups to have their scores overestimated or underestimated?
Many possibilities have been suggested.
l Language. Those for whom English is their second language, those who dropped out of
school early, those with dyslexia, or those with a low IQ may have problems understanding
items in ability and personality tests. This means that their scores will not accurately refect
their level of the traits which the tests measure. If the test is not designed to measure
language ability, or one of its correlates (such as crystallised intelligence) the test scores will
be biased. One of the items in the MMPI is: ‘If people had not had it in for me I would
have been much more successful’. Even discounting the possible double negative, I suspect
that not everyone would understand what ‘had it in for me’ means – though high IQ
participants could perhaps infer the meaning from the context. Another item from that test
is ‘As a youngster I was suspended from school one or more times for cutting up’. Does
this refer to self-harm? Knife crime? Truancy? Fooling around?
l Assumed knowledge. Many personality and many ability items make some assumptions
about what people know. For example, one ability test asked children what is the right
thing to do if they fnd a stamped, addressed envelope in the road. A child who lived in the
middle of a prairie and who normally communicated electronically could hardly realise
that seeking out a postbox is supposed to be the correct answer.
l Coaching. Scores on some ability- or knowledge-based tests might be improved with
practice, so coaching may improve performance. Likewise there is some evidence that
familiarising students with the sorts of problems in cognitive tests and how to approach
them may have a modest infuence on their scores (Powers and Rock, 1999), although these
researchers note that the effects are far smaller than the coaching companies claim.
However it does not seem to be possible to improve g by training (Melby-Lervag et al.,
2016). In the case of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (a test used to select students for colleges
in the USA), it is not entirely clear whether the time and energy devoted to learning the
‘tricks of the test’ would not be better spent taking a course to improve one’s mathematical
ability or some other area of academic weakness (Evans and Pike, 1973). The fundamental
point is surely that psychological tests should not be so well publicised that would-be
candidates can gain useful knowledge in this way. All the necessary information should
surely be given to all candidates during the test instructions.
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Problems with tests
l Race, sex, dialect of test administrator. It has been claimed that minority groups may be
disadvantaged if the person administering a test or questionnaire comes from a different
background; speaking standard English rather than the dialect to which they are accustomed
may make participants feel intimidated, and so demotivated. Sattler and Gwynne (1982)
list several such claims, but they, Sattler (1992) and Jensen (1980) reviewed the empirical
literature and found little evidence that these characteristics of the test administrator
infuence IQ scores.
l Scoring. This should not be a major problem for objectively scored psychometric tests,
but could perhaps be important for projective tests; examiner bias and prejudice might
creep in.
l Psychological factors. Test anxiety is discussed below. Self-esteem, motivation and impulsivity
have all been implicated in underperformance. Encouraging even young children to perform
well can lead to signifcant increases in their scores on ability tests compared to control groups
(Brown and Walberg, 1993). Cultural factors have also been suggested as important infuences
in test performance. If a child believes that he or she is unlikely to perform well on a test, then
it is possible that he or she will perform poorly so as to conform to a stereotype (Steele and
Aronson, 1995). Detailed test instructions and a sensitive administration procedure aim to
reduce these as much as possible – e.g., by giving some easy practice examples, putting
candidates at their ease, explaining the purpose of the test, explaining confdentiality
arrangements, perhaps stressing that there are no right or wrong answers (for a personality
test) and stressing that the scores are anonymous (if they are). If the test has time limits this
should be made clear at the outset. It is also good policy to give everyone your contact details
(e.g., a business card) at the end of the session in case they have any concerns they want to
raise later. I always make the start of the process very informal, and then explain, apologetically,
that for the sake of fairness the test instructions need to be read verbatim.
Sensitivity to the feelings of those who are being assessed, coupled with a careful choice of
test or questionnaire, should allow the effects to be minimised.
Test anxiety
Response styles (also known as ‘response biases’ or ‘response sets’) may affect tests assessing
personality, mood, motivation and attitudes. When people are asked to report their behaviour
of express an opinion using a questionnaire, the way in which people respond is not entirely
determined by the trait that the test hopes to measure. We will frst consider test anxiety, which
typically correlates about –0.2 with academic achievement (Hembree, 1988) and thus explains
about 4% of the person-to-person variation in school performance; anxiety about psychological
tests and assessments is generally assumed to be similar. Several scales have been developed
to measure test anxiety, of which Spielberger’s Test Anxiety Scale (Spielberger, 1980) is
probably the best known. Its items measure a mixture of worry (intrusive thoughts about
performing badly affect performance) and emotionality (sweating, feeling tense) according to
Zeidner and Nevo (1992).
Whilst high levels of test anxiety are associated with lowered performance on many tests
of attainment it is unwise to infer from this that test anxiety leads to performance impairment.
It could be that high anxiety results from the (correct) appraisal that one is not going to
perform at all well. More complex analyses (e.g., Hopko et al., 2005; Moutaf et al., 2006)
show that high anxiety does indeed impair performance on cognitive tests.
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Problems with tests
A widely researched model (Zeidner and Matthews, 2005) which incorporates this
possibility suggests that there are three main components of test anxiety, which are thought
to interact in complex ways.
l Self-beliefs. Believing that one is unlikely to perform well turn into a self-fulflling prophecy
if they lead to maladaptive behaviour. On the other hand believing that one is in control
of the situation may lead to protection from worry, intrusive thoughts and maladaptive
behaviour.
l Executive (cognitive) processes. These include thinking about the importance of the
assessment, the consequences of failure, the use of coping strategies and metacognitive
beliefs, such as that nothing can be done to stop worry affecting performance.
l Maladaptive behaviour. Stemming from a low belief in one’s competence, this involves
behaving in a way allows one to blame something other than lack of ability for poor
performance in an ability test or school assessment. By not revising, partying the day before
an assessment or not really engaging with the procedure one can say ‘I would have
performed well if only I had done more revision/not gone out the night before/listened to
the instructions/tried the practice examples’.
The problem is that this model is so complex, with feedback between the various elements,
that it is not entirely obvious how it can be tested.
Acquiescence
It is well known that individuals are more likely to agree with statements than to disagree
with them (Messick and Jackson, 1961) – a tendency that is exploited to the full by
unscrupulous market researchers. Suppose that you asked a carefully selected sample of the
population ‘do you intend to vote for the present government in the next election?’ and found
that 55% said that they did. Then suppose you asked another sample of people ‘do you intend
to vote for one of the opposition parties in the next election?’ You might naively expect that,
on the basis of the frst survey, about 100–55 = 45% of the population would answer ‘yes’.
In fact, the proportion is likely to be considerably higher, just because people seem to be more
willing to say ‘yes’ than ‘no’ whatever the question may be (Cronbach, 1946). This is known
as the response set of acquiescence.
This fnding has some fairly unpleasant implications for personality testing. It means that
any personality scale – a scale of anxiety, for example – whose items are all scored in the same
direction (so that a response of ‘yes’ or ‘strongly agree’ to each item produces a high score on
the test) will be infuenced by acquiescence. Individuals’ scores will be a little higher than they
should be because of this tendency to agree with statements – everyone would appear to be a
little more anxious than they actually are. This in itself may not appear to be too much of a
problem. If it were possible to estimate that, on average, each person’s score was two points
higher than it should be because of this response set, it would be a simple matter to deduct
this amount from each individual’s score. (In practice, there would be no need to bother doing
so, since the correlations between the test scores and other things would be unaffected by
deducting a constant from each person’s score.) So what is the problem?
The diffculties arise if there are individual differences in this response set of acquiescence.
Perhaps some individuals have a strong tendency to agree with statements, whereas others are
completely immune from doing so. This is what is so dangerous, since if individuals’ scores
on the anxiety test are infuenced by both anxiety and their tendency to agree, it is clear that
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Problems with tests
the test will overestimate the anxiety scores of the acquiescent individuals, while being
completely accurate for low acquiescent people. This is why most personality tests contain
items that are scored in both directions. If about 50% of the items are phrased so that agreeing
with a statement implies a high score on the trait (e.g., ‘I suffer from nerves’) and the remainder
are phrased the opposite way round (e.g., ‘I am calm and relaxed most of the time’), then
acquiescence will have little effect. When the test is scored, any tendency to acquiesce will
cancel itself out. Tests that are not constructed in this way should be viewed with suspicion.
The tendency of a person to acquiesce has a small correlation with Openness (Hibbing et al.,
2019) and those who complete questionnaires quickly and who are rated as simplistic thinkers
are also more likely to use the extremes of a rating scale (Naemi et al., 2009).
Social desirability
Social desirability is another response style that can affect the way in which people answer
test items in personality tests; it was briefy mentioned in Chapter 18. It is the tendency to
show oneself in a good light and to deny any behaviours or feelings that may be socially
unacceptable. Items relating to swearing, being mean, being aggressive, having a sense of
humour, being honest, being hard working and being intelligent are among those that may be
infuenced by this response style. It is a particular problem when personality tests are used for
personnel selection – anyone with a modicum of intelligence is likely to realise that it is
probably not a good thing to admit to experiencing hallucinations, being dishonest or having
a ‘slapdash’ attitude when flling in a personality questionnaire while applying for a job.
It is not diffcult to measure social desirability. It is possible to ask raters to scrutinise items
in personality questionnaires and to decide how much each item is affected by social
desirability. Where there is good agreement, it is highly probable that social desirability will
affect the way in which the item is answered. Edwards (1957) carried out this experiment and
observed that there was a substantial correlation between ratings of the social desirability of
test items and the way in which they were answered. People tended to answer items in a
socially desirable way, indicating that social desirability may be a problem for personality
questionnaires.
As with acquiescence, this raises severe diffculties only if we assume that some people are
more swayed by social desirability than others when flling in personality questionnaires.
Unfortunately, it is rarely possible to use the same solution for social desirability (balancing
the test items so that some socially desirable responses tend to increase the score on the trait,
while others decrease it). Can you think of a test item that measures anxiety where the
‘anxious’ response is also more socially desirable than the ‘low-anxiety’ response? Instead, it
is common practice to try to eliminate highly socially desirable items from personality
questionnaires as they are being developed.
Individual differences in the tendency to give socially desirable responses can be measured
using scales such as the Crowne–Marlowe (Crowne and Marlowe, 1964) or the Balanced
Inventory of Desirable Responding (Paulhus, 1984). A group of individuals can be given this
questionnaire along with the questionnaire that is being developed in the context in which it
will be used. If any items in the questionnaire are strongly infuenced by social desirability,
the responses to these questions will correlate substantially with individuals’ scores on the
social desirability scale. If the items are little affected by social desirability, the correlations
will be trivial. Thus it is possible to identify which items are strongly affected by social
desirability and so consider eliminating or rephrasing them during the process of test
construction.
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Problems with tests
When a scale is used to assess personality as part of a selection process, it is sensible to try
to reduce socially desirable responding by scattering items measuring social desirability
throughout the questionnaire, asking participants to be honest, making them aware that it is
not in their best interests to distort their responses, as this can be detected. However this then
leads to the question of what one should do if a candidate appears to be outstanding but also
seems to be answering items in the socially desirable way. If social desirability is not linked to
job performance, it may be illegal to reject them because of this – and there is no evidence
that individuals are deliberately trying to distort their scores. It is possible that socially
desirable responding is linked to some personality trait(s), for example.
It is therefore useful to consider whether socially desirable responding is linked to
occupational performance and other measures of performance, and whether it is also
correlated with other personality traits. Ones et al. (1996) addressed these questions by means
of two meta-analyses. The frst established whether socially desirable responding is linked to
job performance; whether people who made socially desirable responses performed any worse
(or better) at school, training courses and at work than those who appeared to give honest
answers. There was a modest (albeit highly signifcant) tendency for people who made socially
desirable responses to perform well at various training courses, as rated by instructors
(ρ=0.22); other correlations were close to zero. Hence there was no evidence that people who
made socially desirable responses to personality items performed worse at work. Of course it
would be good to know whether people who made socially desirable responses performed
better (or worse) at work than might be expected given their scores on other selection tests.
However a meta-analysis cannot address that issue.
Their second meta-analysis examined whether social desirability was linked to personality.
It seemed to be correlated with low Neuroticism and Conscientiousness from self-report
questionnaires – but of course, it is possible that social desirability affected these scales, so
this is not a particularly useful analysis. It was however found that social desirability also
correlated slightly with low Neuroticism and high Conscientiousness when these traits were
rated by others (ρ=–0.14 and ρ=0.10). It was also negatively correlated with both years of
education (ρ=–0.18) and school performance (ρ=–0.11) though not with intelligence. Social
desirability does seem to have a small association with Neuroticism and Conscientiousness;
as the ratings of personality may have not been entirely accurate it is possible that the true
relationships might be substantially larger than the meta-analysis suggested.
Ones et al. also estimated what the correlations between each of the Big Five scores and
job performance would be if no one showed socially desirable responding. This showed that
correcting for individual differences in social desirability made virtually no difference to the
correlations between personality and job performance. Social desirability may not to be much
of a problem after all.
Faking good and faking bad

