Posts Tagged ‘police stress’

Police Psychology | Law Enforcement Spirituality Part 2

Posted: December 10, 2015 in Other Tools
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In New York, as I am sure in many major cities, it is common to find many members of the departments who are Jewish.  But isn’t their faith antithetical to police work?  My conservative Jewish Intern will explain.  As we are traveling through the Hanukkah season we must not forget the members of the Jewish faith in Blue.  — Gary and Anne

An Officer and Jewish

 

Today, we have reached a point in time where discrimination is not only discouraged—it is illegal. This is with regards to gender, race, ethnicity, and religion. Despite this, there are Star of David, Police Psychologymany things to consider within a religious group. In this post, I would like to discuss with you some considerations that must be evaluated for Jews who want to join the police force.

The Chumash (one of the sections of the Jewish bible) requires that Jews establish a police force. Indeed, a robust police force is a required feature of all Jewish communities. At the same time, the bible makes it very clear that police officers are enforcers, not executors of justice, or punishers. The role of police officers is to find and prevent criminal activities. Their responsibilities do not include exacting retribution against those they feel are deserving. This is an important distinction that is emphasized many times in the bible—and it is a distinction that bears emphasizing here. Studies show that there are three main levels of police force: legal, extra-legal, and excessive. Most notably, many cops maintain that extra-legal force (while not within the technical confines of the law) is allowed and necessary depending on the situation and other abstract factors. In other words, many times cops see themselves as the executors of justice, while, in fact, their role is really meant to be enforcers of justice.

And yet, despite the requirement to establish a strong police force in every community, historically, the Jews have had a distrust for the civil authority. This often led to a disinterest in joining secular police forces. For instance, it is recorded that one Jewish man was a detective and investigator for the Roman police force, and his friends all told him this brought about “divine displeasure.” The story ends there, but many Rabbis explain the reasoning here. In these ancient time periods, the secular government was oftentimes unfair and unjust. People did not receive fair trails, and punishments were regularly inhumane and excessive. For this reason, this man’s friends frowned upon the practice of ratting our Jewish criminals to the Roman authority. This, however, was the case in that particular circumstance. Today, joining secular police forces are seen as a respectable profession in the Jewish community. Why? Because the laws and consequences in this country are executed fairly, equal treatment for all. In such a case, the bible permits reporting on other Jews, even if they are alleged violators.

In fact, in some cases it is even encouraged to join the police force! One concern many people address is the idea that the bible encourages us to lead lifestyles of refinement and poise. The concern here is that being exposed to a life of violence and authority that invariably comes hand in hand with police work may be incompatible with the personality and the psyche that God encourages us to pursue. But, many Rabbis explain that this is not a valid concern. Indeed, it is recorded in many books that everyone has different personalities and inclinations for different professions. The bible says there are those people who are predisposed toward violence and blood. Instead of trying to counter their very nature, we should encourage them to pursue positive professions that are align with their personalities. For instance, such an individual should become a butcher and sell animal meat. In psychological terms, this is called sublimation, a Freudian defense mechanism. Sublimation is a mature defense mechanism where socially unacceptable behaviors (such as murder and violence) are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable behaviors (such as become a butcher). Eventually, this can lead to a permanent alteration of the initial inappropriate impulse.

Police work is just like this. The bible does not want to discourage people who have a penchant for control, authority, even violence and toughness. Instead, it wants to nurture it and find positive outlets for such behaviors. Becoming enforcers of the law—particularly in developed countries in which we can rely on the fact that the laws will be just and equal—is one such way to do so.

Reports from Jewish police officers also show that “Jewish cops often feel in their work a sense of moral mission that is intertwined with their Judaism.” In other words, many cops (Jewish and otherwise) are motivated by their faith. This moral framework can help Jews navigate the more unpleasant realities of police work. Many Jews encourage a lifestyle of “tikun olam”—making the world a better place. Working with law enforcement gives these Jewish individuals a sense that they are working toward a greater goal, one of betterment for our society.

Today, there are about 3,000 Jews in the NYPD. While this is a small percentage, it should also be noted that many Jews volunteer for citizen watch programs (called “shomrim” in the Jewish communities). In addition, Jews have a long-standing history with law enforcement in America. Historical records show that a Polish Jew living in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in the 1600s demanded that the governor allow him to take up arms alongside the other colonists in order to protect his home.

