Society for Personality Assessment: The Field Behind Serious Testing

The Society for Personality Assessment (SPA) is a professional group for psychologists who test personality. It was founded in 1938 as the Rorschach Institute. It publishes the Journal of Personality Assessment and runs a yearly convention where members train on specific tests and earn continuing education (CE) credit.

Its members work in clinics, hospitals, courts, and universities. You will sometimes see it written as the society of personality assessment. In its own words, SPA is dedicated to the development of methods of personality assessment, "the advancement of research on their effectiveness, the exchange of ideas about the theory and practice of assessment, and the promotion of the applied practice of personality assessment."

What does SPA do?

Day to day, SPA does three things. It publishes the Journal of Personality Assessment, where researchers check whether testing methods hold up. The journal began in 1936 as the Rorschach Research Exchange, a newsletter Bruno Klopfer started for people learning the inkblot test. It took its current name in 1971, and today it is published by Taylor & Francis. It runs a yearly convention where psychologists train on specific tests and earn continuing education credit. And it hands out awards. The best known is the Bruno Klopfer Award, SPA's top honor, named for its founder. It goes to a psychologist for a lifetime of major contribution to personality assessment. Behind all three sits a short list of habits the society has pushed for decades, set out in its 2006 position paper on training in psychological assessment. Use more than one method, check whether a person's answers are consistent and honest, and compare their scores against a large, well-described group of other people.

SPA history: from the Rorschach Institute to today

The society started almost by accident. In 1936 or 1937, a circle formed around Bruno Klopfer's workshops at Columbia University on the Rorschach inkblot test. It was incorporated as the Rorschach Institute in May 1938, and its first officers, named in 1939, had Klopfer as director and Morris Krugman as president. As the field grew past a single test, the name followed. It became the Society for Projective Tests and the Rorschach Institute in 1948, the Society for Projective Techniques in 1960, and the Society for Personality Assessment in 1971. The four names follow the field's own growth, from one inkblot test to the whole craft of measuring personality.

SPA vs the Society for Personality and Social Psychology

The two names get mixed up all the time. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, or SPSP, describes itself as the world's largest organization of personality and social psychologists, with more than 7,500 members. Its members mostly study how people think, feel, and behave around others, often through experiments. SPA is smaller and more hands-on. Its members give tests to people who need an answer: Is this patient depressed? Is this defendant fit to stand trial? Is a treatment working? For research on why people act as they do, go to SPSP. To learn how a psychologist would test you, go to SPA.

When SPA members say personality assessment, they mean something bigger than the online quiz most of us picture. A full assessment is a process run by a trained psychologist. It combines several tests with an interview and a person's history, and it is aimed at one specific question about one person. These are the tests that come up most in the society's convention workshops.

Test

Format

Items

Rough time

Ages

What it measures

Who gives it

MMPI-3

True or false questionnaire

335

About 25 to 50 minutes

18 and up

Personality traits and signs of mental health problems, with validity scales

A licensed psychologist

PAI

Four-step rating questionnaire

344

About 50 to 60 minutes

18 and up

Clinical problems, treatment needs, and personality, with validity scales

A licensed psychologist

Rorschach (R-PAS)

Say what you see in inkblots

10 cards

About 45 to 60 minutes

Children through adults

How a person sees, thinks, and handles stress

A psychologist trained in the scoring system

TAT

Tell stories about pictures

A chosen set of cards, often 8 to 12

About 30 to 60 minutes

Children through adults

Motives, relationships, and how a person makes sense of others

A trained psychologist

PID-5

Four-step rating questionnaire

220 (short form 25)

About 30 to 40 minutes

18 and up

Traits tied to the DSM-5 model of personality disorders

A clinician or researcher

MMPI-A-RF

True or false questionnaire

241

About 30 to 45 minutes

14 to 18

Teen personality and mental health problems, with validity scales

A licensed psychologist

MACI-II

True or false questionnaire

160

About 25 to 30 minutes

13 to 18

Teen personality patterns and clinical concerns

A licensed psychologist

The MMPI-3 is the newest version of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a true-or-false questionnaire first published in 1943. The University of Minnesota Press released the MMPI-3 in 2020. The PAI, or Personality Assessment Inventory, is a shorter questionnaire that asks how true each statement is on a four-step scale. The Rorschach, now often scored with a system called R-PAS, asks you to say what you see in ten inkblots. The TAT, or Thematic Apperception Test, asks you to tell stories about a set of ambiguous pictures. The PID-5 is a questionnaire tied to the newer, trait-based way the DSM-5, the main diagnostic manual in American mental health care, describes personality disorders.

Is the MMPI a personality assessment?

Yes, the MMPI is a personality assessment, and one of the most researched in clinical work. It covers both personality traits and signs of mental health problems. What sets it apart is its validity scales. These are groups of items that watch how you answer rather than what you answer. Some flag a person who agrees with everything. Others pick up someone reporting far more symptoms than is plausible, or someone painting themselves as unusually virtuous. If those scales look wrong, the psychologist may decline to interpret the rest of the test. That is the sharpest line between an MMPI and a test you find online: the MMPI expects some people to slant their answers and is built to notice. If you are weighing the two big clinical questionnaires against each other, our PAI versus MMPI-2 breakdown lines up items, time, and cost.