Participants sometimes seek to convey a particular impression by setting out to sabotage test
results when completing questionnaires – for example, to make themselves appear in a very
positive light (as with a prisoner seeking early release, or when applying for a job) or negative
(for example, when seeking compensation following an accident, or to avoid compulsory
military service). This can affect both the levels of personality traits and the correlations
between them (Boss et al., 2015) and can be widespread; Griffn and Wilson (2012) found
that over 60% of medical-school applicants appeared to have distorted their scores on at least
one of the Big Five personality scales when it was used as part of the selection procedure.
482
Problems with tests
It seems that Conscientiousness is the easiest of the Big Five factors to fake whilst Openness
is most resistant to deliberate faking (Griffn et al., 2004).
Worryingly, impression management may be a problem even when people are flling in
personality questionnaires for research purposes over the internet, rather than for employment,
etc. Bäckström et al. (2009) gave a Swedish translation of an IPIP (International Personality
Item Pool) Big Five personality questionnaire to a large sample of people and used confrmatory
factor analysis (see Chapter 19) to determine whether there was a sixth, social desirability,
factor with a negative loading on neuroticism and positive loadings on the other Big Five
factors. There was, and scores on this factor correlated strongly with a test measuring
impression management, suggesting that this sixth general factor was, indeed, measuring an
aspect of impression management.
It is possible to identify items which are particularly susceptible to faking (good or bad) by
asking participants to complete a questionnaire in order to improve your chances of obtaining
compensation following a car accident, so as to be selected for your dream job, or something
similar, and some questionnaires can be scored so as to detect these forms of faking. However
doubts have been raised about whether such laboratory-induced faking behaviour bears much
relationship to real-life faking behaviour (Holden and Book, 2012).
Many of the scales which are prone to deliberate sabotage tend not to measure the main
personality traits discussed in this book, but are more specialised diagnostic and clinical
instruments – for example to measure psychopathy, where sabotage is substantial (Rogers
et al., 2002). However a detailed discussion of these issues is outside the remit of this book
and so a more detailed discussion may be inappropriate; see Ziegler et al. (2012) for further
details.
Self-deception
It is also possible that people give inaccurate answers on questionnaires because they are
genuinely misguided about how they behave and how others see them. For example, you may
genuinely believe that you are open to new ideas and experiences, yet everyone else regards
you as closed-minded and conventional. It is obviously harder to detect this form of bias
which can perhaps be inferred if two raters who know a participant well agree closely with
each other about the participant’s personality, but the participant herself produces a very
different profle. Or it could just be that the participant is good at ‘putting on a front’ and
fooling the people they know. Paulhus et al. (1991) discuss this, and related issues, in some
depth. It too creates problems for the practical use of self-report questionnaires by reducing
the validity of scales.
Extreme responding
The way in which people use Likert scales can also be infuenced by other features of their
makeup. A typical Likert scale might invite someone to circle one of the numbers from
1 to 5, where a rating of 1 implies that they ‘strongly disagree’ with a statement and a rating of
5 that they ‘strongly agree’ with it. Some years ago, Paul Kline, Jon May and I were interested
in developing an ‘objective test’ to measure authoritarian attitudes. We suspected that
authoritarian types tended to see the world in ‘black and white’ terms, free from any doubt
or ambiguity. Therefore we postulated that when presented with a 5-point rating scale they
would circle plenty of 1s and 5s, but rather few of the middle points compared to control
483
Problems with tests
groups, which is exactly what we observed (Cooper et al., 1986). Here is another personality
trait that infuences the way in which people use any Likert scale. Extreme responding also
has a small correlation with Openness (Hibbing et al., 2019).
Random responding
Random responding can be a problem when participants have nothing to gain from
participating in a research study; they may just choose random answers to get away as quickly
as possible. It may also be a problem when participants are uncooperative (e.g., in forensic
settings; Cook et al., 2016). As we noted in Chapter 17 some questionnaires have scales to
detect random responding but it is straightforward to do this oneself – particularly if the data
are in a spreadsheet. Simply identify several pairs of items which tend to be answered similarly
(which is not quite the same thing as being highly correlated; you may wish to ponder why).
Then work out the difference between the two scores for each pair of items for each person
(ignoring any minus signs). People who give consistently different responses to these pairs of
items are probably responding randomly. Sometimes people just give the same answer to
many successive questions, which is fairly easy to identify by looking at the raw (unscored)
responses.
Random responding has been identifed as a real problem for researchers using the
NEO-PI(R) (Holden et al., 2012).

Name some variables that may affect performance on personality tests.
Conclusions
Those who argue that such problems mean that psychological tests should be cast out into
the psychological wilderness, along with phrenology and animal magnetism (Morgeson et al.,
2007; Gould, 1996), overlook two points. First, if these effects were all important, then tests
would not be able to predict any criterion behaviours. As we have seen in Chapters 17 and 18,
ability tests and (occasionally, in some contexts) some personality scales can make a useful
contribution here. Second, they ignore guidelines for ‘good practice’ in test administration.
The instructions for virtually all tests stress that the examiner should use his or her interpersonal
skills to make participants feel as relaxed and unthreatened as possible, to motivate children
to perform their very best and so on. Moreover, virtually all tests include several test items
that familiarise candidates with the types of problem to be presented, the use of the answer
sheet and so on. Thus, in practice, test-takers should be made to feel relaxed and motivated
to answer honestly and perform their best, and will get some practice prior to the main testing
session.
In addition, several organisations now offer candidates the opportunity to pre-test
themselves. For example, the Northern Ireland Civil Service runs an selection system that
involves sending applicants a sample of psychometric test items so that they can try these out
for themselves before attending the assessment procedure. An additional beneft of this
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Problems with tests
procedure is that individuals who score very poorly on the self-administered tests may choose
not to apply, thereby reducing costs.
This chapter does, however, highlight that great care must be taken in selecting an
appropriate test, and checking its credentials carefully before using it. The scores of any scale
are only likely to be meaningful if its properties are well documented in the test manual or
the psychological literature, and it is sensitively administered.
Summary
This chapter has considered some problems with psychometric testing and, in particular, the
concept of bias – which is poorly understood both within and without the psychological
community. We have also briefy considered some other variables that can infuence
performance on tests of ability and personality and commented on their importance and
implications for testing practice.

Warne et al. (2014) provide an accessible and interesting account of test bias, group differences
and their importance in applied psychology. The standard work in this area is Jensen’s (1980)
book Bias in Mental Testing which can be heartily recommended, though of course its review
of the empirical literature is now out of date. Reynolds and Suzuki (2013) is both comprehensive
and more up-to-date. For those who plan on using tests with children, Sattler (1992) is warmly
recommended; it covers good practice in the choice, administration and interpretation of
ability tests. Rust and Golombok (2009) has a thoughtful discussions of the infuence of
anxiety, motivation and the various response sets on performance, as do occupational/
organisational psychology texts and specialised treatments such as Young (2014). Those who
wish to explore the detection of bias using item response theory might enjoy Hambleton
et al. (1991) or Chapter 7 of Hogan (2019), whilst Ziegler et al. (2012) give a comprehensive
discussion of faking and its effects.
SAQ 21.1
Part 1 of Figure 21.2 shows data from two groups of people (‘o’ and ‘x’) which
have the same regression line. This shows that the equation linking IQ and
income is the same for each group, indicating that the IQ test is not biased.
However there is a genuine group difference; members of the ‘x’ group tend
to have higher scores on the IQ test, and this is refected in their higher
incomes. The second part of the graph shows that a person with a particular
IQ is more likely to have a higher income if they are a member of the ‘x’
group; the regression line for the x group lies above the regression line for
the ‘o’ group. The IQ test is biased. In this example there is also a group
485
Problems with tests
difference, as members of the ‘x’ group tend to have higher IQs, so this is an
example where there is both bias and a group difference.
1.
Annual income 10 years later x

$20 000 x x
x x
x x x x x
x x x x
x x
x xx
$10 000 x x x
x
x
Score on IQ test
2.
Annual income 10 years later
x
x
x xx x
x xx xx x x x
x
$20 000 x x x x xx
x x
xx x
x x x x
x x
x
$10 000
Score on IQ test
Figure 21.2 Answer to self-assessment question 21.1
SAQ 21.2
a. The test will select more females than males into the organisation.
b. It is important to remember that applicants for a particular job do not
form a random sample of the population. Factors such as geographical
486
Problems with tests
location of the business, the nature of competing businesses, perceived

chances of employment, the structure of a divided education system,
emigration, family traditions of employment, etc. can all interact with
ability to produce rather distorted samples. For example, if there is a
popular major employer in the same geographical area that takes large
numbers of high IQ female employees, other businesses may end up
taking applicants who were rejected.
c. Plot the graph of criterion performance vs test performance for both
groups and check that the two lines have similar heights and slopes. Also
check the reliability of the test within each group, and check for signs of
internal bias. Remove biased items if any are found and recompute the
validity coeffcients. Consult the literature to discover whether others
have reported similar results using the same test against similar criteria.
If all else fails, consider trying another test.
SAQ 21.3
Apart from the personality trait that the test seeks to measure, responses will
be infuenced by social desirability, acquiescence and extreme responding/
conservatism, although other variables (such as the individual’s perception of
the reason for testing) might also be important.
Note
1 Or multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA).
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Chapter 22
Integration and conclusions
Introduction
This book has covered a wide range of theories and methodologies, from classical
psychoanalysis to factor analysis by way of the main trait theories of personality and ability –
proof indeed of the wide range of skills necessary both to understand and to evaluate other
people’s research and to begin to use the techniques in earnest, for I hope that by now some
of the interesting issues in individual differences research will be obvious. The purpose of this
chapter is to refect on some of the broad issues which have emerged throughout this book,
to identify areas where research appears to be producing promising results, and to give a
personal view of areas where there seems to be some controversy.
Learning outcomes
Having read this brief chapter you should be able to:
l Step back from the detail and identify some ways in which individual
difference theories have developed – and why this book has stressed
some theories but not others.
l Identify and discuss some areas of controversy.
Individual differences in retrospect

In this section I want to paint the ‘big picture’ – to show why the book included the theories
that it did, and show how the various chapters ftted together. I ignore most of the
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methodological chapters, as these just provide the technical detail required to understand and
evaluate tests and questionnaires. However there is one exception.
The use and abuse of psychometric techniques

In Chapters 5 and 6 I showed that in order to infer that a personality trait causes some
behaviour to take place, the trait needs to be identifed by observing that several different
behaviours tend to occur together – for example sweating easily, being hypervigilant in
scanning the environment and reacting strongly to potential threats in the case of anxiety.
I pointed out that observing that several behaviours tend to occur together allows one to
diagnose a common cause in medicine and psychiatry (alcohol infuences several different
aspects of behaviour, depressive illness infuences others, the ‘common cold’ infuences yet
others). This led Cattell (e.g., 1973) to suggest that personality psychologists should identify
and study ‘source traits’ which behave like this. These would include traits such as the Big
Five personality factors (as each is represented by six different facets of behaviour), various
models of emotional intelligence, and so on.
The problem is that very often psychologists develop scales by writing items which are
nearly identical in meaning, and so which have to be answered in the same way. These must
inevitably form a factor. However as far as I can see, these factors are unlikely to be as useful
as source traits. Indeed, one can invent any concept one likes and write multiple highly similar
items to measure it.
This appears to be aping the methodology recommended by Cattell. And indeed it all looks
very scientifc; factor analysis and various wonderful psychometric techniques are brought to
bear on the data. All of this seems to be pointless, however, for the items are highly similar in
meaning. People’s responses to these items are bound to be highly correlated, they are bound
to form factors, and the scales measuring these factors are bound to show high reliability.
It is hard to see that there is even any point in gathering data to prove any of this; if such
a scale is highly reliable, all it tells us is that people have understood the words, and have not
answered items at random! There is no evidence that such a factor is a source trait; it might
not refect some characteristic of people but instead may just be a concept dreamed up by a
psychologist which has no relationship whatsoever to any aspect of behaviour. The number
of such traits is potentially almost infnite, as they stem from ideas in a psychologist’s head
(‘I want to measure such-and-such a trait’) rather than being discovered by analysing how
people actually behave (or how they say they behave).
I see this as a major issue in personality research, which is why I have mentioned it several
times. The problem is that many psychologists seem keen to explore these narrow traits and
the journals are full of the fruits of their labours. It is not at all obvious to me that this will
ultimately develop our understanding of personality, although those who have spent their
careers developing, using and persuading others to use these tests will disagree with this view.
Developing a new so-called personality scale like this and relating it to other scales for the
rest of one’s career is easy. Developing theories to explain the origins of personality (e.g.,
reinforcement sensitivity theory) is both far more diffcult, and (arguably) far more important.
Personality
We started by looking at individuals. Three theories set out to understand people as unique
beings. Rogers listened to people’s description of their ‘self’ and viewed personality of a
process of trying to understand oneself through introspection, within a close supportive
relationship – such as that offered by the therapist in client-centred therapy. Kelly, on the other
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hand, tried to understand how others viewed their world, arguing that we each try to predict
our own and others’ behaviour through a system of ‘personal constructs’. According to this
theory we each develop ways of classifying people, objects and ourselves in order to try to
understand and predict their behaviour; understanding personality involves understanding
the individual’s system of personal constructs – e.g., through the use of the repertory grid or
self-description. Freud and other psychoanalysts developed hugely complex and largely
speculative theories of personality based on the premise that we are largely unconscious of
our motives. We all deal with unpleasant events, memories and wishes by using defence
mechanisms to thrust them into an unconscious area of the mind. These repressed memories
and wishes cause a variety of psychological symptoms to emerge which can only be cured
through psychoanalysis, by discovering their origins and forcing the patient to recognise the
truth of what the analyst revealed.
I chose to include the Rogers’s theory because it offers a simple way of exploring personality –
through introspection in a safe, supportive environment. It is diffcult to think of a simpler,
or more direct, approach. It is also the foundation of most modern approaches to psychotherapy
and counselling. However it also becomes clear that understanding individuals is not always
the most helpful way of studying personality. We will often want to compare people (for
example, to measure emotional stability so that we can try to predict who will function well
as an astronaut) and the qualitative approach offered by Rogers really does not lend itself to
quantifying individual differences.
Much the same can be said about Kelly’s theory. Although the idea of personal constructs
is appealing, and has some therapeutic potential, it again seeks to understand people as
individuals and to understand each person’s idiosyncratic way of making sense of the world
in which they fnd themselves. This theory, too, is of limited use for making comparisons
between individuals. It has, however, had a rather unexpected application in knowledge
engineering, as a technique for eliciting information from experts for use in ‘expert systems’
using artifcial intelligence.
Freud’s theory was included partly because it is interesting, and partly because there is so
much wrong with it. It all began with rather haphazard collections of data from small samples
of very unusual people, under conditions where there was no record of what actually went
on between the patient and the analyst. The theory became exceedingly complex; it is not clear
precisely how it developed from the observations that were made (alternatives might have
been just as plausible) and could occasionally ‘explain’ almost any outcome. There is
considerable doubt as to whether psychoanalysis even proved effective in curing patients
(Erdelyi, 1985). The model of personality was assumed to apply to all individuals, not just
the middle-class women who were analysed. It was also used to explain phenomena as diverse
as religion (Freud, 1939) and the appeal of art and literature (Freud, 1900).
Unlike the theories of Rogers and Kelly, Freud’s theory at least had the potential for
comparing people; it might (in principle, if not in practice) be possible to tell whether one
person had a greater level of Oedipal fxation than another, whether they differed in their
degree of oral fxation, or whether they used different amounts of a particular defence
mechanism. However because the theory was based on such fimsy evidence, this has rarely
produced anything useful (Kline, 1981). Freud’s theory also showed the need for a theory to
be falsifable. There needs to be a way of empirically testing it; for example, it has to be
possible to test whether or young boys fear castration from their father, or whether dreams
truly represent the fulflment of disguised wishes, the true nature of which the dreamer is
unaware.
We then come to Chapter 6 seeking to explore theories which are based on evidence rather
than fanciful speculation (as with Freud), which allow people to be compared, and which can
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be shown to be incorrect. For all of their faults, self-report questionnaires do seem to produce
evidence for personality traits, and the method of factor analysis provides a technique for
discovering which dissimilar items unexpectedly form a single factor. It is possible to disprove
theories such as the Five Factor Model or HEXACO; if researchers do not fnd that the
questionnaire items form factors as expected, the model is clearly wrong. However it seems
that the lexical model may not be able to reveal all the important personality traits, and
Chapters 7, 9 and 10 explored a selection of narrower traits, chosen because they currently
generate considerable research interest.
You will notice that I have given examples of test items throughout the book. This is quite
deliberate; sometimes psychologists seem to talk in lofty abstract terms about theoretical
terms, quite forgetting how they are actually assessed. This is my attempt to keep you
grounded, by ensuring that you appreciate that personality traits (no matter how fancy their
names) are derived from some rather simple and straightforward questions.
Abilities
We then showed that the same methods can be applied to cognitive abilities producing a
hierarchy of abilities with general intelligence (g) at the apex. As general intelligence exerts a
strong causal infuence on many types of behaviour (as shown in Chapters 17 and 18) we
focused on this rather than the narrower abilities for the remainder of the book.
Although educationalists swear by Gardner’s model of multiple intelligences, psychologists
who are familiar with the literature in this area will question whether all the ‘intelligences’
are (a) all cognitive, as the term is usually used and (b) different from some of the second-
order abilities identifed through factor analysis, and (c) well supported by evidence. See for
example Scarr (1985) whose review of Gardner’s (1983) book concludes ‘it is ironic that this
book is reviewed in the journal devoted to new ideas in psychology, because it does not have
a single one’.
I mention Gardner’s approach because (like Freud’s) it shows that it is possible to develop
a theory which sounds plausible and interesting but which is simply not well supported by
evidence. Rightly or wrongly almost all the research discussed in this book is based on
empirical evidence. Of course the quality of data may sometimes be questionable, as may the
inferences drawn from them, but it may be safer to base theories upon fawed data than mere
speculation. This is also a problem for Rogers and Kelly, of course. How can one show that
there is no such thing as a self-concept? How could one prove that people do not develop and
use systems of personal constructs? If theories cannot be shown to be incorrect, are they
unscientifc?
Process models
Process models have, of course, had to wait for some consensus structural model to emerge –
one can hardly investigate the processes that seem to underpin personality and ability if there
is no general agreement about the precise nature of the main dimensions. Thus most process
models are fairly rudimentary and signifcant new developments are reported in the journals
every month. The correlations between measures of ability and reaction time measures,
inspection time, etc. seem solid, and suggest that speed is somehow related to general
intelligence, g. More recent research relates g and personality to brain physiology and
cognition, for example cortical thickness and grey matter density in the case of g and recent
work relating g to the speed of transmission of information between various brain
systems.
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We likewise showed several process models of personality have been developed

