Test Developer Profiles

Richard Rogers, Ph.D., ABPP

Tests Developed:

Rogers Criminal Responsibility Assessment Scales

Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms

Dick Rogers was born halfway through the twentieth century (January 1, 1950) to a family of humble means in Worcester, Massachusetts. Much of his childhood was spent in the Main-South neighborhood, then referred to euphemistically as a "slum." Although kept somewhat distant from the streetwise kids who roamed the streets, he was exposed at an early age to the true diversity of human experience. With as many as three roomers sharing the family's seven-room apartment and single bath, he experienced an end-stage alcoholic with florid delirium tremens; a Native American fighting with his dad over pride and rent money; and an isolated Albanian, proud of his heritage. Summers were an entirely different world: old family property on Cape Cod with sandy beaches peopled with middle-class folk.

In a family strongly valuing education, Dick was seen as less academically capable than his older brother. Despite these firmly held perceptions, Dick began to flourish at Worcester State College where he majored in English literature and graduated summa cum laude in 1972. However, by the second semester of his junior year, he realized that psychology and not English literature was his chosen career path. With only six undergraduate courses in psychology, Ph.D. programs overlooked him. With renewed determination, he completed an M.A. program at Assumption College in 1973 and was accepted by Utah State University for doctoral training, which he completed in 1976.

His initial career aspirations were to treat the "worried-well" in a middle-class community. However, practicum and early professional experiences, perhaps influenced by childhood background, led him to seek out forensic psychology as a speciality. Lured by good pay and a guaranteed position six months prior to graduation, Dick accepted a position at a forensic hospital. Within six months, he was promoted to unit program director and was responsible for more than 30 staff. Somewhat scarred by this early bout with administration and restless in a small farming community, he moved to Chicago as one of the four founding members of a university-based center for the evaluation and treatment of forensic patients at Rush Medical School. The dynamic and competitive culture of a medical school setting suited him well. His research program led to the development of his first psychological measure.

As Dick became more involved in insanity evaluations, he was increasingly troubled by the plethora of unsubstantiated opinions, buttressed by self-promoted expertise in the absence of empirical data. The need for a systematic method of conducting insanity evaluations was obvious. In searching for paradigms, Dick was influenced by Dr. Ron Roesch's research efforts on competency to stand trial and Dr. Chris Webster's studies of pretrial assessments. In early 1979, he formed a weekly study group to begin to struggle with the essential components of insanity evaluations. A prototype measure, Criminal Responsibility Assessment Scales, was devised in 1980, composed on 23 variables and a psycholegal decision model. This model was first tested on ten influenced by Dr. Ron Roesch's research efforts on competency to stand trial and Dr. Chris Webster's studies of pretrial assessments. In early 1979, he formed a weekly study group to begin to struggle with the essential components of insanity evaluations. A prototype measure, Criminal Responsibility Assessment Scales, was devised in 1980, composed on 23 variables and a psycholegal decision model. This model was first tested on ten diverse case vignettes with ratings completed by three forensic psychologists and four forensic psychiatrists. Based on this pilot study, items were refined and clinical descriptions were added to the clinician-based ratings. At this time, clinical-forensic psychology was in its infancy: The American Board of Forensic Psychology had been founded in 1978 and most forensic psychologists still practiced in the shadow of forensic psychiatrists. These early stages of clinical-forensic psychology were also a time of great enthusiasm and cooperation. Based both on Dick's perseverance and the emerging professional zeitgeist, Dick was able to enlist several excellent collaborators. His two primary research sites were the Rush Medical School in Chicago and the Court Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Toledo. These sites were augmented by data from five additional forensic centers.

Its current name, Rogers Criminal Responsibility Assessment Scales (R-CRAS), forms the basis of an instructive anecdote about professional rivalry. In the face of possible encroachment on the authorship of his test by a psychiatrist and administrator at Rush Medical School, Dick followed the advice of a friend and eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Bill Reid, and appended the name "Rogers" to the measure. The attempted exploitation was halted.

