Yossef Ben-Porath: You mentioned that
Starke had some concerns about
the MMPI and expressed
some disappointment and perhaps at some point,
even dismay that no efforts were made to move
beyond where he and McKinley had left off in 1943.
The first effort to update the test, of course,
comprehensive effort was
the restandardization project with
which you were involved.
How did you get involved with
the restandardization and what
was your experience with it?
Auke Tellegen: The MMPI at the time
was being managed by a PSI corporation in New York,
but very little was done to update the test.
Then Beverely Kaemmer was
authorized to take the test back.
She went to New York and essentially brought
the test back to the twin cities.
So that, some interested people here,
could bring about a restandardization.
Yossef Ben-Porath: Bev did this in behalf of
the University of Minnesota press.
Auke Tellegen: On behalf also of the author.
Was this informal committee of Starke Hathaway and Jenny
and of Paul Meehl and Grant Dahlstrom and Leona,
Norman Garmezy and they authorized her to do that.
It came back and then became the responsibility of
the University of Minnesota
press to bring about this restandardization.
I think it's important to
be clear about what standardization meant.
It meant collecting new norms,
did not necessarily mean updating the test,
but replacing norms going
back to the '40s with contemporary norms
because it was very
correctly assumed that items that were endorsed,
say, by 10% in the '40s might be endorsed by 50%.
At that time, in the '80s or vice versa.
We did need new norms.
That was the emphasis of that restandardization.
Then at some point,
Bev persuaded me to join the committee.
I was not an MMPI person very much.
I had gone on to other things,
but I was aware of the many methodological criticisms
voiced by other people of the MMPI.
When I came into the committee,
I had all ideas how we might
be able to modernize the instrument.
That didn't go over very well.
In hindsight, wisely, I think,
because even this very conservative restandardization,
when it was published,
met with a lot of objections.
One colleague called it
the new coke and compared it to the classic coke.
Maybe we still remember what happened to the new coke.
Even this very conservative restandardization,
as I said, it took quite a while for it to be received.
But I had wanted a more radical revision of the test,
but not quite at that point.
There were two changes,
though, that you and I worked on.
Yossef Ben-Porath: I'll get to those in a moment.
In fact, this is when you and I
first met was during this time period
during the restandardization.
My first recollection of
hearing you talk about the MMPI was as
a student in my first year clinical assessment class
that you co-taught with Jim Butcher,
and I remember you going through,
and this would have been 1985,
in brief, what's wrong with
the clinical scales or at least how they can be improved?
That's something that you did propose to the committee.
Auke Tellegen: That's right. I did not
too to attack the MMPI,
but Jim Butcher wanted
me to do a methodological introduction.
Then it was very hard not to talk about the MMPI itself
and hypothetically speculate on
how one might improve it [OVERLAPPING] scales.
Yossef Ben-Porath: At that point, get to
work on the scales themselves.
But I had an opportunity as a research assistant,
as a graduate student to work with you on a number of
changes that were introduced with the MPQ.
Let's talk a little bit about the consistency scales.
They're, of course, part of
the validity scale profile on the MMPI-2-RF.
They were developed for the MMPI-2 following work that
you had originally done with
the MPQ, tell me a little about those.
Auke Tellegen: The consistency scales were meant to
identify whether the test taker
was responding coherently,
whether he or she did not contradict themselves on
such a large scale that you had to
assume that they were not reading
the test carefully or that they were confused,
or maybe you skipped an item so that
all the items were lined up the wrong way.
It seemed to me a very desirable logical way
of ruling out incomprehensible tests.
Yossef Ben-Porath: Then there was also
the issue of acquiescence that you.
Auke Tellegen: The traditional way
of controlling for the tendency
of some people to say true to a lot of items,
and other people to say false.
There are naysayers and yea-sayers
and the idea was that we could
control for that by having half the items
answered key true and half the answered keyed false.
If you did too much of one,
then you did less of the other,
and you would control for acquiescence.
My feeling was that was more
important to measure acquiescence than to
control it in that way because you could still have
an acquiescent person producing
a seemingly normal protocol
who nonetheless had not paid attention to the test.
Yossef Ben-Porath: Balanced scoring
keys don't really control
for acquiescence. They can mask it.
Auke Tellegen: They mask it.
That was the accepted method.
I tried to replace the effort to control
it by using measures to measure it.
Yossef Ben-Porath: What we did was
to run many correlations
between all possible pairs of
items using a program that you had actually written.
In Fortran, I believe.
Then very systematically, we went through all of
those output files and
selected the pairs that wound up breaking up.
Auke Tellegen: [OVERLAPPING] Inconsistency.
Yossef Ben-Porath: What is it that we're assessing with
the two consistency measures, VRIN and TRIN?
Auke Tellegen: Two very distinctive sources
that invalidate a person's protocol.
One is the tendency
to respond everything in the same way,
saying all true or false.
There are some respondents either because
they don't really want to
cooperate or because they're confused.
Who tend to respond
every item the same way in a fixed way.
That's fixed responding.