(Chapter 11) with reinforcement sensitivity theory currently generating considerable
interest. Likewise personality and intelligence are both linked to brain structure and function
(Chapters 11, 13 and 15).
Another way of showing the degree to which social factors infuence ability and personality
traits is through behavioural genetics. My experience of marking undergraduate examination
papers shows that very often students believe that behavioural genetics is a technique used by
right-wing reductionists with a political agenda who are keen to show that social factors are
unimportant. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the family environment were all
important, and genetic infuences were trivial, these analyses would show it. It is an empirical
fact that the infuence of genetic makeup is often substantial (particularly for g) whilst the
infuence of the shared environment on adult personality and general ability is generally small.
It is possible that some minor personality factors or abilities may be infuenced by the
childhood (shared) environment, but g, E and N are not. Good science may not always
produce the answers that we would wish to see.
This discovery that g and personality traits are more biologically based than we might have
expected is supported by structural equation modelling and path analyses (see Figure 18.1
and von Stumm et al., 2010) which can show whether parental wealth or intelligence best
predicts infuence a child’s ultimate IQ, earnings, etc. These too suggest that parental wealth
is not nearly as potent an infuence as might perhaps be expected. Likewise multivariate
genetic techniques show (for example) that the correlation between g and school performance
arises primarily because the same set of genes infuence both variables.
Mood and motivation

We then considered states – short lived moods and drives, which are sensitive to environmental
infuences and which fuctuate over time. It has to be said that research in this area is rather
less developed – perhaps because moods and motivational states are of less interest to applied
psychologists who try to understand individual differences in the school or workplace, where
a trait model (focussing on how people generally behave) may be more appropriate.
Applications
Next come some applications of individual differences. It is probably true to say that g usually
seems to be a more useful predictor of behaviour than are personality traits, and surprisingly
perhaps, the biological basis of g seems to be causally related to school performance as
mentioned above. Nevertheless the Big Five factors, ability-emotional intelligence, trait-
emotional intelligence and other narrow personality traits and motivational theories may help
to explain individual differences in areas as diverse as health, sport, work performance and
forensic psychology. As well as g, Conscientiousness and Extraversion are consistently useful
when predicting real-life behaviour.
Other measurement issues

We fnished with three more technical chapters aimed at readers who plan to perform some
serious research in individual differences – or who are just interested in measurement issues.
Chapter 19 provided guidance on how to perform and report the results from a factor analysis,
whilst Chapter 20 suggested several ways to construct a novel scale – from writing the items
to enhancing its reliability through item-analysis. Finally Chapter 21 considered some
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problems associated with tests – variables which affect test performance (such as test anxiety
and response biases) and the oft-cited problem of bias in ability tests, which may make them
underestimate the ability of minority groups. We consider the severity of these issues, and
suggest how bias (in ability tests) can be distinguished from genuine group differences.
Critical appraisals
Throughout the book I have tried to be both fair and critical; ‘thinking out loud’ as I comment
on papers. This is to suggest the types of issues which you might like to consider when reading
the literature for theses or projects, or when performing research yourself. It is all too easy to
produce a chapter which describes theories and tests, but which offers little guidance as to
which approaches seem to be fawed and which are well supported by evidence. I learned
personality theory from such a book and came away feeling oddly dissatisfed; ‘content recall
is the frst step towards conceptual understanding and not an end in itself’ (McPhail, in press)
which is why I have tried to keep you engaged by thinking critically, stressing important issues
by means of self-assessment questions, and a little judicious repetition.
Some of my comments are bound to be incorrect; there will be important papers which
I have not read, and I may have misinterpreted others. The important thing is that you, the
reader, should try to critically evaluate everything that you read rather than taking it on face
value. Are there alternative explanations for the fnding? Does that correlation really suggest
causality? Does the scale or test really measure what its author claims? Do the conclusions
really follow from the results which are presented? Apart from anything else, ‘deep processing’
such as this will help you remember and understand what you read (Gordon and Debus, 2002).
Unclear and controversial issues

To conclude, I fag three areas which seem to me to be either undeveloped or controversial;
one from the area of personality, another from intelligence and a third from psychometrics.
Personality
Anything to do with psychoanalytical theory or unconscious mental processes is highly
controversial and attempts to test aspects of Freud’s theories do not provide strong, replicable
results (Kline, 1981), possibly (but not necessarily) because psychoanalytical concepts are so
very diffcult to operationalise. Work on the unconscious processing of threat-related stimuli
looks to be one of the least disappointing areas of research, but there is very little good-quality
work undertaken in this area. Given that cognitive psychology shows that consciousness
seems to happen quite late in the decision-making process (Dehaene et al., 2014) it is a shame
that unconscious and pre-conscious processes are not more widely studied – although these
may not resemble those identifed by Freud.
Group differences in intelligence

The subject of test bias is widely misunderstood, even in the psychological community, with
many colleagues inferring bias from the presence of group differences, and others assuming that
group differences are genuine and test bias can be ignored. The latter point to differences in test
scores between racial or gender groups (or the average scores of countries) and seek to explain
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what these differences may imply; for example, that living near the equator may lead to lower
IQ, that a country’s average IQ is linked to its economic prosperity, the number of children per
family, etc. Confounds such as quality of the educational system, quality of nutrition, the cross-
cultural validity of ability tests and social disadvantage are rarely properly considered.
Group differences in ability are therefore highly controversial, the right-wing argument
appearing to go along the following lines:
l some racial groups perform less well than others on ability tests
l intelligence has a substantial genetic component
l therefore some groups are genetically inferior to others.
The last statement does not follow from the frst two. Just because within-group differences
have a substantial genetic component it does not follow that between-group differences have
any genetic component at all.
Sometimes it is argued that dysgenic trends for IQ should be found, as:
l individuals with lower IQs tend to have more children than those with high IQs
l intelligence has a substantial genetic component
l therefore the average IQ in that country should fall over time. (Despite what the Flynn
effect suggests actually happens!)
This last possibility is discussed by Lynn (1996) amongst others.

The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994) caused considerable controversy when it
appeared, some of the criticism being based on rhetoric rather than evidence. However, there
is some agreement that, while the data presented there (linking IQ to a variety of social
behaviours) was often legitimate, some of the inferences drawn from these analyses, and the
resulting political and social recommendations, may not be either valid or helpful. There are
also some problems with the statistical analyses in this book; while the data analysed there
suggest moderate to strong links between general ability, educational qualifcations and
earnings, the size of the relationships with other variables is generally tiny.
Psychometrics
Some comments on the method of psychometrics have recently caused something of a stir.
Michell (1997) argued that all tests used in psychology are fatally fawed because they do not
have an equal unit of measurement. Unlike rulers, balances and so on, there can be no
guarantee that the interval between being neutral and ‘agreeing’ with a statement is the same
size as the interval between ‘disagreeing’ and ‘strongly disagreeing’ with it. Yet this is what
we assume whenever a Likert scale is used. It otherwise makes no sense to add together scores
on several items – even if we are correct in assuming that the characteristic which we are trying
to measure is quantitative, and so is capable of being represented numerically. Could this be
one of the reasons why personality tests seem to be much weaker predictors of behaviour than
ability tests, for which the measurement problems may be less pronounced?
Conclusions
The scientifc study of individual differences has changed enormously in the last 50 years.
Some basic issues are still being addressed; Bergner (2020) recently argued that we do not
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even have a universally accepted defnition of what we mean by the term ‘personality’. (He
provides one.) Nevertheless there is now some measure of agreement between researchers
about the main dimensions of personality and ability, making the search for process models
possible – although readers will gather that there is still much to do. Psychometricians do not
yet have the measure of humankind.
References
Bergner, R. M. 2020. What Is Personality? Two Myths and a Defnition. New Ideas in
Dehaene, S., Charles, L., King, J. R. & Marti, S. 2014. Toward a Computational Theory of
Conscious Processing. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 25, 76–84.
Erdelyi, M. H. 1985. Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychology. New York: Freeman.
Freud, S. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. 1939. Moses and Monotheism. London: Hogarth Press.
Gardner, H. 1983. Frames of Mind (1st Edn). New York: Basic Books.
Gordon, C. & Debus, R. 2002. Developing Deep Learning Approaches and Personal Teaching
Effcacy within a Preservice Teacher Education Context. British Journal of Educational
Herrnstein, R. J. & Murray, C. 1994. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in
American Life. New York: The Free Press.
Lynn, R. 1996. Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations. Westport, CT:
Praeger.
McPhail, G. (in press) The Search for Deep Learning: A Curriculum Coherence Model. Journal
of Curriculum Studies.
Scarr, S. 1985. Review of Frames of Mind – The Theory of Multiple Intelligences – Gardner,
H. New Ideas in Psychology, 3, 95–100.
Von Stumm, S., Macintyre, S., Batty, D. G., Clark, H. & Deary, I. J. 2010. Intelligence, Social
Class of Origin, Childhood Behavior Disturbance and Education as Predictors of Status
Attainment in Midlife in Men: The Aberdeen Children of the 1950s Study. Intelligence, 38,
202–211.
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Appendix A
Correlations
Suppose that each person in a sample produces two scores, which might be scores on
psychometric tests, test items, or whatever. We often want to know the extent to which the
two scores are related. A correlation coeffcient – sometimes known as the Pearson correlation
coeffcient after its inventor, Karl Pearson – is a number between −1.0 and 1.0 which indicates
the extent to which these two variables overlap, and the direction of this relationship.
Figure A-1
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Appendix A
Figure A-2
A correlation of 0 indicates that a high score on one variable is associated equally often
with high, medium and low scores on the other variable. A scatter diagram shows individuals’
scores on one variable plotted as a function of their scores on the other variable. The scatter
diagram in Figure A-1 shows a correlation of approximately zero.
A correlation of 1.0 or −1.0 would indicate that if one of each person’s scores is known, it
is possible to predict the other one exactly. That is, the two variables are precisely proportional
to each other. Figure A-2 shows the scatter diagram for such a correlation.
This is an example of a perfect positive correlation, where ‘perfect’ means that all of the
points lie exactly on a straight line, and ‘positive’ means that a person who has a high score
on Test A also has a high score on Test B. A negative correlation would mean that a high score
on Test A would be associated with a low score on Test B, so the points would lie on a line
that slopes from top-left to bottom-right.
In this example, you can see that each person’s score on Test A is exactly equal to their
score on Test B. So if a person’s score on one of these two tests were known, it would be a
simple matter to work out what their score was on the other test. As the correlation is perfect
(1.0), we would expect this prediction to be completely accurate.
Perfect correlations simply do not exist in real life. Even if the underlying relationship is
‘perfect’, each of the observed scores will be contaminated by measurement error, since no
test has perfect reliability or validity. In the above example, imagine that each of the points
was moved a small, arbitrary distance up/down (corresponding to measurement error on Test
A) and left/right (corresponding to measurement error on Test B). The scatter diagram would
then look something like that shown in Figure A-3.
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Appendix A
Figure A-3
Although there is still a strong tendency for high scores on Test A to be associated with
high scores on Test B, this relationship is no longer perfect. So now knowing someone’s score
on one of the tests would only allow us to make a rough estimate of their scores on the other
test, as the scores do not fall on a perfect straight line.
Question
To obtain a perfect positive correlation, is it necessary for one variable always
to be equal to the other?
The answer is no, as shown in Figure A-4. Here you can see that there is again a perfect
correlation between the two sets of variables. That is, they all lie exactly on a straight line.
However, the variables most certainly are not equal (in fact, the equation linking them is
‘Score on Test A = 3 × score on Test B + 2’). Thus a perfect correlation just shows that two
variables are perfectly linearly related – not that they are identical.
501
Appendix A
Figure A-4
ExErCiSE
Suppose that when two tests, A and B, are given to a large sample of people,
their scores on this test are found to have a correlation of 0.4. Try to work
out whether this correlation would (a) rise, (b) fall, (c) change in some
unpredictable way or (d) stay exactly the same if, instead of calculating the
correlation from the raw data, you frst:
a. multiply each person’s score on Test A by 6, leaving their score on Test B
unaltered;
b. subtract 20 from each person’s score on Test A, leaving their score on Test B
unaltered;
c. multiply each person’s score on Test A by 2, and subtract 9 from their
score on Test B;
d. square each of the values of Test A, leaving their score on test B unaltered
If the answers are not obvious, you should try to settle this matter empirically. Using
your favourite statistics package, defne two variables, Test A and Test B. Then invent some
scores on these two tests from half a dozen hypothetical students – just type in any numbers
you like. Having done this, calculate the correlation between Test A and Test B, and then
modify the values of Tests A and B as described above. Re-calculate the correlation at
each step.
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Appendix A
You should have found out that the correlation does not change at all when you:
l alter the mean level of either or both of the variables (by adding or subtracting a constant,
e.g., 20, to either or both of the scores)
l alter the standard deviation of the scores on either of the variables (by multiplying or
dividing test scores by a constant, e.g., 6).
However, when you perform any other operation (such as squaring, or taking logarithms)
the correlation will change. It will probably decrease if there was a fairly linear relationship
between the two untransformed variables.
The frst two properties of the correlation (insensitivity to the mean or the standard
deviation of either distribution of scores) are very necessary, since scores on tests:
l have an arbitrary zero-point. A raw score of 0 on a test of mechanical reasoning does not
imply that a person has no mechanical reasoning ability whatsoever. If one person scores
20 on such a test, this does not imply that they have four times the ability of someone who
scores 5. The scores form an interval scale, rather than a ratio scale.
l have an arbitrary scale of measurement. A scale having 20 items scored as ‘number of items
correctly answered’ will produce scores that are about twice as high as a test consisting of
10 such items (assuming that each test contains items of similar diffculty). The correlation
between the two tests logically should not be affected by the number of items in each test
and/or the range of scores – and the exercise shows that this is indeed the case.
Thus correlations are very well suited for showing the relationship between scores on tests,
as they are not affected by the mean or standard deviation of the scores on either of the scales.
It is possible to test whether a given correlation is signifcantly different from zero, from
another value, or indeed from another correlation coeffcient. We are usually interested in
determining whether a correlation is signifcantly different from zero – that is, whether the
data show that high scores on one variable tend to be associated with high (or low) scores on
another variable. Any good statistics book will give details of how to do this.
The importance of r2
A statistical signifcance test merely shows whether the correlation that is computed from a
particular sample is so large that it is unlikely to have arisen by chance. It does not say how
important it is. When large samples of people are tested, even tiny correlations (e.g., r=0.06)
can be statistically signifcant: in other words, large enough to convince us that the correlation
in the population is probably not zero.
r2 is known as the coeffcient of determination. It shows the percentage of the variance of
one variable that can be predicted from the other. Thus if the correlation between two variables
is 0.7, 49% of the variance of one variable can be explained by the other. The remainder is
due to other variables and/or random error. In the previous example, a correlation of 0.06
explains only 0.0036 of the variance of the other. We can be confdent that relationship exists
(because of the large sample size) but it is certainly not large enough to be useful for anything!
When calculating a correlation, it is always worthwhile mentally squaring it. For example, if
a battery of selection tests shows a correlation of 0.5 with job performance, this implies that
it explains about a quarter of the person-to-person variation in job performance.
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Appendix A
Correlation and causality

