Measurement of personality and attitude: applications to clinical research

CHANGES in personality and attitudes are a salient aspect of many psychiatric disorders. It is there-fore important for psychiatrists to have accurate measures of personality functions and relevant attitudes. Over the last 50 years many measures of personality have been developed, mainly by psychologists, but until recently few of these had much clinical utility. Most measures in this area were devised to explore normal personality func-tion, or to test socio-psychological theories, or for special purposes like vocational guidance. In the last few years more attention has been paid to clinical application of these measures so that instruments are now emerging which hold pro-mise for psychiatric research, although none o