Personality inventory assessment vs performance-based methods

SPA's research sorts tests into two families. A personality inventory assessment, like the PAI, the PID-5, or the MMPI-3, asks you to describe yourself. It is quick to give, simple to score, and backed by large comparison groups. Its weakness is that you control every answer. Performance-based methods, like the Rorschach and the TAT, ask you to do a task instead. It is hard to tell what a good answer looks like, so steering the result takes more than wishful answering. Their weakness is that scoring them well takes years of training. The society's position, set out in its 2006 standards for training in psychological assessment and repeated across its workshops, is that neither family is enough alone. Good practice uses both, adds an interview, and looks for the places they agree. Psychologists call this multimethod assessment, and it is the most useful idea to carry out of SPA's world and into any test you take yourself. For a wider tour of the tools, see our guide to what each personality assessment measures and which to trust.

For its members, SPA comes down to three things: the journal, the dues, and the yearly convention. The Journal of Personality Assessment is published six times a year and included with membership. It is where new scoring methods, validity studies, and case research show up first.

How much does SPA membership cost?

SPA membership cost depends on your career stage. For 2026, dues are $175 for a Professional member or Fellow, which requires a doctorate in psychology, medicine, or a related field. Early Career members, in their first five years after the doctorate, pay $105. Graduate students pay $45, and so do undergraduates majoring in psychology or a related field. Associates, who hold a graduate degree below the doctorate, pay $175. Membership runs from January 1 to December 31. Rates are prorated from June 1, and anyone who joins after August 1 is covered for the rest of that year and all of the next. For an extra fee you can add membership in the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods, which includes its journal, Rorschachiana.

Does SPA offer CEs?

Yes. SPA is an approved continuing education sponsor through the American Psychological Association. Credits at its 2026 convention were also approved by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Psychology and the Canadian Psychological Association. A half-day workshop carries 3.5 CEs and a full-day workshop carries 7.

What does it cost to register for the SPA convention or workshops?

The 2026 SPA convention ran from March 25 to 29 at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto. Its sessions leaned on multimethod assessment, with a strong thread of trauma-informed and culturally responsive testing and newer talks on artificial intelligence in assessment. In-person registration had three price windows: early (through January 14), regular (January 15 to March 9), and late (from March 10). Students paid $109, $134, or $174. Members paid $399, $449, or $519. Non-members paid $539, $589, or $659. Workshops are bought separately, so you can register for workshops only, without the full convention. Cancellations for the convention or a workshop were refunded, minus a $75 fee, until March 9, 2026. After that date, no refunds were given. For members, half-day workshops ran $199 to $319 and full-day workshops $329 to $449. Workshop topics covered the MMPI-3, the teen version MMPI-A-RF, the PAI, the Rorschach under both R-PAS and the older Comprehensive System, the PID-5, the MACI-II, and the TAT. The 2027 convention is set for March 31 to April 4 in Long Beach, California. Prices were not posted when we wrote this, so check the society's site before you plan travel.

SPA is built for people who give personality tests as part of their job. That means clinical psychologists, forensic psychologists who test people for the courts, researchers who build and check instruments, and graduate students training for any of these. If you give the MMPI or score the Rorschach, SPA's workshops and journal are how you stay current. Psychology undergraduates can join too, at the student rate.

For everyone else, including students choosing a major, parents, and adults thinking about a new line of work, SPA is less a club to join and more a set of standards to borrow. Those standards make a good filter for any test you are about to take. Does it check whether your answers are consistent? Does it compare you with a large, clearly described group of people? Does it say plainly what it cannot tell you? A test that fails all three can still be fun. It should not steer a big decision.

Personality and skills assessment for career decisions

This is where many personality assessment searches end up: at a career choice. A personality and skills assessment for career decisions has two jobs. The personality half describes your style, such as how you decide, talk things through, and work with others. The skills half should show where you are strongest and what work stays satisfying over time. Most tools do only one of the two. A type test hands you a style and a loose list of jobs. An aptitude test scores one skill on one day. Our guide to aptitude tests vs psychometric tests sets the two families side by side. If you are ten or fifteen years into your working life, the question is usually narrower than either one: which of the things you already do well deserves the next decade.

What is the best personality assessment test?

There is no single best personality assessment. The society's research points to a better question: best for what? If the question is clinical, like diagnosing depression or judging risk in a court case, the strongest tools are clinician-given tests such as the MMPI-3 or the PAI, read alongside an interview, and only a licensed psychologist should be doing that. If the question is plain self-knowledge, most personality researchers rely on the Big Five. The Big 5 personality assessment page on our site walks through each score. If the question is a career decision, a personality test alone falls short, because it describes preference and style and stops before the work itself.

Whatever you choose, hold it to the bar the field uses. The testing standards psychologists work from ask three things of any test: does it measure the trait it names, does a retake land in the same place, and was it tried on people like you? Our accuracy comparison of career personality tests runs the popular options through them.

Beyond Personality Assessment: Find What You're Actually Good At

If a career decision brought you here, the SPA lesson carries over. Pick a format that resists slanted answers, and ask for evidence of what you do well alongside what you prefer. Pigment applies that lesson to working adults. Each question makes you choose between two statements, so you cannot take the flattering option every time, and one chapter of the report covers the work you would probably excel at, beside the roles your patterns point to. Pigment has no tie to SPA and makes no clinical judgments. It is career intelligence for people deciding what comes next.

Put Your Next Career Move Through a Tougher Test

Pigment has you choose one of two statements each time, the format researchers lean on to limit slanted answers. Your picks become a 36-page report naming your strengths and the jobs they point toward. The price is $79.99.

Start with the Pigment career test