A correlation need not imply that one variable causes the other. There would be a substantial
correlation between the number of television sets and the number of bottles of wine sold each
year between 1960 and 2001. This does not imply that purchasing a television makes one
drink wine, or that drinking wine makes one purchase a television. Rather they both refect
social trends.
Correlations and group differences

One has to be very careful when calculating correlations between sets of data that show group
differences. For example, suppose that one performs a survey, notices in passing that there are
large sex effects on some of the variables, but proceeds to use them in a correlation. This is a
very common, very dangerous practice. To see why, plot a scatter diagram showing the test
scores of the three males and the three females in Table A-1.
It is clear that there is a huge positive correlation between the variables for the males, and
a similarly large positive correlation within the female sample. However when all the data are
plotted together, because there is a massive difference between the male and female means on
the variables, there is a huge negative correlation between the two variables (r=–0.98)! When
there are differences in the means between several groups, it is very dangerous indeed to
calculate a correlation from the raw data. Instead one should standardise the scores of each
of the groups. For each person, subtract their group mean from their score and divide by the
group standard deviation (sd). So the frst male would obtain a score of 3–4 on Test A (as you
1
should verify: the mean of 3, 4 and 5 is 4 and the sd is 1). Likewise the frst female’s score on
Test A would be 20–21 (mean 21, sd 1). This will bring both variables to the same mean and
1
standard deviation.
Dichotomous data
There are a few special cases of the correlation coeffcient of which you should be aware.
One common case involves one variable which is continuous (e.g., a test score) and another
Table A-1 Hypothetical data showing the danger of calculating

correlations where there are signifcant group differences
Gender Test A Test B
Male 3 25
Male 4 26
Male 5 28
Female 20 2
Female 21 4
Female 22 5
504
Appendix A
Table A-2 responses to two two-valued (dichotomous) variables
Response to Item 1
Correct Incorrect Total

response to item 2 Correct a b a+b
incorrect c d c+d
Total a+c b+d a+b+c+d
which is dichotomous (i.e., which can only assume one of two values). Dichotomous
variables are fairly common in psychology. Responses to test items may be coded as
‘correct/incorrect’, or responses such as ‘true/false’ or ‘agree/disagree’ may be correlated
together. They will often be coded as 0/1, although in fact any two numbers can be used.
When a dichotomous variable is correlated with a continuous variable, the correlation
coeffcient is often known as the point-biserial correlation. It is calculated in precisely the
same way as the usual Pearson correlation – it just has a different name for historical
reasons. A common use of the point-biserial correlation is when correlating responses to
individual test items with other variables – the test items being coded as correct (1) or
incorrect (0).
When two dichotomous items are correlated together (again using the usual formula for a
Pearson correlation), the correlation is sometimes known as the phi coeffcient.
Both point-biserial and phi coeffcients are problematical, and phi correlation coeffcients
can only be 1.0 under rather special circumstances. Instead of representing just the amount
of overlap between two variables, the point-biserial and phi coeffcients are also infuenced
by the diffculty levels of the two dichotomous items. An example will make this clear. Table A-2
shows individuals’ responses on two dichotomous items, and the numbers denoted by a, b, c
and d show the number of individuals falling into each of the cells of the table.
A perfect positive correlation will imply that b = c = 0 – that is, everyone who answers item
1 correctly also answers item 2 correctly, and everyone who fails item 1 also fails item 2. This
is possible only when the proportion of individuals who answer item 1 correctly is exactly the
same as the proportion who answer item 2 correctly, as you may care to verify. Phi can equal
1.0 only if the means of the two variables are identical.
The same problem affects the point-biserial, only more so. It is mathematically impossible
to obtain a point-biserial correlation larger than about 0.8, under the very best circumstances
(which is when 50 per cent of the values of the dichotomous variable are 1 and the 50 per
cent are 0). As this mean of the dichotomous variable shifts away from 0.5, the maximum
possible point-biserial falls to 0.7 (mean = 0.2 or 0.8) and 0.6 (mean = 0.1 or 0.9). Cooper
(2019, pp. 98, 101) has provided diagrams showing this effect.
This creates problems when interpreting correlations. A small correlation could come
from two variables that just happen not to be particularly strongly correlated together, or
from two variables that have very different distributions and so cannot correlate substantially.
Because of this, other forms of correlation have been developed to analyse dichotomous
data. The tetrachoric correlation coeffcient is not affected by the different distributions of
the variables, and so should be calculated instead of phi for the analysis of dichotomous
data provided that the data represent some underlying continuous variable. Thus if one
505
Appendix A
categorises drivers as ‘fast or slow’ it would be legitimate to correlate this variable with
other things using the tetrachoric correlation. If they were coded ‘male or female’ or ‘German
or Italian’ it would not.
reference
506
Appendix B
Code of fair testing practices

in education
Contents
A. Developing and Selecting Appropriate Tests 508
B. Administering and Scoring Tests 509
C. Reporting and Interpreting Test Results 510
D. Informing Test Takers 511
E. Working Group 512
The Code of Fair Testing Practices in Education1 (Code) is a guide for professionals in fulflling
their obligation to provide and use tests that are fair to all test takers regardless of age, gender,
disability, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, linguistic background,
or other personal characteristics. Fairness is a primary consideration in all aspects of testing.
Careful standardization of tests and administration conditions helps to ensure that all test
takers are given a comparable opportunity to demonstrate what they know and how they can
perform in the area being tested. Fairness implies that every test taker has the opportunity to
prepare for the test and is informed about the general nature and content of the test, as
appropriate to the purpose of the test. Fairness also extends to the accurate reporting of
individual and group test results. Fairness is not an isolated concept, but must be considered
in all aspects of the testing process.
The Code2 applies broadly to testing in education (admissions, educational assessment,
educational diagnosis, and student placement) regardless of the mode of presentation, so it is
relevant to conventional paper-and-pencil tests, computer-based tests, and performance tests.
It is not designed to cover employment testing, licensure or certifcation testing, or other types
of testing outside the feld of education. The Code is directed primarily at professionally
developed tests used in formally administered testing programs. Although the Code is not
507
Appendix B
intended to cover tests prepared by teachers for use in their own classrooms, teachers are
encouraged to use the guidelines to help improve their testing practices.
The Code addresses the roles of test developers and test users separately. Test developers
are people and organizations that construct tests, as well as those that set policies for testing
programs. Test users are people and agencies that select tests, administer tests, commission
test development services, or make decisions on the basis of test scores. Test developer
and test user roles may overlap, for example, when a state or local education agency
commissions test development services, sets policies that control the test development process,
and makes decisions on the basis of the test scores.
Many of the statements in the Code refer to the selection and use of existing tests. When
a new test is developed, when an existing test is modifed, or when the administration of a test
is modifed, the Code is intended to provide guidance for this process3.
The Code provides guidance separately for test developers and test users in four critical
areas:
a. Developing and Selecting Appropriate Tests

b. Administering and Scoring Tests
c. Reporting and Interpreting Test Results
d. Informing Test Takers
The Code is intended to be consistent with the relevant parts of the Standards for Educational
and Psychological Testing (American Educational Research Association [AERA], American
Psychological Association [APA], and National Council on Measurement in Education
[NCME], 1999). The Code is not meant to add new principles over and above those in the
Standards or to change their meaning. Rather, the Code is intended to represent the spirit of
selected portions of the Standards in a way that is relevant and meaningful to developers and
users of tests, as well as to test takers and/or their parents or guardians. States, districts,
schools, organizations, and individual professionals are encouraged to commit themselves to
fairness in testing and safeguarding the rights of test takers. The Code is intended to assist in
carrying out such commitments.
A. Developing and Selecting Appropriate Tests

Test Developers
Test developers should provide the information and supporting evidence that test users need
to select appropriate tests.
1. Provide evidence of what the test measures, the recommended uses, the intended test
takers, and the strengths and limitations of the test, including the level of precision of the
test scores.
2. Describe how the content and skills to be tested were selected and how the tests were
developed.
3. Communicate information about a test’s characteristics at a level of detail appropriate to
the intended test users.
4. Provide guidance on the levels of skills, knowledge, and training necessary for appropriate
review, selection, and administration of tests.
5. Provide evidence that the technical quality, including reliability and validity, of the test
meets its intended purposes.
508
Appendix B
6. Provide to qualifed test users representative samples of test questions or practice tests,
directions, answer sheets, manuals, and score reports.
7. Avoid potentially offensive content or language when developing test questions and
related materials.
8. Make appropriately modifed forms of tests or administration procedures available for
test takers with disabilities who need special accommodations.
9. Obtain and provide evidence on the performance of test takers of diverse subgroups,
making signifcant efforts to obtain sample sizes that are adequate for subgroup analyses.
Evaluate the evidence to ensure that differences in performance are related to the skills
being assessed.
Test Users
Test users should select tests that meet the intended purpose and that are appropriate for the
intended test takers.
1. Defne the purpose for testing, the content and skills to be tested, and the intended test
takers. Select and use the most appropriate test based on a thorough review of available
information.
2. Review and select tests based on the appropriateness of test content, skills tested, and
content coverage for the intended purpose of testing.
3. Review materials provided by test developers and select tests for which clear, accurate,
and complete information is provided.
4. Select tests through a process that includes persons with appropriate knowledge, skills,
and training.
5. Evaluate evidence of the technical quality of the test provided by the test developer and
any independent reviewers.
6. Evaluate representative samples of test questions or practice tests, directions, answer
sheets, manuals, and score reports before selecting a test.
7. Evaluate procedures and materials used by test developers, as well as the resulting test,
to ensure that potentially offensive content or language is avoided.
8. Select tests with appropriately modifed forms or administration procedures for test takers
with disabilities who need special accommodations.
9. Evaluate the available evidence on the performance of test takers of diverse subgroups.
Determine to the extent feasible which performance differences may have been caused by
factors unrelated to the skills being assessed.
B. Administering and Scoring Tests

Test Developers
Test developers should explain how to administer and score tests correctly and fairly.
1. Provide clear descriptions of detailed procedures for administering tests in a standardized

manner.
2. Provide guidelines on reasonable procedures for assessing persons with disabilities who
need special accommodations or those with diverse linguistic backgrounds.
3. Provide information to test takers or test users on test question formats and procedures
for answering test questions, including information on the use of any needed materials
and equipment.
509
Appendix B
4. Establish and implement procedures to ensure the security of testing materials during all
phases of test development, administration, scoring, and reporting.
5. Provide procedures, materials, and guidelines for scoring the tests and for monitoring the
accuracy of the scoring process. If scoring the test is the responsibility of the test developer,
provide adequate training for scorers.
6. Correct errors that affect the interpretation of the scores and communicate the corrected
results promptly.
7. Develop and implement procedures for ensuring the confdentiality of scores.
Test Users
Test users should administer and score tests correctly and fairly.
1. Follow established procedures for administering tests in a standardized manner.

