Behavior-based measures, also called Objective Personality Tests (OPTs), have a long history in Psychology. During the last decade, their use and development was notably boosted in different fields of psychology as in social psychology, differential psychology, psychological assessment and, a number of applied fields. OPTs aim to capture behavior in highly standardized miniature situations; they lack transparency, and do not require introspection. Therefore, they are supposed to avoid two well-known weaknesses of self-reports: limited self-knowledge and impression management. Nevertheless, do current concepts of OPTs fulfil psychometric properties and standards in a way that allow for their application beyond their use in research? Within this symposium we aim to present a mixture of established and new developments and aim for further insight in OPTs psychometric properties with special regard to their validity and discuss how they can contribute to the advancement of personality research and assessment.

Study 1 (n=615) tested stability, reliability, and validity of behavioral reactions in economic games as indicators of altruistic and fairness dispositions. We assessed financial decisions in three independent rounds of a dictator-game and an ultimatum-game. Additionally, we assessed decisions in one round of a mixed-game. In this situation, participants were observers of a dictator-situation and decided what amount to invest in order to punish Person A and/or to compensate Person B, depending of Person A’s allocation to Person B. Six weeks later, behavioral reactions were assessed again. In addition, self-report measures of personality dispositions were administered. Latent-State-Trait Models revealed high relative stability of behavioral reactions and high reliability of the economic games. In Study 2, (n=518) a longitudinal design with three measurement occasions across 6 months, behavioral reactions in a dictator game and an ultimatum game were repeatedly measured together with self-reported personality dispositions. Importantly, this design informs about the relationship between changes in behavioral reactions and personality measures over time. Results and implications will be discussed.

Risk propensity referes to the individual tendency to choose highly rewarded alternatives even if they have a lower probability of occurrence (or even high probability of loses). Traditionally, the assessment of such construct has flipped from self-reports devoted to assess related constructs, such as sensation seeking or impulsivity, to a more or less domain-specific self-reports about concrete risk taking behaviors. Last decade has shown the development of several objective task-based personality tests (OPTs) with promising results, such as the BART (Lejuez et al., 2002), the GDT (Brand et al., 2005), the RT (Rubio el at, 2010) or the PTR (Aguado et al., 2011). Nevertheless, there are still certain aspects to explore. On the one hand, the role of task performance feedback in risk propensity assessment; one of the most reputed OPT (BDT) usually gives feedback on performance while other (RT) gives no feedback at all. The present contribution is aimed to show the effect of a controlled feedback on task performance. Ordinarily, OPTs have failed in showing convergent validity with domain-specific risk-taking self-reports. In this case, convergent validity of the PTR with the general personality dimensions supposedly related to risk-taking behavior is presented.

The Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) represents a OPT of the new generation and has been widely and successfully used as a research tool for the assessment of risk taking for more than a decade. Literature reported scores tht revealed to be positively associated with self-reported risk-related behaviors such as smoking, gambling, drug and alcohol consumption, and risky sexual behaviors. Although the BART has been established as a research tool, but has not been used a measure for single case assessment or in clinical consulting so far. The following contribution further analyzes psychometric properties of the BART with special regard to its convergent and discriminant correlations with OPTs, rating scales and IATs, its criterion validity, and its temporal stability based on data of 370 participants who completed on the BART on three measurement occasions with 1-2 weeks between trials. Data shows that the BART assement is more stable than occasion specific aspect of the construct. Furthermore, data endorse that analyzes of construct validity based on simple MTMM approaches remains a crucial aspect in evaluation of OPTs.

Dual-process theories have often been explained the fact that implicit (via IATs) or behavioral (via OPTs) measures of personality are not or only weakly correlated with scores achieved on explicit rating scales. However, only few neuroimaging studies have tested whether these modes are represented by separate neuronal systems. A functional imaging study assessed differences in brain activations in a group of 60 healthy adult participants. We chose two OPTs, the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) and the Game of Dice Task (GDT), whereby the BART has been suggested to measure risk taking more spontaneously, and the GDT has been suggested to measure risk taking more reflectively. In the BART, risky decisions yielded significantly stronger activations than safe decisions in the bilateral caudate, as well as the bilateral Insula. In the GDT, risky decisions also yielded significantly stronger activations than safe decisions in the bilateral caudate and Insula, but additionally in the ACC and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal cortex, regions previously associated with cognitive control and number processing. Thus, implicit processing was associated with subcortical activations, while more explicit processing activated similar areas, but was additionally associated with activation in cortical, particularly prefrontal regions.