Psychologists often use a variety of tests in their practice. Usually this is part of psychodiagnostics and helps to clarify and clarify many important points in a person's psychological state. Such tests are of two main types - personality and intelligence.
Intelligence tests study the cognitive abilities of a person - his attention, memory, ability to analyze, logic, etc. They may look like tasks or school examples. Sometimes, during their passage, it is necessary to perform mathematical actions, but sometimes these are just different cards with text or pictures. Such tests are used to determine readiness for school, as well as to identify intellectual abilities.
But personality tests study and help determine character traits, subtleties of temperament, behavior, emotional sphere, mood, willpower.
Most often, these tests look like questionnaires. On average, they have seventy to ninety questions, but there are also large questionnaires with more than five hundred questions. The more questions, the more accurately you can describe personality traits, calculate on the basis of their likelihood of behavior in certain situations, predict a person's compatibility with other team members, find the main psychological problems, complexes, and also positive qualities. Such tests are often used when applying for a job, during diagnostics in medical institutions.
Also, these tests are used by psychologists working with adolescents who are in the process of searching for their own self, their own identification, help them to better understand their own character.
There are also tests that help to understand the psychological mood in a team - a work, school class or in a family, both between spouses and between parents and children.
There are tests when the psychologist asks the test taker to draw something (for example, a house, family members, a tree, etc.), and from these drawings an experienced doctor can also draw conclusions about mood, problems in relationships with other family or team members, and even anxiety and depression.
Tests are not the only, but quite significant method of psychodiagnostics, and are successfully used by various psychiatrists. As a rule, their results (which can still be interpreted in different ways) must be supported by other data as well.