2. Provide and document appropriate procedures for test takers with disabilities who need
special accommodations or those with diverse linguistic backgrounds. Some
accommodations may be required by law or regulation.
3. Provide test takers with an opportunity to become familiar with test question formats
and any materials or equipment that may be used during testing.
4. Protect the security of test materials, including respecting copyrights and eliminating
opportunities for test takers to obtain scores by fraudulent means.
5. If test scoring is the responsibility of the test user, provide adequate training to scorers
and ensure and monitor the accuracy of the scoring process.
6. Correct errors that affect the interpretation of the scores and communicate the corrected
results promptly.
7. Develop and implement procedures for ensuring the confdentiality of scores.
C. Reporting and Interpreting Test Results

Test Developers
Test developers should report test results accurately and provide information to help test users
interpret test results correctly.
1. Provide information to support recommended interpretations of the results, including the

nature of the content, norms or comparison groups, and other technical evidence. Advise
test users of the benefts and limitations of test results and their interpretation. Warn
against assigning greater precision than is warranted.
2. Provide guidance regarding the interpretations of results for tests administered with
modifcations. Inform test users of potential problems in interpreting test results when
tests or test administration procedures are modifed.
3. Specify appropriate uses of test results and warn test users of potential misuses.
4. When test developers set standards, provide the rationale, procedures, and evidence for
setting performance standards or passing scores. Avoid using stigmatizing labels.
5. Encourage test users to base decisions about test takers on multiple sources of appropriate
information, not on a single test score.
6. Provide information to enable test users to accurately interpret and report test results for
groups of test takers, including information about who were and who were not included
510
Appendix B
in the different groups being compared and information about factors that might infuence
the interpretation of results.
7. Provide test results in a timely fashion and in a manner that is understood by the test taker.
8. Provide guidance to test users about how to monitor the extent to which the test is
fulflling its intended purposes.
Test Users
Test users should report and interpret test results accurately and clearly.
1. Interpret the meaning of the test results, taking into account the nature of the content,
norms or comparison groups, other technical evidence, and benefts and limitations of
test results.
2. Interpret test results from modifed test or test administration procedures in view of the
impact those modifcations may have had on test results.
3. Avoid using tests for purposes other than those recommended by the test developer unless
there is evidence to support the intended use or interpretation.
4. Review the procedures for setting performance standards or passing scores. Avoid using
stigmatizing labels.
5. Avoid using a single test score as the sole determinant of decisions about test takers.
Interpret test scores in conjunction with other information about individuals.
6. State the intended interpretation and use of test results for groups of test takers. Avoid
grouping test results for purposes not specifcally recommended by the test developer
unless evidence is obtained to support the intended use. Report procedures that were
followed in determining who were and who were not included in the groups being
compared and describe factors that might infuence the interpretation of results.
7. Communicate test results in a timely fashion and in a manner that is understood by the
test taker.
8. Develop and implement procedures for monitoring test use, including consistency with
the intended purposes of the test.
D. Informing Test Takers

Under some circumstances, test developers have direct communication with the test takers
and/or control of the tests, testing process, and test results. In other circumstances the test
users have these responsibilities.
Test developers or test users should inform test takers about the nature of the test, test taker
rights and responsibilities, the appropriate use of scores, and procedures for resolving
challenges to scores.
1. Inform test takers in advance of the test administration about the coverage of the test,
the types of question formats, the directions, and appropriate test-taking strategies. Make
such information available to all test takers.
2. When a test is optional, provide test takers or their parents/guardians with information
to help them judge whether a test should be taken—including indications of any
consequences that may result from not taking the test (e.g., not being eligible to
compete for a particular scholarship)—and whether there is an available alternative
to the test.
511
Appendix B
3. Provide test takers or their parents/guardians with information about rights test takers
may have to obtain copies of tests and completed answer sheets, to retake tests, to have
tests rescored, or to have scores declared invalid.
4. Provide test takers or their parents/guardians with information about responsibilities test
takers have, such as being aware of the intended purpose and uses of the test, performing
at capacity, following directions, and not disclosing test items or interfering with other
test takers.
5. Inform test takers or their parents/guardians how long scores will be kept on fle and
indicate to whom, under what circumstances, and in what manner test scores and related
information will or will not be released. Protect test scores from unauthorized release and
access.
6. Describe procedures for investigating and resolving circumstances that might result in
canceling or withholding scores, such as failure to adhere to specifed testing procedures.
7. Describe procedures that test takers, parents/guardians, and other interested parties may
use to obtain more information about the test, register complaints, and have problems
resolved.
E. Working Group4
The membership of the working group that developed the Code of Fair Testing Practices in
Education and of the Joint Committee on Testing Practices that guided the working group is
as follows:
Peter Behuniak, PhD

Lloyd Bond, PhD
Gwyneth M. Boodoo, PhD
Wayne Camara, PhD
Ray Fenton, PhD
John J. Fremer, PhD (Cochair)
Sharon M. Goldsmith, PhD
Bert F. Green, PhD
William G. Harris, PhD
Janet E. Helms, PhD
Stephanie H. McConaughy, PhD
Julie P. Noble, PhD
Wayne M. Patience, PhD
Carole L. Perlman, PhD
Douglas K. Smith, PhD
Janet E. Wall, EdD (Cochair)
Pat Nellor Wickwire, PhD
Mary Yakimowski, PhD
Lara Frumkin, PhD, of the APA, served as staff liaison.
Notes
1 Copyright 2004 by the Joint Committee on Testing Practices. This material may be reproduced
in its entirety without fees or permission, provided that acknowledgment is made to the Joint
512
Appendix B
Committee on Testing Practices. Any exceptions to this, including requests to excerpt or

paraphrase this document must be presented in writing to Director, Testing and Assessment,
Science Directorate, APA. This edition replaces the frst edition of the Code, which was
published in 1988. Please cite this document as follows: Code of Fair Testing Practices in
Education (2004). Washington, DC: Joint Committee on Testing Practices. (Mailing Address:
Joint Committee on Testing Practices, Science Directorate, American Psychological Association,
750 First Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002–4242.)
2 The Code has been prepared by the Joint Committee on Testing Practices, a cooperative effort
among several professional organizations. The aim of the Joint Committee is to act in the
public interest to advance the quality of testing practices. Members of the Joint Committee
include the American Counseling Association (ACA), the American Educational Research
Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Speech
Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), the National Association of School Psychologists
(NASP), the National Association of Test Directors (NATD), and the National Council on
Measurement in Education (NCME).
3 The Code is not intended to be mandatory, exhaustive, or defnitive, and may not be applicable
to every situation. Instead, the Code is intended to be aspirational, and is not intended to take
precedence over the judgment of those who have competence in the subjects addressed.
4 The Joint Committee intends that the Code be consistent with and supportive of existing codes
of conduct and standards of other professional groups who use tests in educational contexts.
Of particular note are the Responsibilities of Users of Standardized Tests (Association for
Assessment in Counseling and Education, 2003), APA Test User Qualifcations (2000), ASHA
Code of Ethics (2001), Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (1992), NASP
Professional Conduct Manual (2000), NCME Code of Professional Responsibility (1995), and
Rights and Responsibilities of Test Takers: Guidelines and Expectations (Joint Committee on
Testing Practices, 2000).
513
Author Index
Aamodt, M. G. 408 Bajaj, S. 292

Aaron, R. V. 213 Bar-On, R. 126, 128, 136, 138, 139, 384
Abbott, R. A. 182 Baranczuk, U. 202
Achenbach, T. M. 41 Bardo, M. T. 177
Ackerman, P. L. 369 Barlow, D. H. 382
Ackerman, R. A. 207, 208 Barrett, P. T. 46, 109, 115, 285, 286, 374,
Adan, A. 178, 185 435
Adelstein, J. S. 225 Barrick, M. R. 417
Adler, A. 53, 54, 66, 67, 70 Barry, C. T. 208
Adorno, T. W. 197, 198 Bartlett, L. 182
Ajzen, I. 364, 374 Bartlett, M. S. 434, 446
Akbari, R. 269 Basten, U. 293
Allen, M. S. 113, 420, 421 Bates, T. C. 336
Alloway, T. P. 292, 406 Batty, G. D. 394
Allport, G. W. 77, 101, 105, 110 Baughman, H. M. 214
Altemeyer, B. 213 Baumeister, R. F. 183, 185, 207
Aluja, A. 113, 175, 177 Beauducel, A. 285
Amodio, D. M. 199 Beaujouan, Y-M. 418
Anderson, H. 27 Beck, A. T. 382
Anderson, M. L. 313 Beedie, C. J. 352
Anderson, T. 386 Begbie, H. 66
Andrei, F. 142 Beloff, H. 24
Anglim, J. 113 Benjafeld, J. G. 27
Apter, M. J. 351, 372–374 Benson, V. E. 405
Archer, R. P. 390 Bergner, R. M. 497
Arden, R. 272 Berk, R. A. 474, 477
Asai, T. 196 Bermond, B. 202
Asbury, K. 336 Berna, C. 359
Ashton, M. C. 99, 111, 113, 208 Bibbey, A. 236
Austin, E. J. 134–136, 384 Blair, C. 263
Blake, G. A. 388
Bachelor, A. 27 Blanchard, R. J. 241
Bäckström, M. 483 Block, J. 23, 27, 113, 199
Baer, R. A. 180 Boccio, C. M. 388, 389
Bagby, R. 201, 202 Boduszek, D. 209
515
Author Index
Boivin, D. B. 359 Ceci, S. J. 404

Bonarius, J. C. 387 Chang, Y. K. 420
Boss, P. 482 Chao, C-J. 17
Boswell, J. F. 382 Chapman, J. P. 115
Bouchard, T. J. J. 338, 345 Chapman, L. J. 193, 194
Bozarth, J. D. 27 Cherny, S. S. 339
Bradley, R. H. 335 Chiari, G. 18
Braungart, J. M. 335 Chida, Y. 236
Brazil, K. 208 Child, D. 93, 368, 374
Breivik, G. 175 Chirumbolo, A. 140
Brewer, G. 205 Choma, B. L. 213
Brewer, R. 203, 213 Chow, P. I. 317
Briley, D. A. 332 Christensen, A. J. 395
Brinch, C. N. 314 Christian, E. 209
Brody, N. 320, 342, 345 Christie, R. 205
Brogden, H. E. 444 Claridge, G. S. 54, 192–194, 234
Brook, M. 391 Clark, C. M. 292
Brouwers, S. A. 304 Clark, H. H. 288
Brown, J. A. C. 70 Clarkson, D. B. 444
Brown, K. W. 180 Cleckley, H. M. 208
Brown, S. M. 479 Cliff, N. 440
Brown, W. P. 60 Cloninger, C. R. 114, 115
Brunell, A. B. 208 Clyde, D. J. 354
Bruner, J. S. 60 Cohen, A. S. 195
Brydges, C. R. 420 Cohen, N. 314, 404
Burtaverde, V. 113 Cohen, R. 420
Burton, K. L. O. 382 Collins, M. D. 246
Bushman, B. J. 207 Colom, R. 290, 292, 314
Buss, D. M. 104 Compton, M. T. 195
Byravan, A. 109 Comrey, A. L. 446
Byrne, A. 236 Condon, D. M. 264
Conley, J. J. 117, 318
Cahan, S. 314, 404 Cook, N. E. 484
Calvin, C. M. 337, 406 Cooke, R. 365
Camilli, G. 314 Coombs, W. N. 457
Campbell, F. A. 312–314, 319 Cooper, A. J. 242–244, 246
Campbell, W. K. 207 Cooper, C. 44, 46, 109, 155, 156, 158, 166, 261,
Canli, T. 234, 235 265, 272, 280, 282, 339, 352–354, 357, 358,
Caputi, P. 27 360, 361, 371, 397, 432, 442, 446, 447, 461,
Carroll, J. B. 90, 262, 273, 278, 288 465, 466, 484, 505
Cartwright, S. 142 Coopersmith, S. 225
Caruso, D. 131, 440 Cornwell, J. M. 434
Castejon, J. L. 270, 406 Corr, P. J. 239, 241–244, 246
Cattell, R. B. 38, 40–42, 44, 99, 103–106, Costa, P. T. 99, 111, 112, 116, 119, 126, 175,
108–112, 115, 126, 136, 172, 255, 256, 184, 316, 320, 340, 362, 418
261, 268, 278, 320, 327, 351–355, Coyne, J. C. 395
368–371, 374, 431, 436, 437, 444, 446, Craig, C. M. 420
464, 468, 492 Crittenden, N. 387, 398
Cavallera, G. M. 177 Cronbach, L. J. 42, 156, 480
516
Author Index
Crowne, D. P. 418, 481 Ece Demir-Lira, O. 339