The R-CRAS was published in 1984 by the then-fledgling test firm, Psychological Assessment Resources. Dick continued to research the R-CRAS until the late 1980s when his departure from Chicago reduced his access to insanity evaluations. His dream that other investigators would be spurred by his efforts and develop more extensive and better-validated measures was not realized. The R-CRAS (Rogers, 1984) remains the only standardized instrument for the assessment of criminal responsibility.

In the late 1980s, academic efforts were increasingly circumscribed as fee-for-service efforts were necessitated by financial cutbacks. Dick was faced with an important decision: either profit financially from service provision by increasing his independent practice or find a more academic position where he could engage in what he loved–"writing and research. Born poor, he remains proud of his decision to reduce his income by $20,000 to accept an academic position at the Clarke Institute, University of Toronto.

Given the adversarial nature of forensic evaluations and the often high stakes for forensic patients, Dick became engrossed in how to assess response styles, especially malingering. As he wrote in 1983 and continues to believe, malingering is an explosive issue. Once raised, irrespective of the clinical evidence, malingering is likely to play a decisive role in forensic evaluations. He was very He was very troubled that critical decisions on malingering were rendered on a paucity of empirical data. Simple rules for the MMPI were treated as sacrosanct; high elevations on Scale F were routinely treated as "fake-bad" without consideration of alternative explanations (e.g., illiteracy or psychotic confusion).

In 1984, Dick wrote a seminal review of malingering indicators, integrating case studies with psychometric research and analogue studies of deception. This review became, several years later, the initial template for his second psychological measure, Structured Interview of Reported  Symptoms (SIRS; Rogers et al., 1992). His first efforts were spent attempting to create an MMPI-type inventory for the assessment of response styles. However, he realized that several detection strategies could not be successfully implemented in a paper-and-pencil format. He was also concerned about enduring problems with reading comprehension and psychotic interference, both of which could confound interpretation.

Tested in 1987, the first prototype for the SIRS examined 12 interview-based strategies for the detection of malingering. Many items were rewritten because they were obviously bogus. More blatant questions were divided into two: (a) a relatively innocuous threshold question and (b) a more obvious probe. In addition, a set of everyday problems were added to reduce the transparency of the SIRS. An important decision involved the research design. While most researchers were content to conduct only simulation studies as experimental analogues, Dick combined the rigor of simulation studies with the ecological validity of known-groups comparison. Published in 1992, the SIRS has been considered the standard for the assessment of feigned disorders. As summarized by Rogers (1997), a body of literature of other investigators has demonstrated the validity and clinical utility of the SIRS.

Advice to Test Developers

Dick is very worried about the future of traditional psychological assessment. In the 1950s, clinical psychologists had obvious advantages over other mental health professionals in their ability to evaluate patients on standardized measures. That advantage has eroded steadily during the past several decades with incursions by other professionals and the rampant commercialization of psychological measures. Test developers are needed more than ever to develop new methods of psychological assessment. Many psychologists and most test developers have overlooked a great, relatively untapped potential of psychological assessment–"namely structured interviews. His book, Diagnostic and Structured Interviewing: A Handbook for Psychologists (Rogers, 1995), is intended to provide a new standard of sophistication for the assessment of Axis I and Axis II disorders and provide a template for test developers.

Test publication has rapidly evolved into a highly competitive business, motivated by profit. The leadership of most test firms has changed from psychologists to business administrators. A concomitant shift in business goals from serving psychologists to increasing profits can be observed at nearly every test firm. This trend has two important implications for test developers. First, more unvalidated measures are published by test firms to increase the "product line"; publishers no longer uphold high standards for test developers. Second, author contracts have become a means of maximizing profits. Many test firms demand that all intellectual rights be assigned to them, offer royalties as low as 5 percent, and pay royalties less often (once or twice per year) to maximize their profits and working capital. Test developers must heed how lower standards and increased competitiveness will affect their willingness to embark on this adventure.

