Validity Rates of the Personality Assessment Inventory and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory–2 in a VA Medical Center Setting

This paper presents some notions regarding the all important question of projective stimulus ambiguity. It is suggested that in spite of the observation that TAT stimulus ambiguity has been the most studied, the problem of stimulus ambiguity must be considered a vital problem in relation to projective tests as a whole. Findings specific to an extended DAP (involving the inclusion of a self-portrait) are reported and the relevance of these findings to the problem of stimulus ambiguity is discussed.     

Building a Bridge of Trust: Collaborative Assessment With a Person With Serious Mental Illness

Collaborative assessment utilizes psychological testing to help people make positive changes in their lives. Limited research has evaluated the utility of collaborative assessment for persons with serious mental illness. This case example uses the Personality Assessment Inventory to illustrate the usefulness of collaborative assessment with a person with serious mental illness. This approach informed not only diagnostic considerations but also revealed the client's current level of distress, contributed to enhanced therapeutic alliance, and directly pointed to psychiatric rehabilitation strategies.     

Is there a Preferred Performance Rating Format? A Non-psychometric Perspective

Les échelles d'appréciation constituent une forme d'évaluation des performances qui a rencontré un grand succès ces dernières décennies. En particulier, de gros efforts ont été consacrés au développement d'échelles relativement insensibles aux erreurs et biais cognitifs. Mais on s'est beaucoup moins intéressé au fait de savoir si et comment le type d'évaluation affecte les attitudes professionnelles et les réactions des personnes évaluées. Des données en provenance de quatre études différentes avec des échantillons tirés dans deux pays (lsraël et le Canada) apportent des éléments en faveur de l'idée selon laquelle une évaluation de la performance basée sur le BOS peut être supérieure aux autres méthodes en ce sens qu'elle entraîne des conséquences plus positives au niveau des attitudes.
One aspect of performance appraisal that has received considerable attention over past decades is the rating format. In particular, much effort has been devoted to developing rating scales that are relatively impervious to cognitive rating errors and biases. However, much less attention has been accorded the issues of whether and how an appraisal's format affects work attitudes and reactions of ratees. Data collected in four separate studies and with samples in two nations (Israel, Canada) lend credence to the proposition that a BOS-based performance appraisal and review may be superior to other appraisal methods in terms of yielding more favorable attitudinal effects.     

Teachers' Pets and Why They Have Them: An Investigation of the Human Animal Bond1

The present study queried a random, university faculty sample as to their reasons for owning pets. Mere pet ownership was not correlated with self‐reported health, happiness, or quality of work life in this sample. Five dominant reasons were given for pet ownership. Women were more likely than men to self‐report reasons related to social support for pet ownership, including that a pet helped them get through hard times and that they would be lonely without a pet. Men were more likely to report pragmatic reasons, such as the pet facilitating exercise or serving a useful function. Beliefs in the positive effects of pets on health were typical. Those beliefs in the health promoting aspects of pets are suggested as a link to human health and a promising area for future research.     

Validity of the Personality Assessment Inventory Aggression scales and Violence Potential index in veterans with PTSD

In this study, we examined the validity of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 1991) Aggression (AGG) scales and Violence Potential index (VPI) in 399 male combat veterans presenting for formal evaluation of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The AGG scales exhibited convergence with other measures of hostility and violence and demonstrated discriminant validity with alternative constructs. When we examined reports of interpersonal violence in the past year, the AGG composite scale displayed substantial incremental validity over the effects of PTSD severity, demographics, a simple dichotomous question regarding violence in the past 30 days, and MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) scales measuring aggression. The VPI, however, added no unique explanatory power over the AGG composite scale.     

Correlates of Functional Impairment in Treatment-Seeking Survivors of Mass Terrorism

This study sought to identify variables associated with functional impairment in persons exposed to terrorism. A sample of adults who sought treatment for psychological distress related to the 2001 World Trade Center attack completed standardized self-report measures of PTSD symptoms, expectancies of ability to regulate negative moods, interpersonal problems, and social-occupational impairment. A multiple regression analysis found that PTSD numbing symptoms, beliefs about the ability to regulate negative moods, feelings of social discomfort and expectations of being disliked, income level, and relationship status significantly predicted 58% of the variance in social-occupational impairment. The results suggest that treatments targeting PTSD numbing symptoms as well as maladaptive expectations about social interactions and one’s ability to manage negative affect may have utility for persons adversely affected by mass violence.     

Recall of anomalous sentences in dementia and amnesia

Alzheimer-type dementing patients were compared with amnesic (Korsakoff) patients, depressed patients, and healthy controls in the immediate recall of semantically anomalous sentences. It was found that the dementing (Alzheimer) patients were severely impaired in their recall of these sentences, but that the amnesic (Korsakoff) patients were not. Alzheimer patients have a severe impairment of short-term memory, and it is argued that this deficit may make Alzheimer patients especially dependent upon the presence of semantic cues in immediate verbal recall--hence, the removal or reversibility of these cues results in a collapse of their performance. Other research has indicated that Alzheimer patients also show impaired semantic processing, and the possible interaction of their short-term memory and semantic processing deficits is briefly discussed.     

The memory deficits in alzheimer-type dementia: A review

This review is an account of recent experimental studies of memory deficits at the early stages of Alzheimer-type dementia, evaluating these studies in relation to current theories of memory functioning in humans. Whilst memory deficits are found to be widespread, some aspects are more resilient to impairment than others. For example, the processes associated with articulatory rehearsal in working memory are unimpaired despite a reduction in performance on most tests of primary memory. The “implicit” aspects of secondary memory appear to remain unimpaired, in contrast to a marked decline in “explicit” or “episodic” memory. In addition, there is evidence that the rate of forgetting from secondary memory is normal. Some aspects of episodic and semantic memory are found to be impaired as a consequence of a decline in the efficient organisation and processing of verbal material at encoding or retrieval. It is concluded that the deficits share particular features found in organic amnesia, but with additional deficits which relate to impairments in other domains of functioning.