Cukic, I. 393 Edwards, A. L. 481
Curran, J. P. 354, 355 Edwards, H. M. 27
Egan, V. 282
Daugherty, A. M. 420 Ekehammar, B. 200
Davey, G. 403 Ekstrom, R. B. 261, 264, 272
Davies, G. M. 396 Elliott, C. D. 266
Davies, M. F. 5 Engle, R. W. 290
Davis, O. S. P. 337 Erdelyi, M. H. 70, 493
Dawda, D. 419 Ertl, J. P. 286
De Fruyt, F. 114, 395 Eskreis-Winkler, L. 364
De Groot, A. D. 423 Ettinger, U. 196
De Neve, J. E. 337 Evans, F. R. 478
De Raad, B. 112 Eysenck, H. J. 45, 51, 69, 93, 99, 100, 115–117,
De Von, H. A. 166 119, 126, 154, 155, 173, 174, 184, 185, 192,
De Vries, R. E. 175 223, 228–236, 238, 239, 242, 244–246, 248,
Deary, I. J. 285, 294, 301, 304, 309, 311, 318, 279, 280, 286, 394, 418
319, 392–394, 396, 423 Eysenck, M. W. 115, 230, 236, 361, 374
Deci, E. L. 366 Eysenck, S. B. 174, 408, 418
Dehaene, S. 53, 496
Deng, X. M. 176 Fahrenberg, J. 235
Denham, S. A. 130 Fairbairn, W. R. D. 63
Denissen, J. J. A. 317 Fanous, A. H. 194
Denollet, J. 395 Farran, D. 314, 319
Depue, R. A. 234 Farrell, B. A. 67
Der, G. 285, 294 Farrelly, D. 136
Derakshan, N. 236 Fehr, B. 206
Derry, K. L. 207 Feldt, L. S. 158
DeShong, H. L. 206 Fenichel, O. 58, 61
Desmarais, S. L. 392 Ferguson, M. A. 293
DeYoung, C. G. 237 Fieulaine, N. 179
Dhingra, K. 209 Finch, W. H. 449
Diamond, A. 291 Fink, A. 234
Dickens, W. T. 476 Finkel, D. 309
Dixon, N. F. 60, 199 Fiori, M. 134
Dobson, P. 163, 434 Fisher, S. 67, 70
Doebler, P. 285 Flashman, L. A. 292
Dressel, J. 392 Flynn, J. R. 272, 301, 303–310, 314–316, 318,
Dubois, J. 237 319, 476, 497
Duckitt, J. 200 Folkman, S. 355
Duckworth, A. L. 363, 364 Forscher, P. S. 42
Duncan, O. D. 405, 414 Fransella, F. 27
Dunlop, W. L. 23 Freud, S. 4, 19, 54–59, 61–63, 65–71, 75, 100,
Dunn, J. 129 101, 178, 225, 342, 493, 494, 496
Duriez, B. 199 Furnham, A. 126, 128, 139, 176, 212, 213
Dutton, E. 307
Gale, A. 234
Eagleton, J. R. 421 Gallacher, J. E. J. 395
Ebner, N. C. 133 Galton, F. 35, 36, 277, 283
517
Author Index
Garber, H. L. 312 Hanson, R. K. 392

Gardner, H. 36, 253, 268–270, 272, 406, Harden, K. P. 336
494 Hardre, P. L. 365
Geary, D. C. 394 Hare, R. D. 208, 209, 390, 391
Gibbons, H. 60 Harenski, C. L. 210
Gignac G. E. 274, 291 Harman, H. H. 264, 444, 446
Giluk, T. L. 180 Harris, C. W. 134, 314, 446, 512
Giofre, D. 406 Harrison, T. L. 314
Glicksohn, J. 174, 175 Hathaway, S. R. 463
Gnambs, T. 303 Hatzimanolis, A. 194
Goldberg, L. R. 99, 110–112, 116, 119, 126 Hawes, S. W. 210
Goleman, D. 125–127 Haworth, C. M. A. 332, 405
Gong, X. P. 139 Hayes, R. P. 180
Gooding, D. C. 195 Hayes, T. R. 294, 302
Gordon, C. 127, 496 Hearne, L. J. 293
Gorsuch, R. 437 Heaven, P. C. L. 116, 200
Gottfredson, L. S. 271, 272 Hebb, D. O. 277
Gough, H. G. 463 Hektner, J. M. 355
Gould, S. J. 343, 484 Hembree, R. 479
Graham, E. K. 117 Hendler, T. 60
Graham, J. R. 463 Hendrickson, D. E. 279, 280, 286
Grasby, K. L. 336 Hepburn, L. 361
Graves, L. V. 307 Herrnstein, R. J. 272, 313, 497
Gray, J. A. 99, 100, 115, 116, 127, 237–240, Hettema, J. M. 384
246, 248 Hibbing, M. V. 481, 484
Greenwald, A. G. 42 Hidalgo, M. P. 177
Griffn, B. 482, 483 Hilbert, S. 291
Grijalva, E. 207, 208 Hofmann, S. G. 182
Gross, J. J. 130 Hogan, T. P. 485
Grudnik, J. L. 282 Holden, R. R. 483, 484
Gruen, R. J. 359 Holmstrom, R. W. 43
Guadagnoli, E. 435 Holzel, B. K. 181
Guay, F. 367 Honess, T. 226
Guilford, J. P. 36, 434, 465 Hopko, D. R. 479
Gulliksen, H. 460, 467 Horn, J. L. 261, 262, 308
Gunnery, S. D. 132 Horne, J. A. 177
Gurven, M. 112 Houben, M. 361
Gustafsson, J-E. 263, 268, 278 Howarth, E. 109, 354, 355
Guttman, L. 436, 437, 453 Howe, M. J. A. 277, 344
Guyer, M. F. 327 Howell, D. C. 79, 433
Hsu, W. T. 237
Hagemann, D. 234 Hu, L-T. 450
Haier, R. J. 293 Hughes, B. M. 395, 421
Hakstian, A. R. 436 Hulsdunker, T. 420
Hakstian, R. N. 261 Hunsley, J. 65
Hambleton, R. K. 466, 485 Hunt, E. 272
Hammer, E. F. 67 Hunt, T. E. 162
Hampson, S. E. 118, 326, 344 Hunter, J. E. 412, 413, 416, 423
518
Author Index
Iacono, W. G. 195 Koehn, M. A. 211

Isen, A. M. 130, 359 Kohn, P. M. 198
Izard, C. E. 354 Koke, L. C. 271
Kowalski, C. M. 206
Jacobson, J. 420 Kreibig, S. D. 235
Jahng, S. 361 Krosnick, J. A. 25
Jain, S. 182 Krueger, R. F. 345
Jamt, R. E. G. 176 Krug, R. E. 198
Jang, K. L. 113, 340 Kulas, J. T. 410
Jaus?ovec, N. 319 Kumar, A. 383
Jencks, C. 314, 423 Kuncel, N. R. 423
Jenkins, C. D. 394 Kuppens, P. 361
Jennrich, R. I. 444 Kwapil, T. R. 194
Jensen, A. R. 69, 280, 283–288, 293, 312, 327,
474, 479, 485 Laborde, S. 140, 421
Jockin, V. 385 LaBuda, M. C. 339
Johns, L. C. 192 Lacan, J. 63
Johnson, W. 291, 329 Lamers, F. 382
Jonason, P. K. 211, 213 Lane, R. D. 204
Jonassaint, C. 421 Larsen, R. J. 359
Jones, A. 173 Lassiter, G. D. 110
Jones, B. D. 421 Lazarus, R. S. 355, 384
Jones, D. N. 211 Leander, N. P. 374
Joseph, D. L. 419 Lee, E. H. 467
Judge, T. A. 184, 208, 417 Lee, K. 99, 113, 208
Jung, C. G. 53, 54, 63–66, 70, 115 Legree, P. J. 134, 136
Jung, R. E. 293 Leistico, A-M. R. 391
Juranek, J. 235 Lenzenweger, M. F. 194, 212
Leonhardt, A. 225
Kabat-Zinn, J. 180 Levenson, M. R. 209, 211
Kaiser, H. F. 436, 437, 440, 443, 445, 453 Lewis, G. J. 204
Kamin, L. J. 343, 472, 473 Li, M. Z. 234
Kanai, R. 246 Lin, P. 395
Kangas, J. 311 Lipnevich, A. A. 177
Karama, S. 292 Lock, M. 417
Karstad, S. B. 129 Locke, K. D. 117
Kaspar, K. 176 Loehlin, J. C. 108, 330, 332, 340, 342, 449
Kaufman, A. S. 266, 308 Longstreth, L. E. 285
Kebbell, M. R. 396 Lorenzo-Seva, U. 80, 432, 433, 439, 447
Keele, S. M. 139 Lorr, M. 65, 354
Kelly, G. A. 9–12, 15, 18, 19, 23, 26, 27, 53, 54, Ludeke, S. 199
100, 178, 225, 226, 381, 387, 492–494 Luders, E. 293
Kish, G. B. 173 Lynam, D. R. 210, 212
Kline, P. 58, 62, 67, 68, 70, 75, 104, 108, 109, Lynn, R. 307, 314, 343, 497
115, 182, 225, 261, 368, 369, 371, 390, 435, Lyons, B. D. 420
444, 458, 461, 467, 483, 493, 496
Kline, R. B. 449 MacCann, C. 134
Klinteberg, B. 177 Machado-de-Sousa, J. P. 235
519
Author Index
Machiavelli, N. 191, 192, 204–206, 210–212 Modinos, G. 195

Maciejewski, D. F. 361 Mofftt, T. E. 382
Mackenzie, B. 282 Monaghan, C. 205
Madison, G. 306 Moore, T. H. M. 195
Mancini, G. 407 Morgeson, F. P. 484
Mann, F. D. 185 Mortensen, E. L. 311
Marques, A. H. 227 Most, R. B. 461, 467
Marsh, H. W. 154 Moutaf, J. 479
Martin, M. 359 Mudrack, P. E. 205
Martins, A. 384 Muris, P. 211
Mason, O. 193 Muro, A. 179
Mata, I. 195 Murphy, J. 203, 204
Matthews, G. 119, 246, 286, 354, 355, 480 Murray, H. A. 362
Maul, A. 134 Musek, J. 117
Mavroveli, S. 407 Myles, J. B. 195
Maxwell, J. 392 Myrtek, M. 395
May, J. 290, 483
Mayer, J. D. 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 134–136, Nadler, A. 183
142, 143 Naemi, B. D. 481
McAuley, E. 421 Nagel, M. 337
McClelland, D. C. 362 Neal, T. M. S. 209
McConville, C. 353, 354, 358–361, 446 Neimeyer, G. J. 27
McCord, J-L. 42 Neimeyer, R. A. 27
McCrae, R. R. 99, 111, 112, 116, 119, 175, 184, Nelson, M. T. 194
320, 340, 362, 418 Nettelbeck, T. 282, 306
McCrory, C. 282 Netter, P. 177
McDonald, R. P. 158, 446 Nicol, A. A. M. 200
McDougall, W. 352, 370 Nisbett, R. E. 319
McEwan, D. 420 Nolan, K. A. 209
McGue, M. 332, 338 Norman, W. T. 110, 111
McIntosh, A. M. 384 Nostro, A. D. 237
McLeod, J. 397 Nowlis, J. 354
McNaughton, N. 239, 242 Nunnally, J. C. 156, 166, 390, 435, 461, 463, 464
McRorie, M. 131, 280
Meade, A. W. 418 O’Boyle, E. H. 419
Mededovic, J. 211 O’Connell, K. A. 373
Meehl, P. E. 192 O’Suilleabhain, P. S. 395
Mehrabian, A. 127 O’Rourke, M. M. 391
Meissner, W. W. 67 O’Toole, B. I. 394
Melby-Lervag, M. 478 Oakes, J. 326
Messick, S. 166, 480 Oberauer, K. 290, 291
Miao, C. 180 Ohi, K. 196
Michell, J. 6, 34, 45, 46, 50, 69, 103, 148, 497 Olson, J. M. 25, 363
Miciuk, L. R. 184 Ones, D. S. 418, 482
Mikolajczak, M. R. 140 Ortiz-Medina, M. B. 195
Miller, J. D. 207, 211, 212 Osmon, D. C. 285
Minnix, J. A. 231 Ost, L. G. 318
Mischel, W. 117, 127 Osterlind, S. J. 477, 478
Mitchell, R. L. C. 228, 234, 235, 237, 246 Ozer, D. J. 396, 403, 423
520
Author Index
Paleczek, D. 206 Reich, J. W. 129

Palmer, B. R. 139 Reid-Seiser, H. L. 419
Pang, Y. J. 225 Revelle, W. 117, 119, 158, 228, 246, 264,
Parker, D. M. 282 440
Passini, F. T. 110 Reynolds, C. R. 411, 474, 485
Paulhus, D. L. 204, 210, 211, 418, 481, 483 Reznick, J. S. 311
Paunonen, S. V. 117 Rhodes, R. E. 420
Peasley-Miklus, C. E. 203 Richardson, M. 407
Pedersen, N. L. 309, 331, 332, 342 Rief, W. 382
Pelletier, L. G. 367, 421 Rijsdijk, F. V. 280
Pelosi, A. J. 395 Rindermann, H. 272
Perkins, A. M. 242 Roberti, J. W. 174
Persson, B. N. 212 Roberts, B. W. 316, 318, 396
Pessiglione, M. 240 Roberts, G. 316
Petrides, K. V. 125, 126, 128, 136, 139–142, Roberts, R. D. 134
384, 407 Robertson, I. T. 418
Pickering, A. D. 240 Robins, R. W. 182, 183
Piedmont, R. L. 421 Rocha, A. A. 134
Pietschnig, J. 307 Rogers, C. R. 9, 10, 19–22, 26, 27, 40, 53, 54,
Pilarska, A. 24 100, 225, 342, 381, 385, 492–494
Pilch, I. 205 Rogers, R. 483
Plant, W. 198 Rohrer, J. M. 67
Plomin, R. 336–338, 345 Rokeach, M. 198
Polderman, T. J. C. 344 Ronnlund, M. 305
Pons, F. 134 Rose, S. 327
Popper, K. R. 352 Rosenberg, M. 26, 154, 182, 183
Poropat, A. E. 406 Roth, B. 405
Posthuma, D. 292 Ruch, W. 176
Powell, J. E. 177 Rund, B. R. 209
Powers, D. E. 478 Rupp, C. I. 195
Preece, D. 202, 203 Rust, J. 485
Prokosch, M. D. 393 Ryan, J. J. 308
Protzko, J. 314, 315 Ryan, R. M. 366
Rykman, R. M. 10
Qualter, P. 407
Quattrocki, E. 204 Saklofske, D. H. 139
Salovey, P. 125, 126, 128, 131, 136, 137, 143
Raine, A. 193, 209, 210 Sampaio, A. 246
Ramey, C. T. 312 Samur, D. 204
Randler, C. 178 Sanchez-Ruiz, M. J. 407
Raskin, N. J. 27, 207 Saper, C. B. 177
Raskin, R. 27, 207 Sattler, J. M. 479, 485
Ratcliff, R. 285 Sauce, B. 344
Raven, J. 264–266, 274, 292, 304 Savage, J. E. 337
Ray, J. J. 198 Scarr, S. 476, 494
Rebernjak, B. 240 Schaie, K. W. 309
Redick, T. S. 135 Schermer, J. A. 117
Reed, T. E. 69, 279, 280, 287 Schiffer, A. L. A. 395
Rees, A. 23 Schinka, J. A. 418
521
Author Index
Schmid, J. 447 Stilley, C. S. 394

