Dr. Richard Lanyon

As co-author of the PeopleClues® line of assessments, Dr. Lanyon is responsible for ongoing research, development and maintenance for achieving product validation objectives.  Dr. Lanyon holds a degree in engineering from the University of Adelaide (Australia) in 1964, plus M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in clinical psychology from the University of Iowa (1964). He is a Diplomat of the American Board of Professional Psychology in Clinical Psychology (1971) and also in Forensic Psychology (1988). He has been a research-and-development engineer for the South Australian Government and has held academic appointments at several universities, including Harvard Medical School where he was also Chief Psychologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Since 1975, he has been Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University and was Director of the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology from 1975 to 1982. He has taught graduate-level courses in the development and use of psychological tests for nearly 40 years, and he has also taught courses in statistics, neuropsychological assessment, personality, and forensic psychology.

Dr. Lanyon has published more than 100 articles in academic and professional journals. His books have included A handbook of MMPI group profiles (University of Minnesota Press, 1968); (with B. P. Lanyon) Behavior therapy (Addison-Wesley, 1978); and (with Leonard D. Goodstein) three editions of the textbook Personality assessment (Wiley, 1971, 1982, 1997), two editions of Adjustment, behavior, and personality (Addison-Wesley, 1975, 1979), and Readingsin personality assessment (1971). Tests he has developed include the Psychological Screening Inventory (1973, 1978); (with B. P. Lanyon) the Incomplete Sentences Task (1980); and (with Ruehlman and Karoly) the Multidimensional Health Profile (1998).

Much of Dr. Lanyon’s research activity has focused on the technology of constructing psychological tests, and in particular, on gaining a better understanding of the various ways in which test respondents tend to misrepresent themselves and on ways of identifying and measuring these distortions. He has given workshops on personality assessment and has consulted to organizations on the development and use of personnel-related psychological test instruments. In addition, he has conducted many individual psychological assessments in a wide variety of settings.