Identifying Personality Characteristics and Psychopathology 291kind, the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia
(SADS). Intended to assist in identifying a broad range of
symptomatic disorders in addition to affective disorders and
schizophrenia, the SADS is a semistructured interview guide
that requires professional judgment and serves clinical as
well as research purposes. Following on its heels came the
Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS), which is entirely struc-
tured and was designed for use by nonprofessional interview-
ers in research studies (Robins, Helzer, Croughan, & Ratcliff,
1981). Both of these measures were extended downward for
use with young people, as the Kiddie SADS (K-SADS; Puig-
Antich & Chambers, 1978) and the Diagnostic Interview for
Children (DISC; Costello, Edelbrock, & Costello, 1985). The
most comprehensive measure of this kind to emerge has been
the Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM(SCID), which
includes forms for identifying personality as well as sympto-
matic disorders (Spitzer, Williams, & Gibbon, 1987; see also
R. Rogers, 2001).
Behavioral Methods
The prescientific history of psychology aside, the formal im-
plementation of behavioral methods for assessing personality
is usually traced to the World War II activities of the United
States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor or-
ganization to the Central Intelligence Agency. Once again the
winds of war instigated advances in the methods of behav-
ioral science, just as they have in the biological and physical
sciences. To aid in selecting operatives for covert intelligence
missions, the OSS observed how recruits behaved in a variety
of contrived problem-solving and stress-inducing situations
and on this basis predicted the likely quality of their perfor-
mance in the field (Office of Strategic Services Assessment
Staff, 1948; see also Handler, 2001). A gap of more than
20 years followed before the OSS methods led to a clearly
defined approach to assessment, mainly because the emer-
gence of systematic behavioral assessment techniques had
to await new ways of conceptualizing personality for assess-
ment purposes.
Of many contributions to the literature that reconceptual-
ized personality in ways that fostered the development of be-
havioral assessment, two can be singled out for their clarity
and influence. In 1968, Walter Mischel publishedPersonality
and Assessment(Mischel, 1968), a book in which he argued
that personality traits are semantic fictions, that continuity in
behavior across time and place exists only as a function of sim-
ilarity across situations, and that assessment of behavior
should accordingly focus on its situational determinants. A
few years later, Goldfried and Kent (1972) drew a sharp dis-
tinction between “traditional” and “behavioral” assessment
procedures with respect to how personality is viewed. From a
traditional assessment perspective, these authors pointed out,
personality consists of characteristics that lead people to be-
have in certain ways, and understanding a person’s actions is
a product of examining his or her underlying tendencies or
dispositions. From a behavioral perspective, by contrast,
personality “is defined according to the likelihood of an
individual manifesting certain behavioral tendencies in the
variety of situations that comprise his day-to-day living”
(Goldfried & Kent, 1972, p. 412). Behaviorally speaking, then,
personality is not ana prioriset of concrete action tendencies
that people have and carry around with them, but is rather a
convenient abstraction for summarizing after the fact how
people have been observed to interact with their environment.
These innovative conceptions of personality, echoed in nu-
merous other books and articles, led during the 1970s and
1980s to a dramatic growth of interest in developing assess-
ment methods in which the obtained data would consist of
representative samples of behavior that could be objectively
evaluated for their implications after the fact, as contrasted
with test responses to be interpreted inferentially as signs of
underlying states or traits they are presumed before the fact
to measure. The core techniques used to achieve this purpose
of behavioral assessment included (a) observational ratings
of person’s responses in natural and contrived situations, as
suggested by the OSS methods and by situations devised by
Paul (1966) to assess the effectiveness of systematic desensi-
tization; (b) observed conduct in role-playing exercises, based
on procedures developed by Rotter and Wickens (1948);
(c) self-report instruments focused on specific behavioral
interactions, as had earlier been exemplified by measures like
Geer’s (1965) Fear Survey Schedule; (d) psychophysiological
measurements, which were suggested by the successful em-
ployment of such techniques in the then emerging field of
behavioral medicine research (see Kallman & Feuerstein,
1977); and (e) behavioral interviews specifically focused on
how people respond to certain kinds of situations in their
lives.
The late 1980s saw gradual moderation of the original
conceptual underpinnings of behavioral assessment and con-
siderable broadening of its focus. It is currently widely rec-
ognized that people are not as “trait-less” as Mischel argued,
nor are traditional and behavioral methods of assessment as
distinct and mutually exclusive as Goldfried and Kent origi-
nally suggested. In the case of Mischel’s argument, behav-
ioral assessors rediscovered Lewin’s classic maxim that how
people behave is an interactive function of their dispositional
nature and the environmental circumstances in which they
find themselves, and the advent of cognitive perspectives in
behavioral approaches encouraged behavioral assessors to