Schmidt, F. L. 412, 413, 416, 423 Stoel, R. D. 177
Schmiedek, F. 285 Storm, C. 354
Schonert-Reichl, K. A. 181 Storm, T. 354
Schroeders, U. 272 Stough, C. 282
Schubert, A. L. 287 Strenze, T. 412
Schulte, M. J. 136, 142 Sulloway, F. 69
Schultz, W. 240 Surtees, P. G. 395
Schutte, N. S. 126, 139, 384 Svebak, S. 373
Segal, N. L. 335, 345
Seidman, L. J. 195 Tabachnick, B. G. 90, 433
Serin, R. C. 209, 391 Tan, F. B. 27
Shamosh, N. A. 127 Taylor, G. J. 201, 203
Shearman, S. M. 198 Taylor, S. E. 396
Sheppard, L. D. 294 Te Nijenhuis, J. 315
Shipstead, Z. 315 Teasdale, T. W. 307
Siassi, M. 395 Thompson, L. A. 339, 405
Siddi, S. 195 Thomson, C. J. 177
Silverman, I. W. 306 Thorndike, R. L. 416, 422, 423
Silverman, S. 363 Thurstone, L. L. 253, 258–262, 278, 416, 442
Simon, S. S. 237 Tisserand, D. J. 292
Singal, J. 42 Toomey, R. 177
Singh, J. P. 391 Trahan, L. H. 307
Siu, N. Y. F. 179 Tran, U. S. 438
Slough, N. 161 Truax, C. B. 27, 385
Smith, T. W. 395, 396 Truneckova, D. 226
Smits, I. A. M. 316 Tryon, R. C. 328
Sniehotta, F. F. 366 Tupes, E. C. 109–111
Soto, C. J. 396 Turiano, N. A. 395
Sowislo, J. F. 26 Turkheimer, E. 336
Spearman, C. 157, 159, 253, 258–261, 263, 278 Turner, S. M. 318
Spector, P. E. 461, 467
Spering, M. 130 Undheim, J. O. 261
Spielberger, C. D. 382, 479
Spijkerman, M. P. J. 182 Valladares-Rodriguez, S. 42
Spitz, H. H. 312, 319 Vallerand, R. J. 365, 366, 368, 370, 372, 374,
Sprung, M. 135 422
Squibb, P. 326 Van Aken, L. 420
Stanton, B. 176 Van Bockstaele, B. 236
Steca, P. 421 Van Dam, N. T. 185
Steele, C. M. 479 Van den Heuvel, M. P. 237
Stein, R. 65 Van der Linden, D. 117, 140, 419
Stephens, R. A. 17 Van der Sluis, S. 336
Stephenson, W. 22 Van Ijzendoorn, M. H. 27
Sternberg, R. J. 253, 260, 270–272, 277, 286, Van Rooy, D. L. 419
288–290, 294, 295 Vanderpool, M. 410
Sternberg, S. 288 Vazire, S. 24
Stevens, R. 70 Velicer, W. F. 435, 438, 440
Stevenson, J. 342 Velten, E. J. 359
522
Author Index
Vernon, P. A. 117, 211, 271, 280, 294 Weinberger, D. A. 236

Vernon, P. E. 261, 278 Weinstock, L. M. 383, 384
Vickers, D. 281 Weissfog, M. 199
Visser, B. A. 269 Wells, W. T. 109
Volkow, N. D. 240 Wessman, A. E. 360
Von Stumm, S. 414, 495 Westermann, R. 359
Vorst, H. C. 202 Westfall, J. 142
Voss, M. W. 420 Whalley, L. J. 392, 393
Vukasovic, T. 344 Williams, L. M. 196
Williams, R. L. 272
Wacker, J. 235 Wilson, G. D. 198
Wahlund, K. 210 Wilson, R. C. 338
Wainer, H. 253 Winter, D. A. 27
Wainright, M. 66 Wittmann, M. 179
Walach, H. 180 Wolf, M. S. 394
Walker, B. M. 27 Wongupparaj, P. 292
Walker, W. D. 200 Woodley, M. A. 306
Walters, G. D. 391
Walton, K. E. 112 Yang, Y. L. 210
Warne, R. T. 485 Young, G. 485
Washburn, J. J. 208 Young, M. S. 418
Wastell, C. 206
Waterhouse, L. 272 Zeidner, M. 461
Watson, D. 354, 358, 385, 395 Ziegler, M. 483
Watson, J. B. 327 Zigmond, A. S. 354, 382
Watt, C. A. 60 Zimbardo, P. G. 179
Watts, A. L. 212 Zuckerman, M. 114, 174–177, 231, 340, 342
Wechsler, D. 39, 48, 50, 266, 311, 315, 388 Zuroff, D. C. 386
Weinberg, R. A. 476 Zwick, W. R. 438, 440
523
Subject Index
16PF, 106–109, 111, 112 adoption studies, 325, 330, 338, 342
aggression, 18, 53–57, 200, 204, 208, 342
abilities, 36–39 Agreeableness, 99–114
and bias, 471–480 and brain function, 237
biological correlates 277–287 and the Dark Triad, 211
change, 303–315 lifespan changes, 206–209
and education, 404–406 and Machiavellianism, 206
and emotion, 125–136, 202–205 personality trait, 112–119
environmental infuences, 325–340 and Psychoticism, 175, 230, 231
factors, 253–263 Alexithymia, 140, 191, 192, 201–206
and forensic psychology, 388–389 alpha activity, 233, 234
and health psychology, 392–394 alpha. See coeffcient alpha
hierarchical models, 261–263 alternate-forms reliability, 158
item-writing, 457–460 American Psychological Association 390, 508
and IQ, 266, 267 amotivation, 366, 367, 421
leadership, 416, 417 amygdala, 126, 210, 225, 230, 235, 242
measurement, 39–40, 44, 48–51, 263–267 anal character, 68, 75, 104
multiple intelligences, 268–270, 406, 494 anxiety, 1, 4, 5, 18, 21–25
and occupational performance, 408–417 and amygdala, 235
operational defnitions of, 33–51 as a mood state, 381–384
primary mental, 259, 260 personality trait, 114–116
processes underlying, 277–294, 338–340 in psychoanalytic theory, 58–61, 67
second order, 260–263 and reinforcement sensitivity theory, 237–246
stability over time, 310–315 reduction, 318, 319
structure, 253–263 and test performance, 152–154, 479, 480, 485
triarchic theory, 270, 271 appraisal, 139, 202, 203, 384, 407, 479
See also general intelligence archetypes, 64, 65
Ability Dimension Action Chart, 256, 257 armchair speculation, 5, 34
ability emotional intelligence, 125–136, 142, attainments, 37–41
143, 307, 407, 408 attitudes, 16, 20–25, 197–200, 362–375
ability tests, 39, 48–51, 127, 133–136, 264–270, auditory evoked potential. See evoked potential
478–480 recordings
ability-EI. See ability emotional intelligence Authoritarianism, 191–201, 205, 212, 213
acquiescence, 152–155, 471, 480, 481
ADAC. See Ability Dimension Action Chart BAS. See reinforcement sensitivity theory
addiction, 16, 240 behaviour checklists, 41
525
Subject Index
behaviour genetics, 327–337 conceptual nervous system. See reinforcement

behaviour therapy, 3, 229, 318 sensitivity theory
Behavioural Approach System. See reinforcement concurrent validity, 163
sensitivity theory confrmatory bias, 5
Behavioural Inhibition System. See reinforcement confrmatory factor analysis, 76, 431, 449–451
sensitivity theory congruence, 21, 22, 225
bias, 471–479, 483 Conscientiousness
and group differences, 474–478, 485, 496, and brain structure, 237
497, 504 changes over time, 316, 317
external bias, 472–475 and education, 403–407
internal bias, 477 heritability, 340
and test validity, 164, 165 and mortality, 395, 396
Big Five models of personality, 109–114 and motivation, 362–364
biological theories, 204, 223–250, 277–287, 292, and other traits, 180, 183, 196, 199–202,
293, 325–348 206, 210
birth order, 66 personality trait, 99, 111–119
BIS. See reinforcement sensitivity theory and sport, 420, 421
bloated specifc, 172 Conservatism, 25, 197–201
bottom up theories, 115 conspection 44, 45
brain damage, 225, 231, 268, 293, 388 construct validity, 147, 148, 162, 165
brain size and intelligence, 292 constructive alternativism, 11
British Ability Scales, 266 constructs. See personal constructs
content validity, 148, 162
cannabis, 195 contextual subtheory. See triarchic theory
chain-P technique, 357–359 continuity hypothesis, 54, 192
circadian rhythms, 177, 178, 185 contrast pole, 13, 14
circular defnition, 102 convergent validity, 162
classical item analysis, 464–467 coping mechanisms, 182, 223, 236, 353,
client-centred therapy, 9, 10, 396, 492 381–385
clinical theories, 2, 4, 5 core constructs, 17
Cloninger, 114, 115 corrected item-total correlation, 464–466
Kelly, 9–19, 23–27 correlation coeffcient, 79, 85, 164, 302, 333,
and personality, 191–196, 318, 319, 381–387, 499–505
390 cortex, 199, 223, 225, 228–248, 292, 293
psychoanalytic, 53–73 cortical arousal, 223, 228, 232, 233
Rogers, 19–27 counselling, 9–30, 383–386, 408
cns. See reinforcement sensitivity theory creativity, 111, 130, 162, 261–263, 270, 372
coaching and test performance, 478 criterion keying, 390–392, 457, 462, 463, 466,
coeffcient alpha, 147–160, 461–466 467
cognitive ability. See abilities, general Cronbach’s alpha. See coeffcient alpha
intelligence crystallised intelligence, 261, 263, 274, 304, 309,
cognitive development, 307–311 310
collective unconscious, 63–66
Consortium for Longitudinal Studies 313 dark triad, 204–213, 391
common environment. See shared environment death instinct, 57, 63, 68
common factors, 83–89, 450 deductive reasoning, 36, 260
communality, 75, 76, 86–90, 440, 442, 449 defence mechanisms, 58–62, 65
componential analysis, 288–290 defensive distance, 241–245
componential subtheory. See triarchic theory demand characteristics, 181, 182
526
Subject Index
depression, 353–361 executive functions, 291, 292

and mood disorder, 381–385 experiential subtheory. See triarchic theory
and personality, 108, 126, 178, 182, 205, expert systems, 9, 17, 493
395 exploratory factor analysis. See factor analysis
and self-esteem, 26 external bias, 473–476
treatment, 177, 182, 205, 318, 387 Extraversion
depth psychology, 53–72 change over time, 316–319
derivatives of drives, 57, 58, 60, 62 and factor analytic models, 99–119
development, 301–325 biological theories, 225, 228, 229–235,
and genetics, 332, 333, 338, 339 237–244, 384
and health, 393–396 genetics, 340–343, 358
of intelligence, 338–340 and mood, 358, 362, 373, 384
of personality, 340–343 and other traits, 173–183, 196, 206, 395
psychoanalytic theories of, 53, 57, 58, and sport, 419, 420
62–64 and work performance, 417–419
Rogers & Kelly, 15, 19, 25–27 extrinsic motivation, 366, 367, 403, 422
deviation IQ, 267, 274 eye movements, 195, 236
differential item functioning, 466, 477
divergent validity, 162, 355, 364 face validity, 148, 161
domain sampling model, 155–158 facets, 111–113
dopamine, 103, 177, 223, 234, 235, 240 factor analysis
dreams, 55–58, 64–66 logic of, 75, 76, 78–91, 93
dyslexia, 2, 36, 39, 164, 254, 266 performing, 431–453
and states, 354–357
ECO. See elementary cognitive operations and traits, 77, 101–213
EEG, 231–235, 292, 361 uses of, 91–93, 457, 464–466
egalitarian fallacy, 475, 476 factor loadings, 84–87, 90, 94, 435–437, 443,
ego, 54–63, 66, 71, 77 446, 449, 450
eigenvalue, 75, 76, 86, 94, 436–441 factor matrix, 75, 76, 84–87, 92, 109, 453
element, 12–16, 28, 29, 204 factor pattern correlation matrix, 84–87, 94,
elementary cognitive operations, 277, 288–290 446
elementary cognitive tasks. See elementary factor rotation, 75, 238, 431, 441, 446
cognitive operations factor scores, 258, 435, 444–446
emergent pole, 13, 14 factor structure matrix, 84, 85, 94, 443, 444
emotion. See mood, ability emotional faking, 41, 408, 418, 482, 483
intelligence, trait emotional intelligence family environment, 224–226, 325–345, 404
emotional intelligence, 125–140, 268, 403, 423, fear, 17, 20, 61, 62, 237, 241–245
495 fve-factor model. See Big Five models of
empathy, 20–27, 137–141, 181, 205–208, 342, personality
386 fxed role therapy, 24, 27, 387
environment. See shared environment, unique Flight-Fight-Freeze System. See reinforcement
environment sensitivity theory
EPQ-R, 115, 174, 244 fuid intelligence (Gf) , 261, 263, 292, 293,
ergs, 370–373 304–309, 320
errors. See measurement errors Flynn effect, 272, 301–310, 314–319
eros, 57 fMRI studies, 227, 231–240, 292–294
ethics, 34, 42, 49, 50, 247, 507–512 forensic psychology, 388–396, 472, 484, 495
eugenics, 343 four-branch model of emotional intelligence, 126,
evoked potential recordings, 280, 286, 292, 294 128, 134
527
Subject Index
free association, 55, 56, 62, 70, 71 hierarchical models, 90, 91, 117, 257–263, 272,
free response tests, 40 291
frontal cortex, 210, 231, 234, 237, 293, 384 Honesty, 99, 113, 175, 177, 208
fronto-parietal theory of intelligence, 293 hostility, 17, 18, 114, 198, 358, 395
functional connectivity, 223, 237, 277, 293 hypervigilance, 236
hypnosis, 54–56
g. See general intelligence hysteria, 53–57, 61, 68, 390
GAD. See General Anxiety Disorder
gamifcation, 42 id, 54, 57–67, 71, 110, 231
Gc. See crystallised intelligence identifcation, 62
gene-environment interactions, 336 implicit Association Tests, 42
general ability. See general intelligence impulsivity
General Anxiety Disorder, 382–384, 396 and emotional intelligence, 126, 139,
general factor of personality, 99, 117, 119, 140 141
general intelligence (g) 38 and psychoanalysis, 58, 61, 62
and bias, 475–479 and personality, 107, 112–116, 174, 179, 193,
as a factor, 253–263 208
and education, 403–406 and reinforcement sensitivity theory, 240,
and forensic psychology, 388, 389 243–246
and genetics, 325–331, 336–344 in-basket selection method, 162
and health, 392–394 incongruence. See congruence
measurement, 33–36, 263–267, 458–460 incremental validity, 147, 148, 163, 164
processes, 277–295 individual psychology, 66, 67
and work, 408–416 individual tests, 266, 388–392
generalist genes, 337, 405 individuation, 63–65
genetic infuences over the lifespan, 331, 332 inductive reasoning, 36, 261, 309
genetics, 325–345 infantile sexuality, 62
Gf. See fuid intelligence inferiority complex, 54, 66
Gm. See memory ability inspection time, 277, 280–283, 305–309
Gps. See perceptual speed instincts, 57–63, 68, 352
Gr. See retrieval Intellect, 111, 119, See also Openness to
grey matter, 195, 234, 293, 494 Experience
Grit, 351, 352, 363, 364 intelligence. See general intelligence
group differences, 472–479, 485, 496, 497, internal bias, 477, 478
504 internal consistency. See coeffcient alpha
group tests, 263–265 International Personality Item Pool, 49, 50, 115,
guessing, 36, 44, 60, 152, 460, 462 483
guilt, 17, 21, 63, 126, 210, 421 International Test Commission, 49, 50
Gv. See visualisation interoception, 203, 204
intrinsic motivation, 366, 367, 370, 421, 422
Hare Psychopathy Checklist, 208, 209, 390, introspection, 9, 24, 56, 61, 492, 493
391 Introversion. See Extraversion
Head Start interventions, 301, 311–315, 339, IPIP. See International Personality Item Pool
340 ipsatised scales, 418, 434
health, 363–367, 384, 392–396 IQ, 265–267, 302–315, 327–329, 335–344
heritability. See genetics isolation, 58
HEXACO, 111–114, 119, 175–177, 184, 208 item analysis, 134, 457, 461–468
Heywood cases, 440 item response theory, 457, 466–478, 485
528
Subject Index
job analysis, 410 MSCEIT, 126, 131–134, 136