References

Rogers, R. (1984). Rogers Criminal Responsibility Assessment Scales (R-CRAS) and test manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

Rogers, R. (1995). Diagnostic and structured interviewing: A handbook for psychologists. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

Rogers, R. (Ed.) (1997). Clinical assessment of malingering and deception (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford.

Rogers, R., Bagby, R. M., and Dickens, S. E. (1992). Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS) and professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

Theodore Millon, Ph.D., D.Sc.

Tests Developed:

Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI)

Millon Behavioral Health Inventory (MBHI)

Millon Adolescent Personality Inventory (MAPI)

Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory (MACI)

Millon Index of Personality Styles (MIPS)

Theodore Millon was born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 18, 1928, the only son of parents who had immigrated some three years earlier from Bialystok, Poland, and Vilna, Lithuania. Both were modestly educated, although his father was a descendant of a family known for its many rabbis and Talmudic scholars. The effects of the great depression provided a melancholic context for community life in the 1930s, but the youthful "Teddy," as he was known, was largely oblivious to the hardships his parents endured, well-protected by them from their mournful and stress-laden daily existence.

Advanced education for Ted was characteristically desultory and enigmatic. At the City College of New York (CCNY), he wandered from one major to another, trying out economics, sociology, philosophy, and physics, all to no avail until he fortuitously took the requisite basic psychology course.

He went on to an M.A. in clinical psychology at CCNY and a Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut. Upon completion of a dissertation designed to explicate traits of the authoritarian personality, Ted obtained a teaching position at Lehigh University. By a no-longer curious twist in his career's focus, he also assumed a senior administrative post at a large state hospital.

Presumption and vanity, so often the spur to writing books, had little to do with the origins of his first text, Modern Psychopathology (MP). It began as an exercise in self-education, an attempt to gather and to render the disparate facts and theories of psychopathology into a coherent and orderly framework. Such a venture, it was hoped, would enable him to pursue his future research, teaching, and clinical responsibilities more effectively. Little did he know that the tasks of authorship would force him to think more presumptuously than he cared–"even worse, to feel a measure of pride and vanity in these presumptions. Faced repeatedly with the obscurities, contradictions, and confusions that beset the field, he found himself formulating novel "clarifications" and "solutions" to old and perplexing problems. In short, an act of modest self-education became an act of intellectual audacity; the future will tell whether the venturesome spirit that overtook him will be judged to have been impertinent and foolhardy, or original and persuasive. The writing of his first major work, Modern Psychopathology, stemmed from his discontent with the state of our field. It ultimately led him to take an academic position in Chicago where he was to head a large psychology division devoted to training psychologists, physicians, and psychiatrists at the University of Illinois Medical Center. Among his responsibilities was to select clinical scholars to revise the antiquated DSM. His proposal led to the birth of the DSM-III Task Force, which he enthusiastically joined, as he did the DSM-IV, both proving to be richly rewarding professional and personal experiences. Also gratifying during his Chicago years was the development of a series of empirically based instruments (MCMI, MBHI, MAPI) that would serve to represent theoretical constructs proposed in the MP book.

The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) and its sister inventories originated initially as a defensive act, a shield against the proliferation of potentially misconceived or poorly designed efforts on the part of well-meaning others to "operationalize" concepts he had proposed in the MP book. Rather than sit back and enjoy the dissemination of his ideas, he began to see this burgeoning of divergent instrument development not only as uncontrolled, and possibly misguided, but also as a process ultimately endangering the very theoretical notions they were designed to strengthen.

