Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

James N. Butcher

Abstract
The original Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was developed in the 1940s to
assess mental health problems in psychiatric and medical settings, and it rapidly became a standard
personality instrument (Hathaway & McKinley, 1940). The popularity of this true‐false personality
inventory was due in large part to its easy‐to‐use format and to the fact that the scales have well‐
established validity in assessing clinical symptoms and syndromes (Butcher, 2005). The MMPI
underwent a major revision in the 1980s, resulting in two forms of the test: an adult version, the
MMPI‐2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989), and an adolescent form,
MMPI‐A (Butcher et al., 1992). The MMPI‐2 is a 567‐item inventory comprised of symptoms, beliefs,
and attitudes in adults above age 18. The MMPI‐A is a 478‐item version that is used for assessing
young people, age 14–18. This article addresses only the MMPI‐2. Together, the MMPI‐2 and
MMPI‐A have become the most widely researched and used clinical assessment instruments in the
field of personality assessment.

The original Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was developed in the 1940s
to assess mental health problems in psychiatric and medical settings, and it rapidly became a
standard personality instrument (Hathaway & McKinley, 1940). The popularity of this true‐false
personality inventory was due in large part to its easy‐to‐use format and to the fact that the scales
have well‐established validity in assessing clinical symptoms and syndromes (Butcher, 2005).
The MMPI underwent a major revision in the 1980s, resulting in two forms of the test: an adult
version, the MMPI‐2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989), and an
adolescent form, MMPI‐A (Butcher et al., 1992). The MMPI‐2 is a 567‐item inventory
comprised of symptoms, beliefs, and attitudes in adults above age 18. The MMPI‐A is a 478‐
item version that is used for assessing young people, age 14–18. This article addresses only the
MMPI‐2. Together, the MMPI‐2 and MMPI‐A have become the most widely researched and
used clinical assessment instruments in the field of personality assessment.

1 Assessing Protocol Validity

In some settings such as forensic applications or personnel settings, people may be motivated to
present themselves in ways that do not disclose accurate information about themselves. For
example, when an individual is being tested to determine sanity in a pretrial criminal evaluation,
the person might be exaggerating symptoms. The initial step in MMPI‐2 profile interpretation is
the important one of determining whether the client has cooperated with the testing to provide an
accurate appraisal of his or her personality functioning. Several scales on the MMPI‐2 aid
clinicians in determining whether a client's item responses provide key personality information
or are instead simply reflecting response sets or deceptive motivational patterns that disguise the
client's true feelings and motivations (Baer, Wetter, Nichols, Greene, & Berry, 1995). Several
validity scales have been developed to evaluate a client's approach to the test. Four of these
assessment strategies are the following.

1.1 The L Scale

The L scale addresses the client's willingness to acknowledge faults or problems. Individuals
who score high on L are presenting an overly favorable picture of themselves. High scorers are
claiming virtue not found among people in general. The L scale is particularly valuable in
situations like personnel screening or some types of court cases, because people in those settings
try to put their best foot forward and present themselves as better adjusted than they really are.

1.2 The K Scale

The K scale was developed to appraise test defensiveness or the tendency that some people have
to minimize problems. In addition, this measure also serves as a means of correcting for
defensiveness. That is, if clients are defensive as assessed by this scale, their score on five of the
clinical scales are adjusted to compensate for their evasiveness.

1.3 The F Scale

The Infrequency scale or F scale was developed to assess the tendency of some people to
exaggerate their problems or to fake the test by overresponding to extreme items. The items on
this scale are very rare or bizarre symptoms. Individuals who endorse a lot of these items tend to
exaggerate symptoms on the MMPI‐2, perhaps as a way of trying to convince professionals that
they need psychological services. As noted earlier, this motivational pattern is also found among
individuals with a need to claim problems in order to influence the court in forensic cases.
The F scale can be elevated for several possible reasons. The profile could be invalid because the
client became confused or disoriented or responded in a random manner. High F scores are also
found among clients who are malingering or producing exaggerated responses in order to falsely
claim mental illness (Graham, Watts, & Timbrook, 1991).

1.4 TRIN and VRIN Scales

Two measures were developed to assess response inconsistency. These scales are based on the
analysis of the individual's responding to the items in a consistent or inconsistent manner. The
scales are comprised of item pairs that involve responses that are semantically inconsistent, for
example, a pair of items that contain contradictory content that cannot logically be answered in
the same direction if the subject is responding consistently to the content.

