Preface to the second edition

Summary

The ten years since I started writing the first edition of this book have seen a great increase in interest in psychological testing in Britain. At the beginning of the 1980s only a few employers in Britain used personality tests: since then their use has spread from the private sector into the National Health Service and local government. Only the education sector still selects, or tries to select, its staff by inefficient, unscientific methods. Since 1987 I have been a Director of Oxford Psychologists Press Ltd, who distribute and publish tests of personality and intelligence, including the California Psychological Inventory, which readers will find mentioned in Chapters 2, 3, 10 and 11.

The second edition incorporates two new Chapters (Chapters 12 and 13), the first on alcoholism and the other on psychological resilience. All of the other chapters have been updated and rewritten. The amount of updating needed for each chapter gives an interesting commentary on developments in personality research since 1982. The chapter on psychoanalysis needed the least updating, because research on empirical verification of Freudian theories of personality has largely dried up. The chapter on learning-based approaches (Chapter 4) didn't need much change either. Chapter 5 on biological approaches, by contrast, needed quite a lot of revision. So did the chapters on aggression and sexual variation (Chapters 10 and 11); views on sexual variation have taken a sharply biological turn in the last ten years. The chapters on traits and factors (Chapters 2 and 3) have been extensively altered, partly because criticisms and reformulation of the trait approach continue to pour forth from personality theorists, partly because personnel psychologists have made some real advances. Research on numerous, very various approaches to the self (Chapter 7) has also proliferated. Personal construct theory, by contrast (Chapter 6), seems to be going out of fashion.