Contents
The paper presents the author’s version of the Cattell test. It is shown that the new representation allows to obtain a clear psychological profile of a person’s personality and assess the level of development of his emotional, volitional, communicative and intellectual qualities.
1. Statement of the question
In psychotherapeutic practice, it is an axiom that when a person seeks professional help, he addresses with an “imaginary” problem; the very fact of conversion suggests that the person does not know his real difficulties [1]. Therefore, conducting a full diagnosis is extremely important in order to find the real causes of the problem and develop joint solutions.
In psychotherapy for the differential diagnosis of personality, it is usually recommended to use a survey, observation and tests. However, if we analyze the numerous literature on psychotherapeutic counseling, we can see that diagnostics here, as a rule, is limited to acquaintance with the client’s request, his questioning, observation, but without the use of tests that have a higher objectivity than questioning and observation.
This situation, in my opinion, is due to the complexity of interpretation and the lack of clarity in the presentation of test materials. Here, first of all, we are talking about the widespread Cattell test, or rather its graphic representation. I will illustrate the above with the following example.
2. On some errors in the interpretation of the standard Cattell test
The request was made by a young, interesting woman with a higher education, Natalya N., who wants to have children (she is already 31 years old), but is experiencing difficulties in creating a family. She is socially successful, financially and housingly secure, but men do not stay around her for a long time. Personally, the reasons for their behavior were not clear to her, and she came to the conclusion that the time of fruitless waiting was over and she needed to seek professional help.
I always precede my counseling work by receiving a completed Cattell 16 PF-A questionnaire (187 questions for adults). Among the many personality tests based on questionnaires, it is the Cattell test, in comparison with others, that deservedly turns out to be preferable, as it gives a multifaceted detailed personality profile of 16 factors.
Answers to all questions do not require much time: 20-25 minutes. To process the results, a certified computer program developed by the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (subdivision «Cogito-Center») [2] was used. The result obtained by this program in graphical form is shown in Fig.1.
Factors from 4 to 7 are considered mild.
The numerical values of psychological factors in the walls obtained in the program are listed in column F of the table. For ease of reading the designation of the content of factors, the graph is rotated by 90 degrees.
At the same time, the program provides text support for each factor.
It should be said that we obtain a graph similar in form with the help of similar programs of other development firms — Amalthea, Zerkalo, Imaton. Exactly the same picture is obtained with the help of manual processing of questionnaires presented in reference books on practical diagnostics [3,4] and textbooks [5]. That is, it is a generally accepted standardized representation.
What can you draw the attention of the client in this chart? What general conclusions and recommendations can be drawn from it? In my opinion, almost none.
First of all. It is not clear what the need for such a graphical representation is — a connection into a continuous broken line consistently connecting factors that are far from each other in meaning (alienation A — high intelligence B — emotional instability C — authoritativeness E — etc.).
What is a representation that graphically demonstrates? Or is it done arbitrarily? If so, then it confuses the understanding of the graph here. In any case, you should justify and explain the type of graph or change the presentation of the results.
Secondly. Some clearly negative psychological qualities, such as «Anxiety + O», «Suspiciousness + L» and «Tension + Q4» are for some reason listed in a positive pole. And their positive antipodes «Calm-O»,
«Credulity-L», «Relaxation-Q4» into negative qualities. This is a clear mistake. In accordance with the logic of common sense, they must be reversed. It is incredible that so far no one has paid attention to this discrepancy. All the other 13 factors, in my opinion, correspond to their place.
And thirdly. At the beginning of the graph in Fig.1. the bipolarity of factors is declared in the form of a positive and negative pole (for example, emotional instability — emotional stability). However, in the future, for some reason, the interpretation is given in a unipolar form from 0 to 10. This can be seen from the expression under the diagram: «Factors from 4 to 7 are considered weakly expressed.» If we dwell on the bipolar representation of factors, then it is necessary to choose the reference axis, relative to which the factors are considered either positive or negative. In this program, this is not done, although other authors have such an axis of reference.
It should be emphasized that all these shortcomings make the chart not visual and uninformative, moreover, meaningless. And the discussion in this case is limited to printing out the textual accompaniment of individual 16 factors. As a result, after getting acquainted with their multitude, the client is completely confused.
3. Suggestions for modifying the results of the Keettell test
In this paper, an attempt is made to overcome these shortcomings and present the test results in a more visual and understandable form. On fig. 2 presents the results of this work. What was done?
Firstly, it is proposed to abandon the broken graph and present the Cattell test in the form of a diagram consisting of 4 groups of factors that are similar in meaning:
1st group. Emotional qualities — (C, L, O, Q4)
2nd group. Volitional qualities — (E, H, G, Q3)
3rd group. Communication skills — (A, F, I, Q2)
4th group. Intellectual qualities — (B, M, N, Q1)
You can find works where this recommendation is given and where the choice of individual groups coincides with those proposed. But nowhere was this recommendation brought to a visual presentation.