multiple hurdle test batteries, 409
Kaiser-Guttman criterion, 436 multiple intelligence theory, 36, 268–270, 406,
494
L-data, 34, 41, 44 multiple-choice tests, 40, 43–45, 460
learning theory, 118, 223 multivariate genetics, 337, 384, 405, 406, 422,
lexical hypothesis. See personality sphere 495
lie scale, 41, 418 Myers-Briggs inventory, 65
life instinct. See eros
Likert scale, 44, 45, 103, 151, 154 Narcissism, 204, 206–212, 403, 421
limbic system, 126, 228, 230 Narcissistic Personality Inventory, 207
local independence of items, 155, 165, 458, 459 Negative Affect, 130, 351, 354–361, 374,
382
Machiavellianism, 191, 192, 204–206, NEO-Personality Inventory (Revised), 48,
210–212 112–114, 175, 418, 419, 484
mandala, 63, 64 neural conduction velocity, 279–287
measurement errors neural networks, 225, 237, 287, 293
random, 35–37, 86–89, 106, 147–155, 263 neurosis, 6, 58, 61, 62, 66, 68, 381–385
systematic, 150–155, 471–485 Neuroticism
memory. See also working memory biological theories, 228–30, 235–237
ability (Gm), 39, 40, 262, 263 change over time, 301–303, 315–319
and motivation, 369 factor analytic models, 106–119
and psychoanalytic theory, 54–58, 61 genetics, 336, 340–344
and test performance, 159, 203, 256 in health/clinical psychology, 381–385, 395,
Mental Measurement Yearbook, 48, 50, 354 396
Michell’s criticism of psychometrics, 6, 45, 46, and mood, 352–354, 361, 362
69, 103, 148 and other traits, 180–184, 196, 202, 206,
mindfulness, 178–185 244, 373
molecular genetics, 224, 337 and applications, 165, 406, 407, 417, 420,
monoamine oxidase, 176, 177 421
mood variability, 360–362 neurotransmitters, 103, 176, 177, 204, 225, 234,
mood, 37–39, 351–362 240
and emotional intelligence, 126, 130–133, norms, 46–51, 303, 304, 315, 364, 365, 390,
137, 139 393, 466, 510, 511
and personality, 115, 116, 130, 178, 239, nuisance factors, 152–157
382–384 Numerical ability (N), 159, 260–262
states, 355–359 nutrition, 304, 314, 319, 332, 335, 476
change, 359–362
Morningness, 177, 178, 184 objective tests. See T-data
motivation, 36–38, 351, 352, 362–374 oblique solutions, 84, 85, 436, 442–446, 450
and education, 269, 340, 404 Occam’s Razor, 69, 127
and reinforcement sensitivity theory, Oedipus complex, 62, 67, 68, 100, 225, 493
240–246 O-LIFE schizotypy questionnaire, 193, 196
and test-taking, 264, 479, 484 online tests, 39, 182, 483
in sport, 421–423 Openness to Experience
unconscious, 55–60, 66, 69 biology, 237, 340
MRI scans, 227, 231–235, 237, 240, 292–294. change over time, 301–303, 315–319
See also fMRI factor analytic models, 106–119
529
Subject Index
and other traits, 175, 196, 199–202, 210 psychoanalysis, 53–57, 61, 63, 67–69
and school/sports/work, 406, 417–420 psychometrics, 33–46, 75–93, 147–165, 431–485
operational defnition, 33–37, 147, 161, 165, Psychopathy, 2, 204 208–212, 390, 391
266 psychophysiology, 203, 227, 231–237, 286, 287,
orthogonal solution, 83–86, 260, 431, 442–444, 292–294
448 Psychoticism, 115–119, 174–177, 192, 230, 341,
342
parallel analysis, 438, 439 P-technique, 357–359, 370
parallel-forms reliability, 158, 159
percentile norms, 46–48 Q’–data, 34, 40, 41, 44
perceptual defence, 53, 60, 161 Q-data, 34, 40, 41, 44
perceptual speed (Gps), 260–262 Q-sort, 22, 23
personal constructs, 9–19, 23, 386, 387, 493, quantifcation, 24, 41, 44–47, 103, 226–228,
494 288
personal unconscious, 63 questionnaires, 6, 26, 33–45, 65, 68, 103–108
personality
biological models, 223–237 R Core Team 432, 440, 449
change, 316–319 random errors of measurement, 35, 148,
and clinical psychology, 381–387 152–154, 471
development, 130, 134, 199, 224–227, range of convenience, 18
315–319, 342 ratings of behaviour, 5, 41, 105–111, 152, 389,
and education, 406–408 482
environmental and genetic infuences, and leadership, 417
340–344 and Psychopathy, 208–210
and forensic psychology, 389–392 ratio IQ, 266
and health psychology, 394–396 Raven’s Matrices, 264
by introspection, 9–30 reaction formation, 58, 59, 68, 71
psychoanalytic theories, 53–72 reaction times, 35–42, 277, 280–290, 305, 306
and sport, 420, 421 refexes, 280
structure, 99–144, 171–220 reinforcement sensitivity theory, 223, 237–246
and work performance, 417–419 reliability, 147–160, 179, 461–468
personality sphere, 101–106 repertory grid, 9, 12–19, 27, 100
phenomenology, 9, 10, 24, 27 repression, 53–60
pleasure principle, 57 resting state functional connectivity, 237, 293
Positive Affect, 354–359 retrieval (Gr), 262
power tests, 40 role title, 13, 14
practice items, 460 Rorschach inkblots, 43, 44, 50, 390
pre-conscious, 59, 496 Rosenberg Self Esteem Inventory, 26, 154, 182,
predictive validity, 163, 165, 167 183
prejudice, 1, 23, 42, 200 RST. See reinforcement sensitivity theory
primary mental abilities, 259–264, 278 rumination, 182, 184, 242, 384
primary process thought, 57
principal components analysis, 87–90, 432, sadism, 57, 211
435–440, 445, 446, 448 schizophrenia, 115, 191–196, 205, 209, 230
process models, 3, 202–204, 223–246, 277–294, Schizotypy, 192–196, 205, 209, 212, 213
325–345 scientifc assessment, 5, 33–36, 212, 224–226,
projection, 58, 59, 71 326, 352
projective tests, 34, 43–45, 68, 390, 479 and falsifcation, 19, 26, 63–69, 271
530
Subject Index
by factor analysis, 77, 99 theoretical construct, 33, 68

problems, 6, 25, 45, 69, 103, 148 theory of planned behaviour, 351, 364
scoring tests, 6, 34, 43–49, 507–510 threat, 17, 58, 60–62, 207, 235–237, 241–245
Scottish Mental Survey, 309–311, 392–394 time limits, 39, 40, 49, 458, 460–467, 479
scree test, 436, 437 time perception, 178, 179
screen memories, 61 top-down theories, 115
second order abilities, 261–263, 278 Toronto Alexithymia Scale, 201, 202
self-actualisation, 22, 100, 128, 180 trait emotional intelligence, 125–128, 136–142,
self-characterisation, 387 384, 407, 408, 419
self-concept, 16, 20–29, 36, 77, 171 trait. See personality, abilities
self-determination theory, 351, 366, 422 Trait-EI. See trait emotional intelligence
self-esteem, 25, 26, 154–157, 182–185, 225, 458 triad, 13–15
Sensation Seeking, 114, 171–179, 243, 341, 420 triarchic theory, 270, 271
sentiments, 370–373 true score, 148, 152, 155, 156–158, 464, 471
sexual abuse, 4, 61 Tupes and Christal, 109–111
shared environment, 118, 328, 332–344, 495 Twenty Statements Test, 23
situationalism, 3, 5, 23, 38, 117 twin studies, 306, 328–344, 384
social constructionism, 23, 24, 118, 277, 325,
326 unconditional positive regard, 20, 21, 27, 386
social desirability, 117, 152–156, 418, 461, 471, unconscious mental processes, 53–69, 100, 370,
481–483 493, 496
source traits, 102–108, 112, 115, 172, 235, 354 unique environment, 332–339
speeded tests, 40, 458 unique factors, 83, 89, 153, 450
sport, 130, 354, 367–373, 419–423 unique variance, 75, 89, 90, 152, 153, 435, 440,
standard error of measurement, 148, 155, 160 449–451
state, 37–39
and emotion, 125–130, 136, 137, 180 validity, 18, 36, 147, 160–165, 467
and measurement, 151–153, 352, 353–358 construct, 162, 179, 364, 445
mood, 353, 358–362, 384 content, 162, 193
motivational, 362–374 face, 161, 162
STEM and STEU, 126, 134 incremental, 140, 163, 173, 184
strength of interest, 369–371 predictive, 163, 164, 306
subjective view. See phenomenology VARIMAX, 442–446
superego, 54, 57, 62, 69 Velten technique, 359
systematic errors of measurement, 148–154, verbal ability (V), 261
471–485 visualisation ability (Gv), 36, 38, 259–262,
420
T-data, 34, 42, 43, 105, 108, 109, 391
TEIQue, 136, 140–142, 384, 407 Wechsler intelligence scales, 39, 48, 266, 311,
telic and paratelic states, 372, 373 315, 388
test anxiety, 479, 480, 485 workbasket technique. See in-basket
test construction, 91, 92, 457–465, 481 working memory, 257, 277, 290–294, 406
test manual, 44–48, 109, 303, 390, 467, 509 writing items, 157, 457, 458–461, 492
test-retest reliability, 159, 160, 165, 310, 318,
352 Zimbardo Time Perception Inventory, 178, 179
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Colin Cooper - Individual Differences and Personality

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Individual Differences

Individual Differences and Personality provides a student-friendly introduction to both

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2021 Colin Cooper

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

First edition published by Hodder Education 2010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-0-367-18109-3 (hbk)

Visit the companion website: http://www.routledge.com/cw/cooper

1 Introduction to individual differences 1

21 Problems with tests 471

Appendix A Correlations 499

The book consists of sixteen chapters of psychological content (theories, applications of

How can we discover individual differences?

Studying individuals in detail

Scientifc assessment of individuals using

A major problem with this

l Describe and discuss the contribution of Carl Rogers and client-centred

Self-assessment question 2.1

An introduction to George Kelly’s personal

Why different people develop different

Self-assessment question 2.2

When construct systems fail

Discovering personal constructs: the repertory grid

example (closed-minded/exciting) that constructs do not have to be opposites in the sense of

The repertory grid

Figure 2.1 Example of a repertory grid

Self-assessment question 2.3

Figure 2.2 Completed repertory grid

Analysis of repertory grids

Applications of repertory grids

Self-assessment question 2.4

Critical thinking about Kelly’s theory

The person-centred theory of Carl Rogers

by counsellors and clinical

As I follow the experience of many clients in the therapeutic relationship which we

Self-assessment question 2.5

Measuring self-concept by the Q-sort

Measuring self-concept by the Twenty Statements Test

l seeing where they position themselves along various personal constructs

Qualitative rather than quantitative data

Attitudes and self-esteem

Self-assessment question 2.6

Suggested additional reading

Answers to self-assessment questions

Rogers, C. R. 1959. A Theory of Therapy, Personality and Interpersonal Relationships, as

Measuring individual differences

l Explain the differences between ability traits, personality traits and

An operational defnition of reaction time

An operational defnition of intelligence

The importance of psychometrics

Self-assessment question 3.1

Traits and states

Self-assessment question 3.2

Table 3.1 Similarities and differences between abilities, attainments and

Ability trait Attainment Personality trait

Measures how well a person   

Personality questionnaires: Q’-data and Q-data

Table 3.2 Typical items from four questionnaires measuring different

Ratings of behaviour: L-data

Objective tests: T-data

Projective tests of personality

Figure 3.1 Example of an inkblot, similar to those used in Rorschach’s test