Psychological testing and assessment (9th edition)Cohen & Swerdlik (2018)Chapter 11Personality assessment: An overviewFor laypeople: personality refers to components of an individual’s makeup that can elicit positive or negative reactions from others. Personality Dozens of different definitions of personality exist in the psychology literature.Personality: an individual’s unique constellation of psychological traits that is relatively stable over time.Personality assessment Personality assessment: the measurement and evaluation of psychological traits, values, interests, attitudes, worldview, acculturation, sense of humour, cognitive and behavioural styles, and/or related individual characteristics.Traits, types and states Personality traitsThere is no consensus regarding the definition of trait.This book views psychological traits as attributions made in an effort to identify threads of consistency in behavioural patterns.Personality trait: any distinguishable, relatively enduring way in which one individual varies from another.The context is important in applying trait terms to behaviour.A behaviour present in one context may be labelled with one trait term, but the same behaviour exhibited in another context with another trait term.A measure of behaviour in a particular context may be obtained using varied tools of psychological assessment.Exactly how a particular trait manifests itself is, at least to some extent, dependent on the situation.Personality types Personality type: a constellation of...