1989/01/01 by Robert R. McCrae, Paul T. Costa, W. Grant Dahlstrom +3 · 56 citations
Medicine · Psychology · #Musculoskeletal pain and rehabilitation #Psychological Testing and Assessment #Personality Disorders and Psychopathology #Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory #Hostility #Psychology #Clinical psychology #Scale (ratio) #Personality #Personality Assessment Inventory #Personality test #Sample (material) #Psychometrics #Test validity #Psychiatry #Social psychology
paper · doi:10.1097/00006842-198901000-00006
published in Psychosomatic Medicine 51(1), 58-65 (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins)
openalex publication_date 1989/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The MMPI K scale is widely used to screen for invalid responses and to adjust substantive scale scores for defensiveness. In a normal volunteer sample, correlations of MMPI clinical scales and the Cook-Medley Hostility (HO) scale with self-reports and peer ratings on the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) were decreased rather than increased by K-correction. Similarly, in a medical sample, structured interview-based ratings of Potential for Hostility were better predicted by uncorrected HO scores than by K-corrected HO scores. Finally, in a prospective study of mortality among lawyers, uncorrected HO scores were a significant predictor of all-cause mortality; K-corrected scores were not. The data suggest that, under some circumstances, the K scale may measure substantive traits rather than defensiveness, and should be used and interpreted with caution. Its use is probably contraindicated for most research on psychiatrically normal subjects.