Hawaii Forensic Psychology

I have been read­ing inten­sively and neglect­ing my blog­ging duties. The pre­vi­ously cited arti­cle by Detrick, Chibnall, & Call (JPA, 2010, 92,5, 410–415, DOI: 10.1080/00223891.2010.497401) really opens the vis­tas on self-presentational issues in psy­cho­log­i­cal assess­ment. The ari­cle has a com­plete list of ref­er­ences, mostly from the non-clinical lit­er­a­ture, which moves beyond super­fi­cial under­stand­ings of valid­ity scales.  Of inter­est is the arti­cle by Pauls & Crost, 2005, where the authors note that favor­able self-presentational biases are asso­ci­ated with higher cog­ni­tive and emo­tional intel­li­gence (abil­ity to inter­pret test items in the con­text of the assess­ment sit­u­a­tion). They note that the con­struct valid­ity of scales changes under pres­sure of sit­u­a­tional demands. One quote from the Pauls & Crost arti­cle deserves com­plete cita­tion: “In other words, under sit­u­a­tional pres­sure, per­son­al­ity ques­tion­naires turn in part to mea­sueres which are com­pa­ra­ble to achieve­ment tests. According to our view, it is the abil­ity to respond to pes­on­al­ity ques­tion­naires in line with the expec­ta­tions of oth­ers or the abil­ity to fake on ques­tion­naires, which is mea­sured under sit­u­a­tional pres­sure” (p. 196).

Reference: Pauls, C., & Crost, N.W. (2010). Cognitive abil­ity and self-reported effi­cacy of self-presentation pre­dict fak­ing on per­son­al­ity mea­sur­ers. Journal of Individual Differences, 26,4, 194–206.