The prototype concept in personality assessment.

Abstract

The concept of prototype (clear category member) and the fuzzy-set form of cognitive categorization that it entails (Rosch, 1973) has been shown to be useful as an organizational principle for guiding research and assessment in personality psychology. With the aid of a prototype framework for conducting research, personality assessment instruments have been refined (Broughton, 1984), predictable behavioural acts have been brought into focus (Buss & Craik, 1981), abnormal diagnosis has improved (Horowitz, French, Lapid, & Weckler, 1982; Wiggins 1980), and person perception studied (Cantor & Mischel, 1979). These (and other) authors argue that prototypes "work" to the extent they bring us closer to the way in which people actually think about person variables and behaviour. In this article some of the past payoffs of a prototype approach in the field of personality psychology are reviewed, and a multidimensional scaling model of personality assessment, involving a similarity-to-the-prototype rating task, is introduced and its merits discussed.

A Prototypicality Validation of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality Model (CAPP)

“…The logic underpinning the prototypicality approach is that prototype analyses will identify not only core features, but also unrelated or weak features that should be considered removed from the delineating features of the construct (Broughton, 1990). According to our exploratory but also stringent prototypicality evaluation, seven symptoms appeared systematically weak.…”

“…It evaluates the degree of similarity between a characteristic and a conceptual representation (i.e., construct). Thus, in relation to the construct of psychopathy, this approach can help explicate which characteristics or symptoms are salient or essential to the construct and which characteristics and symptoms should be viewed as at the boundary, or indeed, outside the boundary of the construct (Broughton, 1990). Prototypical analysis has a long pedigree; it has been found to be useful in the validation of lexical models of normal personality (Mollaret, 2009) and diagnostic criteria for various mental disorders (Blashfield & Livesley, 1991;Horowitz, Post, French, Wallis, & Siegelman, 1981;Livesley, Reiffer, Sheldon, & West, 1987;Samuel & Widiger, 2004), including personality disorder and psychopathy (Cruise, Colwell, Lyons, & Baker, 2003;Evans, Herbert, Nelson-Gray, & Gaudiano, 2002;Rogers, Duncan, Lynett, & Sewell, 1994).…”

Diagnostic validity of antisocial personality disorder: A prototypical analysis.

“…The prototype approach offers a number of insights for mental disorders (Broughton, 1990;Cantor, Smith, French, & Mezzich, 1980) including the fuzziness of certain diagnoses. Use of prototypic features may clarify a particular diagnosis through the enumeration of core characteristics.…”

Continuity of the prototypes of social competence and shyness over the life span and across life transitions

“…" We accordingly assumed that the continuity of a construct is reflected in the temporal stability of the pattern of saliency scores for the prototype of that construct. To study the continuity of a construct, we relied on prototypes (see, e.g., Broughton, 1990) of the constructs in various stages of life, provided by teachers. The use of informant ratings by peers, parents, teachers, or other observers is still fairly common in research on personality development, although various researchers have stressed the need for gathering data from multiple sources using multiple methods.…”