Millon

VERSIÓN COMPUTARIZADA PARA LA APLICACIÓN
DEL LISTADO DE SÍNTOMAS 90 (SCL 90)
Y DEL INVENTARIO DE TEMPERAMENTO Y CARÁCTER (ITC)
Leopoldo González-Santos*, Roberto E. Mercadillo*, Ariel Graff*, **, Fernando A. Barrios*

SUMMARY
Psychometric tests are effective to measure psychological characteristics, including personality, motivation, intellectual abilities and
psychopathological traits.The Psychopathological diagnostic could
be supported on some of these psychometric tests, which ideally
should be of simple and fast application. Two of the most common tests are the Symptom Check List 90 (SCL 90) and the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI).
SCL 90, developed by Derogatis, Lipman and Covi in 1973, is a
90-item self-report inventory that assesses the level of distressexperienced by the subject. Items are comprised in nine dimensions: somatization, obsessive-compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation and psychoticism.
The SCL 90 has been translated into several languages and has
been successfully applied in Argentina and Spain. In Mexico, CruzFuentes et al. and Lara et al. considered that this test canbe well
used as a psychometric instrument in clinical research.
Due to its efficiency and brief time to response (12-15 min.), the
SCL 90 has been administered to support psicopathological diagnostics and to complement the research of epilepsy, social-behavior disorders, physical disorders, pharmacological treatment and for the
comparison of psychological features in crosscultural studies.The TCI is a self-applied test that describes personality according to Clonninger’s psychobiological model. In this model temperament is described as highly heritable and stable during lifetime, and it is divided in four dimensions: novelty seeking, harm
avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence. Character is described as being determined by the individual’s experience and is
modifiableduring life-time. It is divided in to three dimensions
self-directedness, cooperativeness and self-transcendence.
The TCI has been used to correlate personality features to genetics variability and to complement clinical studies that involves
psychiatric disorder, such as, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and depression. This test has been translated and administered
in American, French,German, Korean and Spanish populations.
In Mexico, Sánchez-Carmona, Páez, López and Nicolini considered that the TCI constitute a psychometric test that can be used to
develop the clinical research in Mexican populations.
In recent years, research and clinical evaluation in several countries, such as United States and France, have successfully designed
and applied computerized versions of the SCL90 and TCI. These

versions provide a quicker rate of testing and a permanent storage of data.
In this work, we analyze the validity of viability to apply a computerized version of the SCL 90 and the TCI in Spanish. This computerized version was previously developed at the Instituto de
Neurobiología de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
This version involves a computer program inJava language, which
give an easy access to the users and is compatible with any computational environment. The sequence to answer the computerized
version involves five steps: a) accessing the main control program,
b) writing the user’s identification data, c) answering SCL 90 test, d)
answering TCI test, e) forming the database.
The formats employed in these computerized versions are similarto those in paper-and-pencil original versions. Its rate sequences
were formed according to the SCL 90 and the TCI’s application
manuals.
The information stored in the computerized program of SCL
90 and TCI, can be imported to the Excel program. By this way, it
is possible to import the results to any database in any statistical
analysis program.
Method
Computerized versions of the SCL 90...