In the spring 2007, I entered A University in Korea as a psychology major student. Then a year later, something bad happened and I had a trouble with that. I felt depressed seriously than ever and my life was totally out of control so that I decided to get some help from the A University Counseling Center. Before sessions started, a counselor had requested me to take the MMPI-2 test which was available in the psychology department in the school. So, I took more than 500 questions and the test bored me. Moreover some of questions were bizarre so I was wondering what those were for. Anyway few days later I had got my scores. That was quite interesting. By chance, one of my classes was covering the MMPI test, so it was easy to understand the test scores. Back then, I didn't know that I would go to the college where the test was developed.
The MMPI is shortening for the Minnesota Multiphase Personality Inventory. As the name suggests, the test was developed in the University of Minnesota by Hathaway and McKindel. It was revised and the new one was named the MMPI-2. Now, the MMPI02 is one of the most widely utilized personality tests. It is one of structured personality tests which refer paper-and-pencil test with questions from empirical data and fixed multiple choices. The Likert Scale is used for the test to quantify respondents' attitudes to questions. In the test, respondents have options to choose true or false to each question with numbers; 1 being "always true" and 5 being "always false".
It would be great that I have my profile sheet. But people in the center did not allow me to do so. Here is someone's MMPI-2 profile. But I can remember some of mine. It has 10 scales related to mental disorders and apart of them, the first three scores are about validity. The L means Lie scale. The F is for frequency and a high core on F usually mean malingering. The K is correction which is about how much you can hide your real response. One of my professors told me that students in college are smart enough so they usually get high scores on K. But I had got a little low score on K, about 50 or less. Speaking of scores, the average is between 50 and 65 on each scale. It is problem to get scores higher than 65, but also to get too much low scores. Anyway the score said I was naïve. In most cases, the K and the L score are positively correlated. So I can assume that my L was also low.
Then most of scales were like a high flying. Most of them were over at least 70 points. In retrospect, that was almost like a cry for help. You can see this website to know more about what high scores on scales mean. But what really surprised me was that the profile said me I may have schizophrenia and need to take medication. No way. I completely denied. However it turned out that I did not have such a big problem like schizophrenia. That was because a computer made my diagnosis, the counselor said. Also she informed me that even though computers could do somewhat for diagnoses, those are still needed to be confirmed by professionals. That was a just happening but I learned a lot from it and other sessions.Even though sometimes there are mistakes in diagnoses, the MMPI-2 test is widely used from clinical field to court. You can see that in our school's website. There are mutiple types of MMPI tests which are researched a lot and used for many purposes.
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