The Eysenck Personality Inventory Lie Scale--Some Further Australian Data

The lie scale of the EPI has been the subject of sparse and equivocal results. No age-related effects on the L scale have been reported. The scale is widely used in Australia as a screening instrument for entry into nursing schools. This study found significant differences in L scale performance between young and mature female nurses. This difference was demonstrated both in the higher frequency with which the mature group scored above the cut-off point for acceptance, and in the higher L scoring of this group even within the category of acceptable returns.     

The item structure of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire across method and culture

Since its publication, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) has endured much criticism of its psychometric properties. As the most stringent of these attacks has derived from hierarchical factor analytic studies it is reasonable to ask whether the inadequacies reported accrue to the questionnaire itself or to the problematic features of factor analysis as a method. A further feature of empirical studies that are critical of the EPQ is that they are, by-and-large, based upon non-British samples. As the EPQ was constructed in Britain it is quite conceivable that cultural artifacts are responsible for the inconsistent findings of Canadian and American researchers. This paper offers a brief review of some of the critical research and reports a study in which the item structure of the EPQ is explored by non-metric multidimensional scaling techniques upon a sample of Irish adolescents. The MDS configuration was then compared with the higher order factor analytic results of American researchers to examine invariance across method. A clear item structure emerges supporting the Eysencks' theoretical model although items of the P scale are less homogenous than would be ideal for a psychometric tool.     

Item format and the structure of the Eysenck Personality Inventory: a replication

A seven-choice response format for personality inventories allows finer distinctions by subjects than the traditional two-choice format. The Eysenck Personality Inventory was employed in the present study to test the hypothesis that use of the expanded format would result in a clearer indication of test structure. A principal components analysis with a varimax rotation retained two components for the two-choice format, clearly identifiable as Eysenck's "Neuroticism" and "Extraversion" which accounted for 16% of the variance. The expanded format retained four components accounting for 28% of the variance.     

Characteristics of items in the Eysenck Personality Inventory which affect responses when students simulate

A large sample of students completed Form A of the Eysenck Personality Inventory, and four subgroups were later asked to simulate extraversion, introversion, neuroticism or stability. It was found that subjects could simulate these four personalities successfully. The changes in individual item responses were correlated with the items' factor loadings, validity, response bias, and detectability. The different scales and types of item were considered separately. In some cases the changes in item responses when simulating introversion and extraversion were related to the extraversion validities and factor loadings of the items. More often, however, the behaviour of items under simulation was correlated with aspects of the items that made them more like an item from another scale and thus lessened their susceptibility to a particular type of simulation.     

Heritability of item responses on the Eysenck personality questionnaire

We report estimates of the heritabilities and common environment variances for the 90 items of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. Responses from 627 pairs of twins were analysed using the biometrical genetic analysis based on the threshold model described by Falconer. Many of the items revealed very substantial heritabilities. No less than 67/90 had heritabilities > 33%, 19 had > 50% and a few were even > 65%. Some of the useful implications of item heritabilities are discussed.     

Differential item functioning by sex and race in the Hogan Personality Inventory

The authors examined measurement bias in the Hogan Personality Inventory by investigating differential item functioning (DIF) across sex and two racial groups (Caucasian and Black). The sample consisted of 1,579 Caucasians (1,023 men, 556 women) and 523 Blacks (321 men, 202 women) who were applying for entry-level, unskilled jobs in factories. Although the group mean differences were trivial, more than a third of the items showed DIF by sex (38.4%) and by race (37.3%). A content analysis of potentially biased items indicated that the themes of items displaying DIF were slightly more cohesive for sex than for race. The authors discuss possible explanations for differing clustering tendencies of items displaying DIF and some practical and theoretical implications of DIF in the development and interpretation of personality inventories.     

Malingering on the Personality Assessment Inventory: identification of specific feigned disorders

Profile validity is a primary consideration in the clinical assessment of psychopathology. Several indicators of negative impression management have been developed for the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 1991) that can both indicate its presence and help differentiate effortful negative distortion from distortion arising from cognitive sets associated with psychopathology. In this study, we tested a method designed to delineate the specific Clinical scales relevant for interpretation of deliberately feigned disorders. We used associations between the Negative Impression Management (NIM) scale and Clinical scales in the normative standardization sample to derive NIM predicted scale scores in a regression framework. We contrasted these predicted scores with observed scores on Clinical scales to yield NIM predicted discrepancies hypothesized to identify those Clinical scales most salient for the interpretation of negative distortion. We found this method to be effective in identifying particular distortion on the relevant scales for individuals attempting to feign 3 specific diagnoses (major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and schizophrenia).     

Personality factors in the Eysenck personality questionnaire

Hierarchical factor analyses were carried out on raw scored EPQ data yielded from two samples of subjects, a Gallup adult quota sample of 1198 subjects and 406 university undergraduates. Each sample was split by sex providing six data sets for analysis. Results at the second order level clearly indicated the recovery of practically all the E, N and L items as three distinct factors, P item recovery differed among males and females. Adult female and student female subject groups did not show clear recovery of a substantial majority of P items. Although P, as a factor, did not appear recognisably in the male student sample, this was interpreted as being due either to the low subject: variable ratio and/or to the low subject number (N=171) and its resultant lack of definition of initial P item variance. The P factor appeared most strongly as a second order in the total Gallup, total student, and male Gallup sample.     

Hierarchical structure of the Eysenck Personality Inventory in a large population sample: Goldberg’s trait-tier mapping procedure

The structure of the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) is poorly understood, and applications have mostly been confined to the broad Neuroticism, Extraversion and Lie scales. Using a hierarchical factoring procedure, we mapped the sequential differentiation of EPI scales from broad, molar factors to more specific, molecular factors, in a UK population sample of over 6500 persons. Replicable facets at the lowest tier of Neuroticism included oversensitivity, mood lability, nervous tension and rumination. The lowest order set of replicable Extraversion facets consisted of social dynamism, sociotropy, haste, jocularity, communalism and impulsivity. The Lie scale consisted of an interpersonal virtue and a behavioral diligence facet. Users of the EPI may be well served in some circumstances by considering its broad Neuroticism, Extraversion and Lie scales as multifactorial, a feature that was explicitly incorporated into subsequent Eysenck inventories and is consistent with other hierarchical trait structures.     

A psychometric investigation of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire.

The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire was administered to 139 females and 123 males. Scale statistics were obtained and hierachial factor analyses were performed. The P scale was found to have low internal consistency reliabilities and to covary with the L scale in the female subsample. Factor analyses showed recovery of E scale items in a secondary factor, Social Extraversion, without an impulsivity primary factor. No P and N dimensions recovered; rather components of each scale interrelated in two meaningful dimensions at the tertiary level.     

The factor structure of the Eysenck Personality Profiler in Russia

One hundred and seventy seven males and 399 females completed a translated short version of the Eysenck Personality Profiler (EPP-S). Two hundred and ninety four Ss also completed the EPQ. By means of item analysis, further shortening of the EPP was achieved, while retaining adequate psychometric characteristics and convergent validity with EPQ scales. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirmed the Eysenck hierarchical model of personality with three basic dimensions and showed stability of the EPP factor structure across genders and sub-samples of different origin. However, CFA showed that only E and P were independent, while N was correlated with E and P.