Use of the latency principle in personality assessment.

Abstract

Projective tests are considered by many students of personality as of questionable validiry because of their great reliance on subjective judgment and the skill of interpretation acquired through long training. It seemed desirable to devise a technique, other than projective, which is objective to sensitive blocks underlying S's verbal responses to paper-and-pencil items. The solution was to measure automatically the latencies of S's verbal responses to personality items. This procedure, called latency-weighted personality testing, is based on the experimental finding that yes responses to paper-andpencil items are given more rapidly than their reversals are rejected (Gilbert, 1961, 1963, 1965, 1967). Latencies are differentially related to verbal responses. Thus, long latencies of verbal responses to personality items indicate blocks underlying these responses; e.g., Gilbert and Cable (1966) show that threatening stimulus items were associated with longer durations of button depression than pleasing items. Two measures of latency can be obtained: (1) reaction-time from the last word of a personality item read to S to S's moving a response lever to the agree or disagree position and (2) duration of depression of a button which is the time from S's depressing ro releasing a button immediately after hearing a personality item. The reacdon-times or durations of depression of button are automatically recorded by reaction-time clocks, accurate to 0.01 sec. Cutting off the latency scores within the upper quartile of the score distribution provides indicators of affective-cognitive complexes underlying the verbal responses to the respective personalicy items. Latenq-weighted personality testing can be applied as a liedetector adjuncr (1960) to any existing or especially prepared direct paper-and-pencil personality test, for clinical diagnosis of specific anxieties (1966) and for personnel selection.