Perhaps Jews will always feel a sense of being an “outsider,” especially when it comes to being a police officer. And perhaps Jews will always look at authority figures with a sense of trepidation (considering what happened with the Holocaust, this may even be a valid concern). But the fact that Jews are becoming increasingly involved with local police forces is definitely a step forward in the right direction.

Yocheved Pahmer
Police Psychology Intern

 

Blog Administrator: Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.

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Police Psychology | Dreams: What Do They Mean?

Posted: December 3, 2015 in Public Information Bureau
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Police Psychology | Dreams: What Do They Mean?

In police psychology we often get asked the question, “what does my dream mean?” A dream is a wish your heart makes when you’re fast asleep…When Cinderella sang this song many years ago, she was just adding to an age-old psychological and philosophical debate. Dream Door, police psychologyAre dreams a window to another world or dimension? Maybe a look into the future? A physiological process in response to something in the environment? A biological necessity? In short: when our heads hit the pillow and we get some shut eye, what on earth are we thinking?

…Perchance to Dream

Dreams can come in many variations. Some dreams are extremely vivid. Others are much hazier. Some dreams wake you up and you can describe them in great details. Others you don’t even remember having. Sometimes, in dreams, you have superpowers and can do incredibly unnatural things. Other times you’re inept, like you’re running in glue, barely able to move or escape. Some people notice recurring dreams or recurring themes in their dreams. I used to have this recurring dream that I was sitting in a college classroom taking a test, but I had never gone to the class. When I looked at the test, I didn’t know anything. I had it probably 50 times through college and grad school. The night after I defended my doctoral dissertation, the recurring dream started, but this time I threw down the paper and walked out of the class. That was the last time I had it. Don’t need to be Freud to figure that one out! Some people can explain certain aspects of their dreams as relating to things they have seen or experienced in the past couple of days. Or recently some of my cops have delved into their own police psychology when they describe dreams of dangerous shoot-no shoot situations where they can’t make up their minds because the perpetrator is a minority. Pretty safe one to interpret given the news of the United States. But all this still begs the question: what is a dream?

Early psychoanalysts explained that dreams are a way to safely live our unconscious fantasies and desires. It is a way for us to experience things that society may deem inappropriate or detrimental. Like dreaming of burning down your school building or office, or dating your celebrity crush. However, when you dream about a killer ballerina chasing after you with a bloody ax, or a girl you’re dating turning into a huge nasty boa constrictor and choking you out (no wonder I stayed single such a long time) …you’d probably need to ask yourself what’s wrong with your unconscious and why you would ever have such strange desires. True, your unconscious may not be playing out your desires literally, but that doesn’t negate the fact that there’s probably more to the story. So, let’s put the idea that dreams help us live out our unconscious fantasies on the back burner and explore some other possibilities.

The Function of Dreams

Dream key, Police stressSome psychologists who explored the function behind dreams, say that dreams help us organize and evaluate our memories and emotions from the past few days, making it easier to solve our current problems. This is called the information-processing theory of dreams: when we dream, our synapses are strengthened, thus strengthening the connections we made and the information we learned during the day. There is some evidence for that. Dreams are also said to be cathartic—like our own personal therapy. Instead of talking, we dream. Others suggest that we dream in order to prepare ourselves in case we ever encounter threatening situations. Dreams, in other words, are test-runs or practice drills for us. When we dream, our amygdala is activated and firing in similar ways as when we are in threatening situations. Our fight-or-flight response tends to kick in too. In other words, when we’re trying to escape from a hammerhead shark (or that damn boa constrictor, those things move fast you know), that’s our brain’s way of saying, “If you can do it in your sleep, you can do it in real life.” So, when you find yourself in the middle of the street in Smurf underwear, your brain is going to be patting itself on the back knowing it prepared you for this very moment.  Don’t quite buy that!

When we sleep, we go through different cycles. REM sleep, which stands for Rapid Eye Movement, is when our dreams occur. During REM sleep, our limbic system is activated. This includes the amygdala (which is involved in our fight-or-flight response) and the hippocampus (which is involved in memory consolidation and storage). The activation-synthesis model of dreaming suggests that when these internal processes are triggered, our brain synthesizes and interprets the information provided and attempts to makes sense of it by creating visuals for us: dreams.

