This book is a uniquely integrative introduction to adult personality assessment that will engage graduate and undergraduate students.

Using T.S. Kuhn's model of scientific revolutions as a framework, this book presents five major theories of personality: psychoanalysis, behaviourism, psychometric traits, social learning theory, and cognitive developmentalism. Each theory provides unique access to a different facet of the person: the dynamic unconscious, behaviour and its control, traits, social behaviour and cognition, and character development.

This book is an update of Paradigms of Personality Assessment by Jerry Wiggins (2003, Guilford), a landmark volume in the personality assessment literature. The first half of Wiggins (2003) described five major paradigms: psychodynamic (as exemplified by the Rorschach and TAT), narrative (interview data), interpersonal (circumplex instruments), multivariate (five-factor instruments), and empirical (MMPI). In the second half of the book, expert representatives of each paradigm interpreted test data from the same patient, Madeline. In this follow-up, personality experts describe innovations in each of the major paradigms articulated by Wiggins since the time of his book, including the advancement of therapeutic assessment, validation of the Rorschach Performance Assessment System, development of a multimethod battery for integrated interpersonal assessment, publication of the Restructured Form of the MMPI-2, and integration of multivariate Five-Factor Model instruments with personality disorder diagnosis. These innovations are highlighted in a reassessment of Madeline 17 years later. This book, which provides a rich demonstration of trans-paradigmatic multimethod assessment by leading scholars in the personality assessment field in the context of one of the most interesting and thorough case studies in the history of clinical assessment, will be a useful resource for students, researchers, and practicing clinicians.

The DSM-5 Alternative Model for Personality Disorders reviews and advances this innovative and increasingly popular scheme for diagnosing and evaluating personality disorders. The authors identify the multiple clinical, theoretical, and research paradigms that co-exist in the Alternative Model for Personality Disorders (AMPD) and show how the model can aid the practicing mental health professional in evaluating and treating patients as well as its importance in stimulating research and theoretical understanding of this domain. This work explores and summarizes methods of personality assessment and psychiatric evaluation, research findings, and clinical applications of the AMPD, highlighting its usefulness to clinical teaching and supervision, forensic application, and current research. It is a go-to reference for experienced professionals and researchers, those who wish to learn this new diagnostic system, and for clinicians in training.

In this groundbreaking handbook, more than 60 internationally respected authorities explore the interface between intelligence and personality by bringing together a wide range of potential integrative links drawn from theory, research, measurements, and applications.

Personality and Roles: Sources of Regularities in Social Behavior For behavioral scientists, whether they identify primarily with the science of psychology or with that of sociology, there may be no challenge greater than that of discovering regularities and consistencies in social behavior. After all, it is such regularities and consistencies that lend predictability to the behavior of individuals in social contexts-in particular, to those events that constitute dyadic interactions and group processes. In the search for behavioral consistencies, two theoretical constructs have emerged as guiding principles: personality and roles. The theoretical construct of personality seeks to understand regularities and consistencies in social behavior in terms of relatively stable traits, enduring dispositions, and other propensities (for example, needs, motives, and attitudes) that are thought to reside within individuals. Because it focuses primarily on the features of individuals, the construct of personality is fundamentally psychological in nature. By contrast, the theoretical construct of roles seeks to understand regularities and consistencies in social behavior in terms of the directive influence of coherent sets of rules and prescriptions that are provided by the interpersonal, occupational, and societal categories of which individuals are continuing members. Because it focuses primarily on features of social structures, the construct of roles is fundamentally sociological in nature.

This text presents a contemporary approach to personality psychology by integrating current methods, theoretical paradigms, and empirical findings in a manner that is both accessible and relevant to undergraduate-level students. Throughout the text, the focus is upon normal personality functioning and how personality research relates to everyday lives.