2 Assessing Clinical Symptom Patterns

Several types of scales have been developed to evaluate clinical problems. There are three types
of scales that address problems in somewhat different ways: the traditional clinical scales and
profile codes, the MMPI‐2 content scales, and the specific problems or supplemental scales. A
scale is a group of items from the MMPI‐2 item pool that have been shown to measure certain
symptom patterns or personality traits. Each item cluster or scale is normed on a population of
normal individuals. This normative group serves as the reference point to which all profiles are
compared.

3 The MMPI‐2 Clinical Scales

Hathaway and McKinley developed the original MMPI clinical scales by determining
empirically the items that separated clinical patients with clear diagnoses from a sample of
nonpatients, or normals. For example, they developed scales to assess hypochondriasis (the Hs
scale), depression (the D scale), hysteria (the Hy scale), psychopathic deviation (the Pd scale),
paranoid thinking (the Pa scale), psychasthenia (the Pt scale), schizophrenia (the Sc scale), and
mania (the Ma scale). In addition, two other scales were included on the clinical profile to
address problems of sex role identification (the Mf scale) and social introversion and
extraversion (the SI scale). Besides interpretation of single clinical scales, elevations on certain
scale patterns or configurations of scores (referred to as profile or code types) are interpreted.
These profile types result from clients endorsing two or more of the clinical scales.

4 Content‐Based Scales
In the development of MMPI‐2, a number of scales that assess the content themes an individual
endorses were developed. The content scales are homogeneous item clusters that assess unitary
themes and represent clear communication about problems to the practitioner. There are 15
content scales measuring different symptom areas and problems; examples include Antisocial
Practices (ASP), Bizarre Mentation (BIZ), and Family Problems (FAM).

5 Special Scales
Several additional scales have been developed to address specific problems, such as the potential
to develop substance abuse problems (the MacAndrew Addiction scale, or MAC‐R, and the
Addiction Potential scale, or APS) and whether the individual acknowledges having problems
with drugs or alcohol (the (Addiction Acknowledgment scale, or AAS). The Marital Distress
scale assesses clients' attitudes toward their marital relationship. These special scales allow the
practitioner to assess specific problems that are not addressed in the clinical or content scales.

6 Development of New Scales for the MMPI‐2

Since its original publication, psychologists have been developing new scales for the test. In fact,
there have actually been more MMPI scales published than there are items on the test. A scale is
simply a combination of items that have been thought to measure a personality construct or
symptom pattern. Researchers interested in developing MMPI‐2‐based measures typically
provide substantial information about the novel measure's psychometric functioning, validity,
and reliability (Butcher, Graham, Kamphuis, & Rouse, 2006). In some instances, new scales
have been developed without sufficient empirical research or clear rationale. For example the
Restructured Clinical scales (Tellegen et al., 2003) were released for public use, even though the
release elicited controversy with respect to these scales having been shown to be highly
redundant with existing measures (Rouse, Greene, Butcher, Nichols, & Williams, in press), or
having drifted too far from the scales of origin (Butcher, Hamilton, Rouse, & Cumella, 2006), or
having been shown to lack sensitivity to assessment of clinical problems (Rogers &
Sewell, 2006; Wallace & Liljequist, 2005). Caution in interpreting these measures in assessing
clients is needed until sufficient research has delineated their meanings and uses.

7 How the MMPI‐2 Is Used

There are currently many diverse applications for the MMPI‐2 for evaluating individuals across a
wide variety of settings. Contemporary uses include evaluating clients who are being admitted to
an inpatient psychiatric facility, understanding problems and possible treatment resistance of
clients entering psychotherapy, providing personality information for therapists to employ in
giving the client feedback in psychotherapy, assessing possible personality problems of students
applying for a graduate clinical psychology program, measuring behavior problems and
symptoms in neuropsychological evaluation of a client with severe head injury, appraising
personality factors and psychological adjustment in applicants for an airline pilot position,
examining persons who are being tried for murder and are claiming to be not guilty by reason of
insanity, and using the test as a research instrument to evaluate the psychological changes in a
drug trial. There have been more than 32 translations and adaptations of the MMPI‐2 for use in
other countries. The items and scales have shown remarkable robustness when used in other
languages and cultures (Butcher, 1996).
In summary, the MMPI‐2 is a self‐report personality inventory that provides the test user with
scores on a number of scales. These scales assess response attitudes, mental health symptoms,
personality traits, and special problems that the client might be experiencing. The MMPI‐2 has
been widely validated and is used in numerous settings around the world.