ABSTRACT

The assessment of individual differences in personality and psychopa­ thology has a long and noble history. Psychological testing putatively has its roots in Ancient China (Dubois, 1970; Jackson & Paunonen, 1980; Wiggins, 1973). However, the modem practice of psychometrics and psychological testing is often traced to the anthropometric laboratory of Sir Francis Galton in the 1880s, which emphasized the careful measure­ ment of numerous physical and behavioral characteristics (Holden, in press). Perhaps the first published paper-and-pencil measure designed to assess psychopathology was the symptom list of Heymans and Wiersma (1906). Subsequently, published inventories emerged where items were scored on scales, beginning with Woodworth's (1917) Personal Data Sheet. The following 23 years then saw the development of numerous psycho­ logical tests that assessed various domains of individual differences (Goldberg, 1971). Then, in 1940, Hathaway and McKinley published the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). The MMPI rapidly gained ascendence over other psychological tests. In fact, the MMPI (or its descendant, the MMPI-2) has been the predominantly used structured test of adult personality or psychopathology (Piotrowski & Keller, 1984, 1989; Piotrowski & Lubin, 1990) for most of the last 60 years.