To establish a measure of instrumental uniformity for future investigators, as well as to assure at least a modicum of psychometric quality among tools that ostensibly reflected his theory's novel constructs, he was prompted (perhaps "driven" is a more accurate word) to consider undertaking the test-construction task himself. At that time, in early 1971, he fortunately was directing a research supervision group composed of psychologists- and psychiatrists-in-training during their internship and residency periods. All of them had read his MP text and found his suggestion that they work together with him to develop instruments to identify and quantify the text's personality constructs to be both worthy and challenging.

Naively, it was assumed that the construction task could be completed in about 18 months, a time period that would allow several members of the research group to participate on a continuing basis. Despite the fact that a structured interview schedule was "postponed" after an initial effort, the "more limited" task of constructing a self-report inventory took almost seven years to complete. The framework and preliminary item selections of the inventory were well under way by the end of the first full year of work; it was described briefly in a book titled Research Methods in Psychopathology. The initial forms of this clinical instrument were called the Millon-Illinois Self-Report Inventory.

Psychodiagnostic instruments of the past were often an exercise in oracular craft and intuitive artistry. A change in the character of personality theory and assessment began to brew in the late 1960s. Slow though these advances progressed, there were clear signs that new ideas would soon emerge. Projective techniques such as the Rorschach began to be analyzed quantitatively and were increasingly anchored to the empirical domain. The so-called objective inventories, such as the MMPI, were being interpreted increasingly in terms of configural profiles. No longer approached as sets of separate scales, formerly segmented instruments were increasingly analyzed as holistic integrations that possessed clinical significance only as gestalt composites. In addition, the former insistence that diagnostic interpretation be "objective," that is, anchored solely to empirical correlates, gave way to clinical syntheses, including the "dynamics" of the previously maligned projectives. Although part-function instruments, oriented toward one expressive form of pathology or another (e.g., Beck Depression Inventory) are still popular, the newest tools moved increasingly toward composite structures, (i.e., "whole" personalities). These personality formulations were not conceived of as random sets or discrete attributes (i.e., factors) that must be individually deduced and then pieced together, but as integrated configurations from the start.

Psychodiagnostic instruments of the past were often an exercise in oracular craft and intuitive artistry. A change in the character of personality theory and assessment began to brew in the late 1960s. Slow though these advances progressed, there were clear signs that new ideas would soon emerge. Projective techniques such as the Rorschach began to be analyzed quantitatively and were increasingly anchored to the empirical domain. The so-called objective inventories, such as the MMPI, were being interpreted increasingly in terms of configural profiles. No longer approached as sets of separate scales, formerly segmented instruments were increasingly analyzed as holistic integrations that possessed clinical significance only as gestalt composites. In addition, the former insistence that diagnostic interpretation be "objective," that is, anchored solely to empirical correlates, gave way to clinical syntheses, including the "dynamics" of the previously maligned projectives. Although part-function instruments, oriented toward one expressive form of pathology or another (e.g., Beck Depression Inventory) are still popular, the newest tools moved increasingly toward composite structures, (i.e., "whole" personalities). These personality formulations were not conceived of as random sets or discrete attributes (i.e., factors) that must be individually deduced and then pieced together, but as integrated configurations from the start.

Leaving Chicago, Millon turned to new tasks, the rebuilding of a quality clinical program at the University of Miami and the development of a health psychology doctorate. He assumed editorial leadership of the first international journal on Psychology and Health, as well as of the much admired Journal of Personality Disorder, which soon became the official publication of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders, which he co-founded. Accepting a joint appointment as a "permanent" visiting professor at Harvard University and McLean Hospital, he has been endowed at both academic settings with a group of magnificent students and colleagues. His affiliation with the recently established Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology furnishes a fruitful base for future scholarly writings and research.

As is evident by the variety of "Millon" instruments reported in this book, he has judged it best to opt in favor of focusing an inventory on target rather than broad-based populations; hence, the MCMI is oriented toward matters of import among adult mental health patients, the MACI focuses on adolescent clinical populations, the MBHI and the forthcoming MBMC focus on those whose primary ailments are of a medical or physical nature, and the recently developed MIPS (Millon Index of Personality Styles) addresses traits among nonclinical or so-called normal adults (as can be seen, he has chosen the term "style" for persons who do not evince discernible psychic pathology).

