A brief, well-rounded personality measure designed to assess normal personality styles for adults.
Author: Theodore Millon, PhD, DSc
The newly updated MIPS Revised test helps address the need for a theoretically grounded instrument that may be administered by a broad range of professionals, including human resource specialists, social work and career counselors, and private practice clinicians.
Addresses Key Dimensions of Normal Personalities
While brief to administer, the MIPS Revised test provides a comprehensive, up-to-date evaluation that surpasses the scope of many other normal personality assessments. The MIPS Revised instrument addresses three key dimensions of normal personalities:
- Motivating Styles, which helps to assess the person's emotional style in dealing with his/her environment;
- Thinking Styles, which helps to examine the person's mode of cognitive processing; and
- Behaving Styles, which helps to assess the person's way of interrelating with others.
This widely useful test offers a convenient tool to help professionals assist ostensibly normally functioning adults who may be experiencing difficulties in work, family or social relationships. It may also be helpful in career counseling or employment settings. In addition, the test's Clinical Index is useful in helping to screen for the possible presence of mental disorders in persons who present as normal.
How to Use This Test
The MIPS Revised test has proven useful in a variety settings, including:
- Employee selection, as a pre-offer screening tool
- Employee assistance programs
- Leadership and employee development programs
- Career planning for high school and college students
- As part of the curriculum for college courses in psychological testing
- Relationship, premarital, and marriage counseling
- Individual counseling
Key Features
- Developed by Dr. Millon in 1994 and revised in 2003, the MIPS Revised test has strong theoretical and practical backing.
- Scale names and the profile display have been updated to provide administrators with better information for interpreting test results.
- With only 180 true/false items, the test can be completed in less than 30 minutes on average.
- While clinically and theoretically grounded, the MIPS Revised test does not require administration by an advanced-degreed professional.
Theodore Millon, PhD, DSc, was Founding Editor of the Journal of Personality Disorders and Inaugural President of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. He has held Full Professorial appointments at Harvard Medical School, the University of Illinois, and the University of Miami. Among his professional activities, he is the primary developer of the Millon inventories. A prolific author, Professor Millon has written or edited more than thirty books, including Disorders of Personality, soon to be published in its third edition, and the just published Personalized Clinical Assessment: A Clinician’s Guide to the Millon Inventories. APA and APF have established the Theodore Millon Award for Mid-Career distinguished scholars in personality psychology. With the support of colleagues and Pearson, Professor Millon serves as Dean and Scientific Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology.
Scales
Motivating Styles
1A - Pleasure-Enhancing
1B - Pain-Avoiding
2A - Actively Modifying
2B - Passively Accommodating
3A - Self-Indulging
3B - Other-Nurturing
Thinking Styles
4A - Externally Focused
4B - Internally Focused
5A - Realistic/Sensing
5B - Imaginative/Intuiting
6A - Thought-Guided
6B - Feeling-Guided
7A - Conservation-Seeking
7B - Innovation-Seeking
Behaving Styles
8A - Asocial/Withdrawing
8B - Gregarious/Outgoing
9A - Anxious/Hesitating
9B - Confident/Asserting
10A - Unconventional/Dissenting
10B - Dutiful/Conforming
11A - Submissive/Yielding
11B - Dominant/Controlling
12A - Dissatisfied/Complaining
12B - Cooperative/Agreeing
Validity Indices
Positive Impression
Negative Impression
Consistency
Clinical Index
The MIPS Revised test offers separate norms for adults and college students, and for both separate and combined genders.
Adult Sample
The adult sample consisted of 1,000 individuals (500 females, 500 males) between the ages of 18 and 65, stratified according to the U.S. population by age, race/ethnicity, and education level.
College Sample
The college sample consisted of 1,600 students (800 males, 800 females), selected from 14 colleges and universities to be representative of a college student population in terms of ethnicity, age, year in school, major area of study, region of the county, and type of institution.
Interpretive Report (Product Number 21100)
Provides the full profile and an integrated analysis of the scales that gives depth to the components of personality measured by the test. This report examines the deeper motivations that orient individuals, the characteristic modes they use to construct and transform their cognitions, and the particular behaviors they have learned in order to relate to others. The interpretive report also includes the Clinical Index score.
View a sample Interpretive Report.
Profile Report (Product Number 21101)
Presents prevalence scores for all 24 scales in a newly revised, easy-to-read graph. The profile report can help give administrators a quick picture of the individual's personality styles.
View a sample Profile Report.
Q™ Local Software - Enables you to score assessments, report results, and store and export data on your computer.
Mail-in Scoring Service - Specially designed answer sheets are mailed to us for processing within 24–48 hours of receipt and returned via regular mail.
Hand Scoring - Administer assessments on answer sheets and score them quickly yourself with an answer key.
- Allows you to score the assessments at your site.
What is the MIPS Revised test designed to do?
The MIPS Revised test helps address the need for a theoretically grounded instrument that may be administered by a broad range of professionals. This comprehensive test provides a greater range of information than many other assessments of normal personality, while offering the efficiency of a brief, easy-to-administer tool.
In what settings is the MIPS Revised test appropriate?
It is useful as a counseling tool in private practice and university counseling centers as well as for career guidance, employee assistance and development programs, and job applicant screening.
How is the MIPS Revised test different from the original MIPS test?
Scale names and profile display were updated to provide administrators with a better, more intuitive approach to interpreting test results.
The MIPS Revised test is comprised of contrasting bipolar scale pairs. Does a high score on one scale necessarily mean a low score on the other scale?
No. Although the bipolarities in the MIPS Revised test appear to present clear contrasts in personality styles, individuals rarely fall unequivocally at one or another extreme. In other words, each bipolar construct represents a continuum on which an individual's scores will fall somewhere on a gradient that represents the extent to which he/she exhibits the characteristic in question.
Why are prevalence scores (PS) used instead of T scores?
The prevalence score scaling procedure used for the MIPS test is preferred to T scores because prevalence scores more accurately reflect differences in the prevalence of various personality traits in the population. The use of T-score transformations would impose an arbitrary statistical rule that bears little resemblance to the reality of normal population prevalence rates and would inaccurately represent the distribution of many personality traits.
What is the relevance of the Positive and Negative Impression scores?
The MIPS Revised test contains two scales that attempt to measure the extent to which an individual's response style is characteristic of a positive-impression or negative-impression response set. The Positive Impression (PI) scale was designed to identify those individuals who tried to create an overly positive impression of themselves on the test. The Negative Impression (NI) scale, on the other hand, was designed to identify individuals whose responses tend to be associated with a generally negative self-perception.
Will recording the wrong gender make a difference on the profile?
Yes, because the MIPS Revised test has separate male and female norms.