Nonverbal Assessment of Personality and Psychopathology

Abstract

In this chapter, the author describes nonverbal test methodologies for the assessment of personality and psychopathology, some of which date back to the beginning of personality assessment in psychology. Methods include drawing techniques, object placement and play techniques, and self-rating and self-report techniques. While adding a potentially valuable set of tools to assessment, these methods have some substantial strengths and weaknesses. For example, the Nonverbal Personality Questionnaire (Paunonen and Jackson 1998) offers the strength of fully adequate psychometric properties while demonstrating good cross-cultural transferability, without the need for item translations. In contrast, no current system of scoring and interpreting human figure drawings appears to have adequate reliability and validity for personality assessment, and it appears difficult to justify continued use of projective drawing measures for any clinical or educational decision-making purposes. Research on nonverbal methods demonstrates that nonverbal techniques can be constructed to tap conventional constructs, like big five personality traits, and constructs that are not easily accessible with traditional verbal methodologies, like family relations, cohesiveness, and hierarchy. While the last two decades have seen a pronounced swing toward direct, face-valid, objective, and explicit assessment methods, nonverbal methods offer alternative methods that are less direct and more implicit. Moreover, nonverbal assessment methodologies are somewhat less obvious in their targeted constructs, thereby being less susceptible to the effects of examinee dissimulation and impression management.