• Defining & Measuring

Psychological Attributes
• Major types of tests

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Psychological attributes &
decisions
Ways of classifying the the psychological
testing.
Is the attribute relatively stable or fluid?
 Adult intelligence is stable
 Attitudes and moods are fluid

 Stable attributes are most likely to be relevant for

making long-term decisions about individuals (e.g.,

college admissions).

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Psychological attributes &
decisions
3 domains that are most relevant to
decision making.
Ability
Interest
Personality

They all represent stable attributes.

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Intelligence-General Mental
Ability
 What is intelligence?
 (+) correlated with any other measure that involves
cognitive ability.
 Difficult to arrive at a widely acceptable definition of

intelligence.
 First, intelligence is a construct.

 What an intelligent person does.

 APA definition: the ability to derive information, learn

from experience, adapt to the environment, understand,
and correctly utilize thought and reason
 Second, intelligence can’t be defined in terms of one type of

behavior.
 Last, intelligence should be related to success in a variety of

cognitively demanding task.

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Intelligence-General Mental
Ability
Some theories were developed to identify the
different types of mental abilities.

Two-factor theory introduced by Spearman.

 Scores on any two cognitively demanding tasks
show a (+) correlation.
 A good measure of general intelligence will

successfully predict all cognitive performance.

 Spearman introduced the general intellectual factor,

g. A test with a high g loading predict a wide range
of ‘intelligent’ behaviors.
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Two-factor theory
 While a good intelligence test is expected to be highly g
loaded, each test has also its own S (specific factor).

 Each test measured some specific factor (S) which was

unique to each test. And this is, on the other hand,
independent of individual’s general intelligence.

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Two-factor theory
 Intelligence can be viewed in terms of one general
underlying factor (g) and a large number of specific
factors (S1, S2, …, Sn).
 Intelligence can be viewed in terms of g (general mental
ability) and S (specific factors)

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Thurstone and group factors
 There are group factors (high correlation within each group
tests), but not identical to, general intelligence factors.
 Seven group factors (1938):
 Verbal comprehension (e.g., vocabulary, reading

comprehension, verbal analogies tests)

 Word fluency

 Number

 Space

 Associative memory

 Perceptual speed

 Reasoning

 So, not a single general factor (g), 7 different group

factors. These are also called primary mental abilities.

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Thurstone and group factors
 Group factors

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Fluid and Crystallized
Intelligence
 introduced by Cattell (1963).
 Fluid: ability to see relationships, as in letter and number
series and analogies. Reasoning ability.
 Crystallized: refers to one’s acquired skills and
knowledge (store of factual knowledge).
 They show different developmental trends.

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Hierarchical Models of
Intelligence
introduced by Carroll (1993)
Both a general intelligence factor as well as
some major group factors exist.

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Hierarchical Models of
Intelligence
Tests that measure both g and specific aspects
of intelligence are acceptable.

One can choose to use a test which measures

g, other can use a test which measures
mechanical abilities. It depends on the thing
that you are interested in and on the purpose of
testing.

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Guilford’s
structure of
intellect model
Guilford did not accept
the g factor.
Intelligence is classified in 3 dimensions:
 Operations
 What an individual does.

 Contents

 The material on which operations are performed.

 Products

 The form in which information is stored and processed.

This model has some problems in terms of both

theoretically and practically (180 types of intelligence).
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Guilford’s
structure of
intellect model

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The first scale on intelligence
The first scale to provide a practical and
reasonably valid measure of intelligence was
developed by Binet and Simon (1905).
This scale contained 30 items for the use of
language, reasoning and comprehension,
arranged in order of difficulty (advantage of the
scale).
The disadvantage is the lack of scoring the test
and interpreting the scores.
 Was a score of 22/30 good? bad?

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The first scale on intelligence

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 Binet’s tests were developed to be used with
children.
Wechsler developed one to be used with adults.
 The popular one:Wechsler adult intelligence scale
 Developed another for assessing children’s

intelligence.

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Interest
What is interest?
 A response of liking to an object or activity (Strong,
1943).
 Interest are different from abilities.

Interest can be used to predict choices.

 A person who loves to work with figures is more
likey to choose a career in accounting.

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Interest
Expressed vs. inventoried interest?
 People might be unaware of their interests or could
not verbalize them.
 The development of complex, indirect methods of

interest measurement.
 Interest inventories could help to clarify interests so

they serve a useful purpose.

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Strong’s Interest Inventory

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Personality
What is personality?
 Peoples are unique.
 Peoples do not behave similarly in all situations.

 On the other hand, there are commonalities in

behavior.
It is believed that behavior should be
considered as stable to allow measurement.

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Personality
2 principles in evaluating a personality
inventory
 Interpretability
 Results must convey information about a person that

can be interpreted reliably by various users.

 Stability
 Reliable relationship between the behavior and the

score.
 Bahavior must show some consistency over a

specific situations.

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Personality
‘Big five’ refers to
 five personality factors found in most personality
inventories.

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