Effects of Covid-19 Emergency and Associated Lockdown Policies on the Normative Expectations for the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) and the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS)

Abstract

Standardized personality tests compare the test taker’s scores to those of a large sample of individuals representing normative expectations. However, what is psychologically normal in one historical context may not be similarly normal in another, so the recent spread of a new coronavirus, SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19), may have implications for what should normally be expected of a nonclinical person taking a personality test shortly after this dramatic event. To address this research question, we administered the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) and the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS) to 60 nonclinical volunteers from Italy and compared their scores with the official normative reference values of the two tests, which had been established before COVID-19. The results of a series of two-sample t-tests indicated that our newly collected sample appeared somewhat less psychologically healthy compared with normative expectations, and these discrepancies were more pronounced on the PAI than on the R-PAS. Implications and future perspectives are discussed.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments for this project are due to the Society for Personality Assessment (SPA), which has funded 500$ to cover part of the costs (e.g., compensation for participants and payment of travels).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Authors are willing to share their data set upon reasonable request. To obtain the data set associated with this article, please contact the corresponding author at [email protected]

Notes

1 The use of Glass’s formula instead of Hedge’s or Cohen’s formulas to calculate the values of d is more accurate in the context of the present study because the parameter used in the denominator of Glass’s formula is based on a much larger sample size, i.e., the sample size of the normative reference sample of R-PAS and PAI (as opposed to the sample size of the present study). It should be noted, however, that the results obtained using the Hedge’s or Cohen’s formulas are nearly identical to those reported here and are available as online supplementary materials (Tables S1, S2, and S3).