P scale and psychosis: Continued concerns.

Notes that the reply by H. J. Eysenck (see record 1978-20108-001) to D. V. Bishop's (1977) criticism of the Psychoticism scale of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire relies heavily for its rebuttal on information contained in a new book by the Eysencks (H. J. Eysenck and S. B. Eysenck, 1976) that was not available to Bishop for her critique. This new additional evidence did not, however, provide the present author with reassurance regarding the usefulness and validity of the P scale. It is argued that because of the extraordinary skewness of the P score distribution, high P scores can be a function simply of attention fluctuation, the error of measurement is especially large for high P scores, and the internal-consistency reliability of the P scale is inflated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)