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Show iC (CdDimsiramninmg Ilimiteiresit Personality test can reveal mental state by CRAIG V. NELSON Office of Public Relations Weber State College A Weber State College professor has developed a new approach to personality tests that will make it easier for psychologists to decide who is crazy and who is not. The test, developed by Dr. Joseph J. Horvat, associate professor in the WSC psychology department, is an adaptation of a personality assessment assess-ment exercise created by George Kelly in the '50s. It is designed to give court psychologists, among others, an extra tool in determining mental state. Horvat, who served as a court expert ex-pert in determining if people were competent to stand trial, said, "If I think you're crazy, I'll want to use as many tests as possible, because the more tests I give, the more accurate I'm going to be in that assessment." The test resembles ink blots in that it taps the unconscious, said Horvat. But instead of using vague ink images, it uses photographic slides of ordinary things. During the test, the subject sees two slides an old schoolhouse and a sunset, for example and then comes up with a word or emotion that describes both. The subject then associates that word and its opposite meaning with an associate father, mother, boss, and so on. Horvat said, from the test, psychologists can detect the subject's sub-ject's abnormalities, psychosis and neurosis. He said the approach is surprisingly effective, so much so that his paper on the subject was accepted ac-cepted for presentation by the Sixth International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology held earlier this year at the University of Cambridge, Cam-bridge, England. The conference usually rejects 80 percent of the papers submitted. "In a trial, I have to say what the state of mind of the person was at the time of the crime," said Horvat. "To determine the state of mind of someone right now is tough, but to find out what it was months or years ago is very hard, and the more evidence I have in the form of personality per-sonality tests, the better off I am in making judgments. "We can still be fooled, but the more we find out, the less mistakes we make." Construct psychology, he said, is the study of how people perceive the world. "We all basically act as scientists. We try to make predictions predic-tions about others and about ourselves based on past events. "Where we run into problems is when those predictions don't hold true." A man who expected to be married for life, for example, would have a failed prediction if his wife asked for a divorce. An understanding of the man's set of predictions what psychologists call the personal constructmakes con-structmakes it possible for a psychologist to better understand and predict behavior, he said. The test takes 30 to 35 minutes for the subject to complete and about two hours for the psychologist to score. It adapts Kelly's original approach ap-proach by using objects instead of a question- and-answer session to discover a subject's personal contract. con-tract. "It was Kelly's idea that personality per-sonality development is by people, so the test ought to be strictly about people," said Horvat. "I didn't buy that. I believe that slides can be very emotional and can often reveal emotions not discovered when you deal strictly with people. "A building can be very majestic. We don't see majestic when we see people, but we may feel that a person per-son is majestic." Horvat gave the test to beginning psychology students and found the success rate in determining personality per-sonality was quite high. Since his paper on the subject was presented, similar tests by other researchers have confirmed the validity of his approach, he said. "It doesn't just measure personality. per-sonality. It goes into it a lot deeper and gives more information than we had before." Court psychologists are not the only on-ly ones who will benefit from the test, Horvat said. It will be useful to any psychologist attempting to determine the extent of mental illnesses. il-lnesses. "There's a lot of material in the unconscious and each test probes a different area," said Horvat. "The more we can test .the un-conscious.the un-conscious.the more we know about the person." |