Mental health articles

The Personality Belief Questionnaire (PBQ; Beck & Beck, 1995) is a 126-item, selfreport measure that contains the prototypical schema content of the Axis II disorders. Respondents are asked to rate how much they believe each statement (from 0 “I do not believe it at all” to 4 “I believe it totally”). A belief ascribed to avoidant personality disorder, for example, is “I am socially inept and socially undesirable in work and social activities.”

Beck et al. (2004) report that the psychometrics for the PBQ show good internal consistency for the various subscales among college students and psychiatric patients, and a modest correlation between the PBQ and both the Personality Disorder Questionnaire–Revised (PDQ-R; Hyler & Rieder, 1987) and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Personality Disorder (MMPI-Personality Disorder; Morey, Waugh, & Blashfi eld, 1985). Somewhat high intercorrelations were found among many of the PBQ scales. It may be that some sets of beliefs overlap and are not as conceptually distinct as conceived by cognitive theory, or perhaps the shared variance between belief sets is due to a general distress factor (Beck et al., 2004). The PBQ is used clinically to identify dysfunctional beliefs, construct a cognitive profi le, and target those beliefs in treatment.

Tags: personality, questionnaire