There are many studies that suggest the necessity of dreaming. Studies in which participants were woken right as they were entering REM sleep showed that these individuals experienced higher rates of tension, anxiety, irritation, and irritability. They also ate a lot more food and gained weight more easily. Without dreams, memory consolidation would be a lot harder, and the information that typically travels into our long-term memory during this time would not do so. Although it is still unclear exactly why all these things occur, depriving people of the ability to dream can have severe consequences on their mental and physical health. They can even start having hallucinations. One of the first things I do when someone comes in physically disturbed or in PTSD is try to get them sleeping right. Need to get that full REM time.

So What’s in a Dream?

Some physiologists say we are just eating up old neurotransmitters when we dream. Are you getting the idea we don’t really agree on things. It goes back to my old saying when you have many interpretations of the same phenomenon maybe that is because there is not just one cause. When multiple causes are behind something we often call it an interaction effect. Maybe sometimes our dreams are eating up neurotransmitters, maybe we are living out our unconscious desires in some dreams, maybe we are just entertaining ourselves with other dreams. It is hard to say when you have an interaction effect. So how do you interpret them if there is no one cause? That I leave to the simple steps below.

 

Police psychology: simple stepsSimple Steps to Interpreting Your Dreams

  1. The first thing I tell my clients, forget the content and concentrate on the feeling. How did you feel when watching the dream? Whatever it was, it was probably reflective of a feeling now. If you felt good it is probably reflective of a lack of concern in life or perhaps the place you want to be in once what is going on in life is over. If you felt anxious, it is probably reflective of an anxiety about something in life. Helpless — the same. Put it your present emotional context and look at the emotion.
  2. Think then about relating it to your life. What is going on in your life that can arise the same emotion? Are you anxious about money and could be dreaming in such a way as that is coming through? Are the unhappy about your children’s work and have made a dream about that?       Are you feeling helpless or trapped in their marriage? Find out what is the same feeling you have in their normal life and put it in perspective.
  3. Finally, look at what the dream is telling you to do. Dreams don’t often reflect any more than the initial feeling, but if you are running from something and turn back toward it to fight, maybe that could be a message to you to find a way to fight the cause of your anxiety in your life. Don’t get overly motivated and go do something rash, but think about the best way to take what the dream is telling you.  If there is a message, consider it as something you have to figure out.
 Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.
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Police Psychology | Selective Memory

Posted: November 18, 2015 in Mastering Thoughts
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Police Psychology | Selective Memory

 

In police psychology, we need to have a pretty good understanding of memory in order to help cops deal with police stress.

Have you ever been accused of having selective memory? Has your spouse ever asked you to do something that slips your mind, and they accuse you of deliberately ignoring that task? Have you ever thought back on a relationship and remembered it differently than the reality?memory dementia Buzzfeed recently made a video about this: one girl who was telling her friend how happy she had been when her ex-boyfriend had taken her on a hike and told her, “I love you” for the first time. The friend quickly reminded her that they had only made it to the entrance of the hike before the ex insisted they turn around, and he had actually said, “Love ya.”

It is very common for us to look back on events and remember them differently (“It was raining!” “No, it was sunny!”), or not remember things that happened to us at all! For some reason, the stories we tell tend to get better or worse each time we recount them. If you’ve ever fallen down and gotten a small scrape, chances are you told all your friends you got injured saving a dog from getting hit by a car. And then that you single-handedly lifted the car up in the air. And then you threw the car all the way down the street. Too much? Maybe. But that doesn’t change the fact that we all have the tendency to remember things inaccurately.  Perhaps Paul Simon said it best in his song Kodachrome:

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together
For one night
I know they’d never match
My sweet imagination
Everything looks worse
In black and white.