That's what the trend scale,
the true versus false response scale
is intended to measure.
You got to have a high score on it.
As originally Keith and you say true to everything.
You got a very low score by saying false to everything.
Both extremes count as invalidating the response.
You always get surprises.
If I can mention one example was a woman from
the West Virginia Hills
who was being abused by her husband,
and she shot him,
and he had not severely wounded,
but in that culture,
you were not supposed to do that to your husband.
She was put in a hospital,
and she wanted very badly to get
out because she was not psychotic.
She had just been abused.
She thought to get out,
and she was not very literate.
She thought the best way for her was to admit everything.
She answered every item true.
Yossef Ben-Porath: Tell them what they want to hear.
Auke Tellegen: Tell them what
she thought they wanted to hear.
I had a totally invalid profile
from a person who just wanted to get out.
Yossef Ben-Porath: That's the trend scale.
Auke Tellegen: That's the trend scale.
It's a good example.
Scores like that you always have to consider in
the context of the total psychological situation.
Transfixed responding,
and the range scale is variable responding.
That can happen if a person just randomly
responds or maybe even sometimes simply skips an item.
All the items are in the wrong place.
These things you will immediately
detect when a person gets a high range score.
Yossef Ben-Porath: I think we also sometimes consider
the possibility of reading problems.
Auke Tellegen: Reading problems, confusional states.
There are many ways.
Yossef Ben-Porath: Language comprehension.
Auke Tellegen: Language comprehension.
Yossef Ben-Porath: All of these can result in
essentially random or variable responses
that are uninformative in so far as the persons.
Auke Tellegen: The true response tendencies
can often be quite
independent or sometimes they can
occur in different portions of the test at the same time.
Yossef Ben-Porath: I've seen one example of that of
a person who scored well above 80 on both scales.
It's not easy to do.
Auke Tellegen: Not easy.
Yossef Ben-Porath: The only way to do it is
exactly what you said to alternate,
to do some variable responding for a while,
then some fixed responding and then
go back to the variable pattern.
Auke Tellegen: You could compare it in
an interview if a person
says something and then says something contradictory,
then you say, didn't you say a moment ago this or that?
That's what these scales are meant
to tap in a standardized.
Yossef Ben-Porath: Just to complicate
things a little bit further,
sometimes when people try to over report or look bad,
they'll give variable responses
because they think that's what a crazy person will do.
Just responses all over the place.
Auke Tellegen: To make it even more complicated,
if you get an extremely low degree of
inconsistency, you might wonder also.
I remember a case of a priest who
had sexually misbehaved and who was under scrutiny.
His TRIN responses were zero.
He was very legalistic and answering
in precisely the same way the way he had before.
Yossef Ben-Porath: That reminds me of
a case of an attorney I once assessed
who was charged with a drug related crime
and did exactly the same thing.
He was very careful. In fact,
there were arrows pointing
one item to another on the answer sheet,
he was going to not contradict himself,
not give us anything that can be used against him.
It also took him three hours to complete.
An attorney should be able to do through a little more.
Auke Tellegen: They would be
both good cases for a casebook.
It's also fun to have these scales.
Enriches your interpretive repertoire.
Yossef Ben-Porath: Yes. The other aspect of
the MMPI too that you and I worked on at
that time was the Uniform T scores.
What was the idea behind the Uniform T scores?
Auke Tellegen: Again, it gets a little technical,
but when you have measures of the psychiatc disorders,
and you administer to a normal comparison group,
then the distributions of
those scales tends to be tapering off to the right.
They're skewed to the right because
very few normal people get those high scores,
but they are not skewed to
the left because these scales were
not intended to measure outstanding mental health.
They just were meant to measure the absence of illness.
You get these skews,
but the skews differed from scales to scales.
You could not directly
compare your score on
one scale with your score on another scale.
Yossef Ben-Porath: The same score would correspond
to different percentage.
Auke Tellegen: To different degrees of extremeness.
What the Uniform T scores were intended
to do to make those elevations more comparable.
That's why we called them comparable.
That involved some statistical manipulations.
Both the consistency scales and Uniform T scores,
were accepted somewhat reluctantly, I have to say,
by the restandardization committee,
but they were accepted and without
too much turmoil when the revision actually came out.
Yossef Ben-Porath: They became a standard part
of the MMPI too.
Auke Tellegen: Of the MMPI. There are
some other inventories that
used consistency scales as well.
Yossef Ben-Porath: Following in your tradition
of developing them first for the MPQ.
Auke Tellegen: For the MPQ. Correct. That as
far as we went,
you and I went working.
Yossef Ben-Porath: At that point.
Auke Tellegen: At that point in updating
the methodology of the test.
Otherwise, it was a very conservative revision.
I have to say that we did drop some items,
working with Jim Butcher.
Jim and I working together,
getting rid of some items that
were considered too objectionable,
religious content, for example.
Yossef Ben-Porath: In fact, you had done a study of that.
Auke Tellegen: With him. In the '60s.
But that was the only real change in the content.
Yossef Ben-Porath: Removing a small number of items.
Of offensive items.