Personality Assessment
Haverford Psychology 205h
(http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/psych212h/p205h.02.html)
(Revised 2/4/25)

Spring, 2002
Doug Davis
Department of Psychology
Haverford College
Sharpless310
Phone: 896-1236

This "HyperSyllabus" is intended not only to provide you with a variety of local course resources in an easily-accessible way, but also to acquaint you with the World Wide Web, a user-friendly subset of the Internet. This document also contains pointers to other Psychology resources on the Net. To get the most from the HyperSyllabus, you should acquire Web resources appropriate to your situation (Mac/Wintel, direct dorm or dial-in connection). Some geek skills are now essential, and I'll help you acquire these.

Prerequisite: Psychology 105: Foundations of Personality, or consent of instructor.

1: Person-ality: Stories of the self

Tu, March 19: Course overview: Persons, selves, traits

• The lecture
• Funder's Intro
• From Anxiety to Method
• Meehl's preface

W, March 20 (Lab): The HTML Form and the Gather Server

• The lecture
• A survey of instant messenger use and personality
  • The data
  • Working with Gather data in Excel
• A Page of One's Own
  • Step-by-step instructions

Th Mar 21: Person-ality and its discontents:
F&O:"Research Methods": readings by McAdams, Block, Rosenthal & Rubin, Cronbach & Meehl

• The lecture

M Mar 25: (Lab): Creating Web pages and forms for use with the Gather server

2: Personality consistency: traits, situations, development

Tu Mar 26: Peronality: Psychodynamics, Projection, Apperception:
F&O: O'Connor, Allport (73-76), Maslow, Allport (308-314), Maslow (315-325), Rogers, Csikszentmihalyi

• Schafer's Stories, Murray's Earnst
• Schafer's card-set
• Qualitatively rich data-sets
  • Diaries
  • Dreams
  • Haverford, '89
  • TAT stories
    • Michigan, '69
    • Morocco, '75
    • Haverford, '94 (computer stimulus)
    • Haverford, '95 (3 standard cards)

W Mar 27 (Lab): Web pages completed: A simple study.

Th Mar 28: A penny for the old guys
F&O: Freud (227-244); Sears; Baumeister, Dale, & Sommer; Crews, Jung, (introversion/extraversion); Horney; Erikson

M April 1 (Lab): Review of Web Form construction, discussion of survey 1

Tu Apr 2: Situations, Persons, Interactions:
F&O: Mischel, Block, Kenrick & Funder, Snyder, McCrae & Costa

3: Bias, Barnum, and Bayes

W Apr 3 (Lab):

Th Apr 4: Labeling and Diagnosis: Rosenhan (1973), Langer & Abelson (1974), Chapman& Chapman

• The lecture
•   The Barnum Effect

M Apr 8: (Lab): Survey 1

Tu Apr 9: Base Rates and Better Judgments: Davis (1976, 1979), Langer& Abelson (1981), Meehl (1956)

• The lecture
• Common Fallacies in Reasoning: Representativeness, Availability Bayesian links
  • A Bayesian calculator

4: Persons, Numbers

W Apr 10 (Lab) The Survey1 Excel and Statistica files

Th Apr 11: Five Factors Several Ways

• APA's Testing and Assessment Page
• Getting Started With the Big Five
• The NEO Five Factor Inventory
  • An on-line version (300 items)
  • A sample explanation of results
• International Personality Item Pool
  • Goldberg, L. Development of Five-Factor Domain Scales
  • Our 50-item Big Five form

M Apr 15 (Lab): Survey 1: Let's run the stats, discuss the results, and write the abstract.

5: Intelligent Persons, Smart Cultures

Tu Apr 16: Intelligence: A history of controversy over testing

• The lecture
• GRE Sample Questions
• The Multiphasic Personality

W Apr 17 Intelligence II

• The lecture

Th Apr 18: Herrnstein & Murray, The Bell Curve:

• The lecture
• two reviews
• Open letter to the Wall Street Journal (December 13, 1994)
• Is there a cognitive elite in America?