Football Days of Youth

When I was younger, I used to have warts on my hands (I wish I didn’t remember that, I actually used to get them one at a time maybe once a year). One day while I was playing nose tackle in varsity football my sophomore year, my hand wart and all—got caught in the face mask of the center. The guy, (who by the way used to give me rides until I was legal to drive), bit off one of my warts with his teeth. I know, I know, it was disgusting. He was spitting and choking, but when he recovered we had two sides to a great story. In his, he almost bit off my hand he was so mean, in mine he ate my wart and they have not come back since. We told that story to every single person we knew, and to many people we didn’t. The story changed a little, but we both had gotten the maximum laugh from it. About 30 years later when I went back to my hometown and saw this guy again, he said to me, “Hey Gary, remember that time you bit a wart off of my hand?” He actually believed this version of the story—to him, that was exactly what happened. I mean, you definitely can’t blame the guy for trying to change the story in this direction, but what made him do this? Why do we change our memories to fit our needs? And, more interestingly, how do we manage to get away with doing something like this? Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, but how do we get to the point that we actually start to believe that the good story is the truth?

Police Psychology | The Power of Reconsolidation and Repression

There are a number of different reasons we can force figure with ribbonourselves to forget or alter a memory, and we often aren’t even aware of doing this. One such way is through embellishment. When we retell a story, essentially we are recalling it from the place we stored it in our long-term memory. And yet each time we recall the story and recount it, we are only recalling a facsimile of the actual event, a mere picture of the episode. Thus each time we tell the story, it tends to be slightly different than the reality. Further, every time something happens to us, the “event” travels from our short-term memory into our long-term memory in a process called consolidation. If something interrupts this consolidation process, the event will never make it all the way to our long-term memory. Think of it like a train that gets derailed or sidetracked, and never ends up back at the station. Importantly, recent studies on memory have shown that every time you recall a memory (either in your own mind, or in order to recount it to someone else) and then put it back in your long-term memory, your memory reconsolidates. And when this reconsolidation process occurs, any emotion or feeling that you are experiencing in this moment tends to get stuck to the memory. Thus, the next time you recall this memory, not only are you remembering a facsimile of the original memory, but you are also remembering bits and pieces of the last time you brought up this memory, and the time before that. It’s like an internal game of telephone. So, even if we don’t embellish a story on purpose, and tell it often enough that we start confusing it with reality, our minds will automatically adjust the memory slightly every time we recall it. Of course, in police psychology, cops are known as the great embellishers to make stories funny or more poignant, except the incident that gets to them and that gets us to our next change.

Another reason memories tend to get changed or forgotten is due to repression. When something extremely embarrassing happens to us or rattles our cage a little, we may feel like it’s the end of the world, but in reality, the acute embarrassment or shock fades and is often forgotten. That is called repression. If we repress a memory often enough, our minds will actually throw it away, in a sense, permanently erasing it from our memory store. It does this either as a defense mechanism, or because there is so much going on in this world, that we need to get rid of some information if we want to engage in any higher cognition. Think of it as a spring-cleaning—your brain periodically throws away some things that are just don’t sit well or clutter your mind. You need to be extremely careful with this one though: sometimes repressing or removing memories is good for your mental health (in fact, we use this in police psychology to help cops deal with police stress), but if it gets to the point that you become avoidant, that can lead to some really detrimental long-term consequences.

Police Psychology | Cognitive Dissonance

A third reason we remember things differently is due to a concept called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance was a theory created by Leon Festinger based on observations of cult members who believed the earth was about to be destroyed. Many of them sold their homes and prepared for The End. Yet, when The End was not forthcoming, instead of admitting they were wrong all along, the devoted members said the disaster was averted because of the faithfulness of the cult members. Another study he conducted involved having participants do a number of mindless tasks, like stack papers and then unstuck them, and stack them again and again and again. They were either paid $1 or $20 to tell the participants in the waiting room how exciting and interesting the task was. Later asked to rate how interesting the task was, those who were paid $1 said they really enjoyed the task, while those who were paid $20 said it was pretty boring. Why? Cognitive Dissonance, of course!

Cognitive dissonance is when a feeling of discomfort forces you to change your attitude or how you feel. Those who were given $20 to lie about the task being interesting didn’t feel any dissonance or guilt about doing so because they were being substantially rewarded. Those who were given only $1 to lie about the task felt guilty for lying because that really isn’t such a strong incentive to tell a lie, and in order to assuage this feeling of guilt/dissonance, they changed the way they felt and remembered the task. So when you make a big fuss about going somewhere, and your partner has no interest in going but finally agrees to take you there, and it turns out to be a big flop, chances are you will remember it being better than it actually was so that you don’t feel so bad for dragging your partner all the way there. The mind is a beautiful thing!

