Critical thinking is widely considered an important skill for psychology majors. However, few measures exist of the types of critical thinking that are specific to psychology majors. Lawson (1999) designed the Psychological Critical Thinking Exam (PCTE) to measure students' ability to "think critically, or evaluate claims, in a way that…

Test-retest studies for assessing stability and change are widely used in different domains and allow improved or additional individual estimates of interest to be obtained. However, if these estimates are to be validly interpreted the responses given at Time-2 must be free of retest effects, and the fulfilment of this assumption must be…

Research on feigned mental disorders indicates that severe psychopathology coupled with significant trauma histories often complicate feigning determinations, resulting in inaccuracies on otherwise effective measures. As part of malingering assessments, the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) is often used because of its excellent validation…

Although not originally designed for implementation in correctional settings, researchers and clinicians have begun to use the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) to assess offenders. A relatively small number of studies have made attempts to validate the alcohol and drug abuse scales of the PAI, and only a very few studies have validated those…

After 100 years of discussion, response bias remains a controversial topic in psychological measurement. The use of bias indicators in applied assessment is predicated on the assumptions that (a) response bias suppresses or moderates the criterion-related validity of substantive psychological indicators and (b) bias indicators are capable of…

The NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992b) is an assessment of normal personality composition that is used in clinical counseling contexts as well as for personnel selection. There has been some debate regarding the necessity and usefulness of validity scales to detect response distortion on this instrument. Because the authors of the instrument,…

Scott O. Lilienfeld is a professor of psychology at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Lilienfeld is founder and editor of the journal, "Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice," and is past president of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology. He has been a member of 11 journal editorial boards, including the…

This study is the first to demonstrate that features of psychopathy can be reliably and validly detected by lay raters from "thin slices" (i.e., small samples) of behavior. Brief excerpts (5 s, 10 s, and 20 s) from interviews with 96 maximum-security inmates were presented in video or audio form or in both modalities combined. Forty raters used…

Research to date has revealed divergent relations across factors of psychopathy measures with criteria of "internalizing" (INT; anxiety, depression) and "externalizing" (EXT; antisocial behavior, substance use). However, failure to account for method variance and suppressor effects has obscured the consistency of these findings…

Existing research on the Spanish-language translation of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; L. C. Morey, 1991) suggests that the validity scales from the English- and Spanish-language versions may not be equivalent measures. In the current study, 72 bilingual participants completed both the English- and Spanish-language versions of the PAI…

The Personality Assessment Inventory's (PAI's) ability to predict psychopathic personality features, as assessed by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), was examined. To investigate whether the PAI Antisocial Features (ANT) Scale and subscales possessed incremental validity beyond other theoretically relevant PAI scales, optimized regression…

In response to discussions by W. Mischel and by D. D. McClelland, attention is invited to the desirability of explicitly identifying general circumstances under which indirect assessment is superior to direct methods for assessing the same trait. (Author)

The present studies focus on strategies for detecting back irrelevant responding (BIR) on the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; L. C. Morey, 1991). Moderate BIR levels can greatly affect the clinical scales of the PAI. Further, the PAI's Inconsistency and Infrequency validity scales are less than optimal for detecting BIR. L. C. Morey and C.…

This article describes a 2-session laboratory project in which students develop, conduct, and attempt to validate an interview-based personality assessment. In Session 1, students learn about effective interview procedures and then design and pilot-test an interview to assess 4 personality traits (emotionality, activity level, sociability, and…

The main aim of this article is to explicate why a transition to ideal point methods of scale construction is needed to advance the field of personality assessment. The study empirically demonstrated the substantive benefits of ideal point methodology as compared with the dominance framework underlying traditional methods of scale construction.…