M Apr 22 (Lab): The Final Project/Paper

Tu Apr 23: Intelligence: Situations, Class, Culture

• The lecture
• The Class of '79

W Apr 24 (Lab): Help with Statistica

• Statistica tips

Th Apr 25: Culture and Personality Assessment I: F&O: Miner, Yang & Bond, Marcus & Kitayama, Triandis, Cohen et al,, Murray et al.

• The lecture

M Apr 29 (Lab): Final Project Help/Discussion

T Apr 30: Persons, Cultures and Assessment II

W May 1 (Lab): Final Project Help/Discussion

Th May 2: Review: From anxiety to method revisited. (Classes end)

Text

Funder, D.C., & Ozer, D.J. (2001). Pieces of the personality puzzle: Readings in theory and research. New York: W.W. Norton. F&O. Second Edition.

Other Resources

Baron, J., & Siepmann, M. (1999): Techniques for creating and using web questionnaires in research and teaching University of Pennsylvania.

Bouchard, T.J. (1995). Breaking the Last Taboo. Contemporary Psychology, 40.

Carlson, R. (1971). Where is the person in personality research? Psychological Bulletin, 75, 203-219. (copies in 402)

Chapman, L. J., & Chapman, J. P. (1971). Test results are what you think they are. Psychology Today. (copies in 402)

Chapman, L. J., & Chapman, J. P. (1969). Illusory correlation as an obstacle to the use of valid psychodiagnostic signs. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 74, 271-280.

Cronbach, L.J. (1975). Five decades of public controversy over mental testing. American Psychologist, 30, 1-14.(copies in 402)

Davis, D.A. (1976). On Being Detectably Sane in Insane Places: Base Rates and Psychodiagnosis. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1976, Vol. 85, 416-422.

 Davis, D.A. (1987). Formal operational thought and the Moroccan adolescent. In J. Valsiner (Ed.) Cultural context and child development: Towards a culture-inclusive developmental psychology. Hofgrefe, 1988.

Davis, D.A. (1979). What's in a name? A Bayesian rethinking of attributional biases in clinical judgment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 47, 1109-1114.

Devereux, George. (1967). From anxiety to method in the behavioral sciences. The Hague: Mouton & Co. excerpt.

Dorfmann, D.D. (1995). Soft Science With a Neoconservative Agenda. Contemporary Psychology, 40.

Fenton, Norman. Common fallacies in reasoning due to misunderstanding of probability. This is part of a collection of resources concerned with Bayesian belief nets and probability.

Herrnstein, R.J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bellcurve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: The Free Press. (Preface, Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 13). (copies in 402)

Jung, C. G. Psychological Types (1921) (Translation by H. Godwyn Baynes[1923]). Chapter 10: General Description of the Types (Classics in the History of Psychology).

Langer, E.J., & Abelson, R.P. (1974). A patient by any other name...: Clinician group differences in labeling bias. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42, 4-9. (copies in 402)

Langer, E.J., & Abelson, R.P. (1981). Reply to Douglas Davis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 49,132-133. (copies in 402)

Murray, H.A. (1940). What should psychologists do about psychoanalysis? Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

Meehl, P. E. (1956). Wanted: A good cookbook. American Psychologist, 11, 263-272. (copies in 402)

Meehl, P.E. (1973). Why I do not attend case conferences. In P.E. Meehl, Psychodiagnosis: Collected papers. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. notes

Meehl, P. E. (1978). Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46,806-814.

Paulsen, A.B. (1973). The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality: A diagnostic test in two parts. Triquarterly. (copies in 402)

Psychologists and Schools. www.arts.cqu.edu.au

Reade, W.K., & Wertheimer, M. (1976). A Bias in the Diagnosis of Schizophrenia. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology,44, 878.

Revelle, William. (1995). Personality Processes. Annual Review of Psychology.

Rosenhan, D. L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179, 250-258. (copies in 402)

Schafer, R. (1958). How was this story told? Journal of Projective techniques, 22, 181-210. (Reprinted in R. Schafer. (1967).Projective techniques and psychoanalysis. New York: International Universities Press, pp. 114-169.) excerpt

• It will be helpful to have the TAT pictures handy when you read this. A fine discussion of one of Schafer's interpretations is linked.

Wolf, J., Munoz, M., Kuperman, C., & Davis, D.A. (1998). Self-presentation in IRC. (internal access only).