Police psychology: simple stepsThree Steps to Using this Material

  1. Reconsolidation. So why do you forget that your spouse told you to do something on her honey-do list? It could be that you kept repeating it over and over in your mind and the internal game of telephone morphed it into something like “don’t forget to watch the football game today honey!” She probably won’t buy that, but give it a shot.
  2. Repression. It could be because the memory was connected to some seriously traumatic event and you just repressed it. I mean perhaps cleaning the bathroom has a trigger connection to an errant memory of gang graffiti that almost got you killed when you were a young cop.       SO you just threw the memory away.       That’s probably not going to work either, but it would be scientifically correct.
  3. Cognitive Dissonance. Or you could give yourself permission to realize you got a bunch of good stuff on your mind, and some bad stuff and it just wasn’t the top thing in your priority inbox. Then you fashion a response that you believe your spouse deserves a better job that you could do so you were looking to hire a team of migrant workers to outsource who barely have the porridge to feed their children much less built a school so they will do the bathroom job and make it a sparkling clean. The only problem was the struggling migrant workers won’t be in town until tomorrow. She definitely won’t believe that, but the laugh payoff may work for the cognitive dissonance and let you make it through another day. Sometimes that’s all we need in life.
 Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.
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Police Psychology | Apples to Orangutans: Life’s Comparisons

Posted: November 12, 2015 in Mastering Thoughts
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Police Psychology | Apples to Orangutans: Life’s Comparisons

 

Police psychology has to constantly deal with comparisons cops make. It is essential to cut them off before they get to be a big problem. What comparisons you ask? “I can’t believe that every day I have to deal with Skylar Police Psychology, oragutanswhining constantly and not listening. You do something about her!” his spouse says as she throws her hands up in the air. The cop thinks about the body he just pulled out of a car and applied first aid until the paramedics came. Or, how hard it was to keep a domestic incident out of the kitchen earlier in the day because that is where the knives are. Or, the three hours of paperwork either one of these situation caused and thinks a little kid whining just doesn’t compare.

Everyone in the world makes comparisons. She’s prettier than me. He’s smarter than me. Her house is bigger than mine. His kids are more respectful than my kids. She’s taller than me, and I’m taller than him, if she wears heels, I will be embarrassed. We tend to compare everything in our own lives to other situations. It helps us put our own problems in perspective. It helps us rank our own successes against other people. It gives us something to which we can measure applesourselves and see if we come out on top. It even helps us know what to expect in the future. This is a very natural thing to do, and it can even help you improve by demonstrating which areas you need to focus on and which areas are already your strengths. However, there is one major downside to such comparisons (aside from the obvious blow to your self-esteem), your “comparison” scale can become incredibly skewed, especially when you encounter a wide range of situations, each with a different level of concern. Also, you can invalidate another person’s problems and create stress for yourself. Nothing in real life can measure up to a catastrophic world full of people real problems. This is especially the case when it comes to police psychology and police stress.

Police Psychology: Cop Comparisons

Cops make the same comparisons everyone else make: his partner is better than my partner; he gets paid more than I get paid; his gun is bigger than my gun (okay, maybe not so much that). But they also take these comparisons one step further. They look at every problem they encounter and measure it up against previous situations they’ve been in. For instance, a shoplifting case that a cop is confronted with seems relatively trivial compared to the fatal crash he had to solve last week. Dealing with a man who ran a red light seems so insignificant when compared to the rape last night. Because cops experience some of the most extreme situations out there, their comparison scales get completely messed up. The high-end of their scale is much higher than a typical person’s scales. This becomes a significant problem when they come home from work and take the scale with them.

At home, they are forced to measure average, day-to-day problems against the larger one’s that law enforcement personnel deal with. When this occurs, the typical “home” problems definitely fall short. Killing a bee that got into the house is a small problem when compared to the company’s finances collapsing, or the shooting they witnessed that morning, or even the domestic abuse they had to put a stop to. And because of this, it becomes much easier to brush off such a problem, or say no to a request.