Secondly, it is proposed to place factors that are negative in meaning (suspiciousness L, anxiety O, tension Q4) in the negative pole, and their positive antipodes (gullibility, calmness and relaxation) in the positive to their logical place, i.e. swap.
When these three factors are interchanged, the numerical values of their walls become different — being maximum, they become minimum and vice versa.
For such an adjustment, without changing the computer program, we subtract its actual value (for example, L) from the maximum value of this factor equal to 10 and obtain its corrected value L * = 10 — 9 = 1, which is distinguished by an asterisk. Similarly, for O* = 10 — O = 10 -10 = 0, Q4* = 10 — Q4 = 10 -10 = 0. We enter these corrected data in the table in Fig. 2 in the F* column.
Thirdly, in order to visualize the bipolarity of the factors, it is proposed to place the coordinate axis symmetrically in the middle of the scale (=5). Then it becomes possible to introduce the concept of factors Ф^ «reduced» to this axis. In this case, their numerical values will be Ф^ = Ф — 5.
All these values of the «reduced» factors are entered in a new column Ф^ and placed on the graph in Fig. 2 in the form of visual black and white stripes, depending on their sign. BLACK are negative «reduced» factors, WHITE are positive.
Thus, all 16 psychological qualities presented in the above form now have both a sign (+, -) and intensity (from 0 to 5), which corresponds to scientific measurements.
4. Discussion of the modified interpretation of the Cattell test
On fig. 2, it immediately catches the eye that the entire group of emotional qualities in the client turned out to be negative (black) with high negative values: emotional instability C^ = -3, suspicion L^ = -4, and anxiety O^ and internal tension Q4 took the limiting negative value equal to -5.
Such a powerful negative emotional core and low self-control (Q3^ = -4) clearly characterize the client as a psychologically immature person. And the high values of E^ = +5 from the strong-willed group indicate its perseverance, dominance, independence and active position in protecting its emotional manifestations.
What kind of man would be able to stay in such an atmosphere for a long time?
On the other hand, her strong intellectual qualities (all “reduced” intellectual factors are positive, in Fig. 2 they are all white) combined with courage, confidence (H^ = +3), responsibility (G^ = +1) and again authority (E^ = +5) allow her to be successful in the business environment.
Upon acquaintance with Fig. 2 client said that for the first time she «saw» who she really was and she answered her own inquiry about failures in her personal life. She had only one question: «What to do?». The recommendations that were given to her had a positive effect over time, but they are beyond the scope of this article and we omit them.
5. findings
Cattell’s psychodiagnostic method in its standard interpretation has errors that should be eliminated.
The interpretation of the Cattell test in the proposed modified form gives the psychotherapist a tool that can find and visually present to the client his psychological portrait.
My experience in counseling clients with psychosomatic and psychiatric disorders (e.g. MDS, parents of children with deviant behavior or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), employees who cannot stay in one place for a long time, communication workers with “burnout syndrome” and many others often gives results similar in appearance to Fig. 2, which indicates the imperfection of these people in the personal emotional sphere.Based on this figure, they could not disagree with this and began to be interested in methods of self-improvement.
In addition, this method can be a good help for any specialist as a self-diagnosis.
On fig. 3 shows as an example the psychological profile of a person using various psychotechniques for personal growth. From this figure, the results of this inner work are clearly visible — almost all the «reduced» psychological factors are located in the positive sector, which demonstrates his optimal professional personal qualities.
The possibilities of the method include its use as an objectification of the effectiveness of work with a client before and after therapy, as was done in [6].
The development of this modification was due to the need to establish a correlation between the results of the instrumental psychodiagnostic method [7] with the data of test psychological diagnostics.
Literature
1. Handbook of psychotherapy / A.K.Vasiliev, T.A.Kitsyna, M.V.Ovsyannikov; under total ed. Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor Makarov.-M.: Astrel, 2009, p. 122
2. “Psyprofile. Professional psychological tests. PsiProfile version 4.01 dated 14/03.2011/XNUMX for local PCs. «Cogito-Center», Institute of Psychology RAS.
3. Practical psychodiagnostics. Methodology and tests. Tutorial. Editor — compiler D.Ya. Raygorodsky. — Samara: Publishing house «Bahrakh-m», 2005, -672 p.
4. Psychodiagnostics. Reference book of practical psychologist. Under total ed. S.T. Possokhova. — M.,: AST; St. Petersburg: Owl, 2005.-671 p.
5. Batarshev L.A. Diagnosis of personality traits and accentuations: A practical guide. — M., Psychotherapy, 2006. — 288 p.
6. Kozlov N.I., Lebedev A.N. Experience in using the Cattell questionnaire for an objective assessment of the effectiveness of psychological training.
7. Tabidze A.A. On the possibilities of instrumental psychodiagnostics. — Journal «Psychotherapy», 2010, No. 4 (88), pp. 29-34.