It has been most gratifying that the defensively constructed MCMI, as well as its sister inventories, quickly matched in acceptance and clinical usage the theory upon which they were based. The task of developing a complete clinical science continues as a goal for Millon. Integrative consonance is not an aspiration limited to ostensibly diverse sciences (e.g., evolutionary biology, cosmology), but is a worthy goal within each science. Particularly relevant in this regard are his efforts to coordinate the separate realms that comprise personality and psychopathology, namely: its theories, the classification system it has formulated, the diagnostic tools it employs, and the therapeutic techniques it implements.

References

Millon, T. (1969). Modern psychopathology. Philadelphia: Saunders.

Millon, T. (1972). Research methods in psychopathology. New York: Wiley.

David Rapaport, Ph.D.

Test Developed:

Contributed to the development of the use of the clinical diagnostic battery

Born in Budapest, Hungary, David Rapaport specialized in mathematics and physics in college. However, after entering into psychoanalysis, his interest shifted to psychology and philosophy, and he earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Budapest in 1938, the same year he emigrated to the United States. After working for a brief period as a psychologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, Rapaport moved to Kansas to accept a position as a staff psychologist at the Osawatamie State Hospital. He worked there until 1940, when Karl Menninger offered him a position at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas; Rapaport was to be the clinic's first full-time psychologist. The years 1940 through 1948 witnessed Rapaport's rise to prominence through a number of publications, including his now-classic work, Diagnostic Psychological Testing (1945--1946), written with Roy Schafer, B.S. [now, Ph.D.], and Merton Gill, M.D. Although hailed by many clinicians as a milestone in the assessment literature, the work was criticized on many counts, such as its lack of statistical rigor. By 1960, all of the remaining stock from the numerous reprintings of the book had been exhausted, and the plates used for reprinting were no longer usable. Two publishers were prepared to republish the two volumes of Diagnostic Psychological Testing in their original form. However, as Holt (1968) tells us:

David Rapaport had been hurt by the criticisms of the book and had taken them to heart; he realized that many were justified, and he did not feel that he could allow so many undeniable errors to stand in a reissued book; yet he did not have time or inclination to undertake a revision. His own interests and practice had turned toward theory, experimental research, and therapy, and those of Roy Schafer had similarly grown away from testing into psychoanalysis. As for the third member of the original team, though he remained interested and informed about testing beyond most of his psychiatric and psychoanalytic colleagues, Merton Gill was clearly not the man for the job. (p. 1)

The person who turned out to be "the man for the job" was Robert R. Holt; Rapaport had spent a sabbatical year at New York University between 1959 and 1960 and had met Holt, who had discussed his ideas for revision. Some time later, shortly before Rapaport's death, Rapaport wrote Holt and asked if he would undertake the revision (which he did). While at Menninger, Rapaport had been head of the psychology department and chairman of research. In 1948, Rapaport left Topeka for Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and a position at the Austen Riggs Foundation there. Unburdened of administrative duties, he immersed himself in the study of psychoanalysis and produced, among other publications, Organization and Pathology of Thought and Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory: A Systematizing Attempt. At the age of 49 and very much involved in his work, David Rapaport died in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, while dining with friends. He was survived by his two daughters and by his wife, Elvira, whom he had met on a kibbutz in Israel before he emigrated to the United States.

References

Holt, R. R. (1968). Editor's Foreword. In D. Rapaport, M. M. Gill, and R. Schfer, Diagnostic psychological testing (rev. ed.). New York: International University Press.

Rapaport, D., Gill, M. M., and Schafer, R. (1945--1946). Diagnostic psychological testing. (2 vols.). Chicago: Year Book.