This mindset can pose a serious problem both to their mental stability and their home life, creating a lot of police stress. When they compare every single situation at home to a problem they encountered while on the job, of course their home problems will seem smaller. It is important for cops to understand that their spouse and their kids don’t have the same scale of comparison. When your wife gets upset that you left the toilet seat up, and you brush it off as, “no big deal” compared to the other things you’ve had to put up with this week, it sends the message to her that you don’t care about her needs. Or you might hear “you’re not validating my feelings” if they have been watching a lot of TV therapists. You end up belittling the things that she finds concerning. When your kids ask you to pick them up from school, and you forget to get them on time, they can’t brush it off as easily as you can. Sure, a cop can think, “What’s the big deal running a few minutes late?” But to your kids, this can be huge.

In police psychology, we need to understand that this problem stems completely from the fact that cops and other people in law enforcement have an entirely different scale of comparison, not because they lack sensitivity. To them, a “big problem” is a murder. To an average person, a “big problem” is when the pilot light goes off and the heat shuts off so you don’t have hot running water for your shower in the morning, or when you can’t do laundry because your spouse forgot to pick up detergent from the store last night. Because this scale is completely different, it is hard for cops to translate other people’s concerns onto their own scale. While putting the toilet seat down may fall high on their wife’s scale, it would barely make it onto a cop’s scale when put in the context of the rest of the problems he/she encounters. When you can learn how to adjust your scale to account for different degrees of work-problems and different degrees of home-problems, you are taking an enormous step in the right direction for your own mental health and your relationship.

Police psychology: simple steps3 Simple Steps: The Importance of Different Scales

  1. Compare the two scales.  So, sure, when you compare murder to picking up the socks you left on the floor last night, the latter problem doesn’t even seem worth mentioning. But bear in mind, on your spouse’s scale, “messy house” may be high up there if she is a concrete-sequential person. It’s a delicate balancing act, but one that really deserves your attention. In order to confront this, cops really need to learn how to adjust their scale to account for “simpler” problems as well. A problem is a problem. On a sheet of paper, create two different scales: your work scale and your home scale. Put down the major problems you have encountered in each setting. Then read them. It will be hard to see the two lists as equal, but you must do that. It can save your marriage.
  2. See the Present, Project into the future.  Brushing your teeth every night may not seem like such a big concern of yours when you compare it to the work problems you have. But, believe me, if you ignore that problem long enough, it will slowly pick its way higher up on the “problem scale.” Things that are ignored have a way of affecting your life.   Look at your list and keep it in the present. Which of these things are affecting your life right now and in the future?  For example a domestic affected your life at the time, but does it affect your life right now. Brushing teeth may have a huge affect on your life in the future. Measuring future impact may change the values of some of the work things you have handle already.
  3. Who am I dealing with?  Before frustration and subsequent anger, ask yourself “is this person trying to hurt me?” Amidst the problem of raising kids and living day-to-day we forget that at one point we picked the person we are with because of certain individual qualities they had. Is their scale of problems really important in the grand scheme of things?    If your answer is yes, figure out how you are going to separate yourself. If it is no, then let them have their tragedies at whatever level they want, and move past it. You will be a better person because of it.

Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.

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Hogwarts and Police Psychology

Posted: October 26, 2015 in Public Information Bureau
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Hogwarts and Police Psychology

by Drs. Gary Aumiller and Scott Stubenrauch (Guest Blogger)

What if we told you that Hogwarts was real and police psychology is used frequently with the new students? What if there really was a Sorting Hat that could define your personality and place you into a specific house? However, instead of four houses (Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw), there are five: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN). Which one would you choose? Well, if you have a proclivity for adventure and a vivid imagination, you would most likely be sorted into ‘Openness’. Alternatively, if you consider yourself to be more compassionate and empathetic, then 15 points for Agreeableness! Quirky are you? – perhaps Neuroticism.

