The measurement of personality.

Abstract

Personality is apparently another example of a shrinking universe which contracts as measurement expands. As we all know, personality, in the beginning, had everything. Then it lost its intelligence, and before it could recover lost its interest and its attitudes. It still feels, aspires, and has sentiments as long as they remain unmeasurable. Once they too fall under the psychometrician's ax, personality will be extinct.But what keeps motivation, feeling, and sentiment out of the psychometrician's reach? Only one thing-the absence of an external criterion, independent of subjective, self-referred judgment. Had not Binet provided us with the external criterion of mental age, we would still be classifying people into "intelligent" and "unintelligent" the way Rorschach and his generation did. Such subjective self-referred judgments characterize all primitive measures. Height, weight, time, and warmth were evaluated subjectively long 1 These three papers, by Zubin, Anastasi, and Super, were presented on January 29. 1954, at the annual meeting of the New York State Psychological Association. Harold Seashore, the President of the Association, writes: "A perquisite of being an association president is the right to give a Presidential Address. I chose my topic: Current Theoretical and Practical Problems in Measurement, and then induced some highly competent friends to make the speech for me. Thus the President's Symposium was invented. The method is recommended to any other president who does not want to write a speech during the year he i i > busy being president!"2 The preparation of this article was facilitated by a grant from the

A Biometric Model for Psychopathology.

“…Our purpose today is to assay the specific capacities of the organism either before illness sets in, or during its early or later manifestations in order to be able to classify individuals with regard to the type of disordered functioning which results when a given mental disease strikes. Elsewhere, 19 -21 I have pointed out how the clinical tests now in use, which are primarily conceptual and heavily dependent on previous experience, fail in dealing with the classification problem.…”