These five ‘houses’ are actually known in Police Psychology as the ‘Big Five’. These five traits make up what we know to be as someone’s “personality” at least in some theories. You may be thinking to yourself: “Why these five traits? I mean, of all the adjectives we would use to describe my colleague’s personality, none would be so pleasant (and censored) as any of the aforementioned words above. I mean the guy’s a complete jerk. And don’t even get me started on his hygiene…” What? You’re still here…? Oh… this is awkward.  Anyway, to figure out why these five personality traits were picked, we must understand the history of a psychologist named Raymond Cattell, his involvement with factor analysis, and why he is so important to the field of Psychology.

The Importance of Personality Screening

Raymond Cattell was a psychologist who lived in the 1900’s to the 1990’s. He was very interested in how everything was correlated. He used ‘Factor Analysis’, a statistical method used to weed out all the unnecessary variables (factors) that shouldn’tPOLICE PSYCHOLOGY, testing be considered in an analysis. For example, we all know a person’s behavior is comprised of many different factors. Cattell was able to take over 20,000 words that served as descriptors of personality, and through Factor Analysis, he was able to narrow down all the personality traits into 16 relevant factors that make up a person’s full personality profile. In Cattell’s own words, “For psychology to take its place as an effective science, we must become less concerned with grandiose theory than with establishing, through research, certain basic laws of relationship.” Factor Analysis is this complex technique where you throw in a bunch of questions totally unrelated and you get them separated into clusters based on themes, which become a single factor. One of the authors did this on his dissertation, way back when, with computer cards and a couple of days of waiting. Cattell did it with paper and pencil and a slide rule (which is an ancient mathematical torture device that only two students in any class could figure out before computers were around). Nowadays, you can probably do factor analysis on an iPad in seconds.

Thus, Cattell developed the ‘Sixteen Personality Factor (16PF®) Questionnaire’. This test is equivalent to the ‘sorting hat’ of Hogwarts—it can identify your personality, predict which career you would be most likely to pursue, and how well or not so well you may perform in a given position (although it doesn’t sing a catchy song while doing so). Later on, these 16 relevant factors were further narrowed down into the “Big Five” traits as we know them today.

The Institute for Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT), Inc. publishes the 16PF Questionnaire, which is now in its 5th edition. Their clients who use it do so to screen through interested job applicants, identify and develop leaders, provide insights for those looking to explore a college major or new career, and to aid in individual and couples counseling. It has great predictive research and selection reports for police and other first responder personnel. And—in case you haven’t guessed yet—Cattell founded this institution and his family led it until 2007.

As we’re sure you know from reading previous blog posts on this site, those of us in police psychology are very concerned with the various personality traits of our uniformed personnel. It is crucial to know how a policeman would react in a high-stress situation; would he run away or into the fray? (What is a fray, by the way?) Call his mom? Take a selfie? Curl up into a fetal position and cry? Break the law? Enforce the law? None of the above? As it turns out, tests have shown that ‘protective service officers’ are more likely to be cool and collected under pressure. But we don’t limit these personality tests to police officers. If one’s personality isn’t properly understood, he/she could end up in the wrong profession. This is why Raymond Cattell’s 16PF Questionnaire is so important—to ensure that you don’t hire a vegan to be a butcher, an agoraphobic as a public speaker, or the local drug dealer as your pharmacist.  And IPAT, the company started by Cattell (did we tell you that?) has an assessment tool that is perfect for predicting law enforcement officers success on the job. No wonder we like IPAT so much!

Harry Potter changed the world of wizards and muggles when he killed Voldemort (He-who-must-not-be-named). He was a wizard with special power and a vision to be able to defeat Voldemort and return the balance to the world. The author, J.K. Rowling, used tremendous creativity to make you constantly say to yourself “How did she think of that?” Cattell, too, had a special power and a vision. He had the power to see personality characteristics as having a problem of content validity (making up the content arbitrarily) and the vision to apply a complicated mathematical concept to solve the problem. He also had creativity as he created not only the 16PF Questionnaire, but a Culture Fair Intelligence Test, the concept of crystallized and fluid intelligence, and numerous ability tests. And he created the company IPAT to keep his tests alive and to allow the police psychology world to have a choice for testing.

So, similar to Hogwarts without Harry, we do not know what police psychology would be without Raymond Cattell. What we do know, his name covered three questions on the most recent Psychology GRE; IPAT is an essential publisher of testing in police selection; and we are still writing about Cattell years later. He must have had something going for him.

Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.

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