Projective techniques
- Key People:
- June Etta Downey
- Henry Murray
- Related Topics:
- phrenology
- Barnum Effect
- projective test
- normative measurement
- graphology
One group of assessment specialists believes that the more freedom people have in picking their responses, the more meaningful the description and classification that can be obtained. Because personality inventories do not permit much freedom of choice, some researchers and clinicians prefer to use projective techniques, in which a person is shown ambiguous stimuli (such as shapes or pictures) and asked to interpret them in some way. (Such stimuli allow relative freedom in projecting one’s own interests and feelings into them, reacting in any way that seems appropriate.) Projective techniques are believed to be sensitive to unconscious dimensions of personality. Defense mechanisms, latent impulses, and anxieties have all been inferred from data gathered in projective situations.
Personality inventories and projective techniques do have some elements in common; inkblots, for example, are ambiguous, but so also are many of the statements on inventories such as the MMPI. These techniques differ in that the subject is given substantially free rein in responding to projective stimuli rather than merely answering true or false, for example. Another similarity between projective and questionnaire or inventory approaches is that all involve the use of relatively standardized testing situations.
While projective techniques are often lumped together as one general methodology, in actual practice there are several approaches to assessment from a projective point of view. Although projective techniques share the common characteristic that they permit the subject wide latitude in responding, they still may be distinguished broadly as follows: (1) associative techniques, in which the subject is asked to react to words, to inkblots, or to other stimuli with the first associated thoughts that come to mind; (2) construction techniques, in which the subject is asked to create something—for example, make up a story or draw a self-portrait; (3) completion techniques, in which the subject is asked to finish a partially developed stimulus, such as adding the last words to an incomplete sentence; (4) choice or ordering techniques, in which the subject is asked to choose from among or to give some orderly sequence to stimuli—for example, to choose from or arrange a set of pictures or inkblots; (5) expressive techniques, in which the subject is asked to use free expression in some manner, such as in finger painting.
Hidden personality defense mechanisms, latent emotional impulses, and inner anxieties all have been attributed to test takers by making theoretical inferences from data gathered as they responded in projective situations. While projective stimuli are ambiguous, they are usually administered under fairly standardized conditions. Quantitative (numerical) measures can be derived from subjects’ responses to them. These include the number of responses one makes to a series of inkblots and the number of responses to the blots in which the subject perceives what seem to him to be moving animals.
The Rorschach Inkblot Test
The Rorschach inkblots were developed by a Swiss psychiatrist, Hermann Rorschach, in an effort to reduce the time required in psychiatric diagnosis. His test consists of 10 cards, half of which are in colour and half in black and white. The test is administered by showing the subject the 10 blots one at a time; the subject’s task is to describe what he sees in the blots or what they remind him of. The subject is usually told that the inkblots are not a test of the kind he took in school and that there are no right or wrong answers.
Rorschach’s work was stimulated by his interest in the relationship between perception and personality. He held that a person’s perceptual responses to inkblots could serve as clues to basic personality tendencies. Despite Rorschach’s original claims for the validity of his test, subsequent negative research findings have led many users of projective techniques to become dubious about the role assigned the inkblots in delineating relationships between perception and personality. In recent years, emphasis has tended to shift to the analysis of nuances of the subject’s social behaviour during the test and to the content of his verbal responses to the examiner—whether, for example, he seeks to obtain the assistance of the examiner in “solving” the inkblots presented to him, sees “angry lions” or “meek lambs” in the inkblots, or is apologetic or combative about his responses.
Over the years, considerable research has been carried out on Rorschach’s inkblots; important statistical problems in analyzing data gathered with projective techniques have been identified, and researchers have continued in their largely unsuccessful efforts to overcome them. There is a vast experimental literature to suggest that the Rorschach technique lacks empirical validity. Recently, researchers have sought to put the Rorschach on a sounder psychometric (mental testing) basis. New comprehensive scoring systems have been developed, and there have been improvements in standardization and norms. These developments have injected new life into the Rorschach as a psychometric instrument.
A similar method, the Holtzman Inkblot Test, has been developed in an effort to eliminate some of the statistical problems that beset the Rorschach test. It involves the administration of a series of 45 inkblots, the subject being permitted to make only one response per card. The Holtzman has the desirable feature that it provides an alternate series of 45 additional cards for use in retesting the same person.
Research with the Rorschach and Holtzman has proceeded in a number of directions; many studies have compared psychiatric patients and other groups of special interest (delinquents, underachieving students) with ostensibly normal people. Some investigators have sought to derive indexes or predictions of future behaviour from responses to inkblots and have checked, for example, to see if anxiety and hostility (as inferred from content analyses of verbal responses) are related to favourable or unfavourable response to psychotherapy. A sizable area of exploration concerns the effects of special conditions (e.g., experimentally induced anxiety or hostility) on the inkblot perceptions reported by the subject and the content of his speech.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
There are other personality assessment devices, which, like the Rorschach, are based on the idea that an individual will project something of himself into his description of an ambiguous stimulus.
The TAT, for example, presents the subject with pictures of persons engaged in a variety of activities (e.g., someone with a violin). While the pictures leave much to one’s imagination, they are more highly specific, organized visual stimuli than are inkblots. The test consists of 30 black and white pictures and one blank card (to test imagination under very limited stimulation). The cards are presented to the subject one at a time, and he is asked to make up a story that describes each picture and that indicates the events that led to the scene and the events that will grow out of it. He is also asked to describe the thoughts and feelings of the persons in his story.
Although some content-analysis scoring systems have been developed for the TAT, attempts to score it in a standardized quantitative fashion tend to be limited to research and have been fewer than has been the case for the Rorschach. This is especially the state of affairs in applied settings in which the test is often used as a basis for conducting a kind of clinical interview; the pictures are used to elicit a sample of verbal behaviour on the basis of which inferences are drawn by the clinician.
In one popular approach, interpretation of a TAT story usually begins with an effort to determine who is the hero (i.e., to identify the character with whom the subject seems to have identified himself). The content of the stories is often analyzed in terms of a so-called need-press system. Needs are defined as the internal motivations of the hero. Press refers to environmental forces that may facilitate or interfere with the satisfaction of needs (e.g., in the story the hero may be physically attacked, frustrated by poverty, or suffer the effects of rumours being spread about him). In assessing the importance or strength of a particular inferred need or press for the individual who takes the test, special attention is given to signs of its pervasiveness and consistency in different stories. Analysis of the test may depend considerably on the subjective, personal characteristics of the evaluator, who usually seeks to interpret the subjects’ behaviour in the testing situation; the characteristics of his utterances; the emotional tone of the stories; the kinds of fantasies he offers; the outcomes of the stories; and the conscious and unconscious needs speculatively inferred from the stories.
Word-association techniques
The list of projective approaches to personality assessment is long, one of the most venerable being the so-called word-association test. Jung used associations to groups of related words as a basis for inferring personality traits (e.g., the inferiority “complex”). Administering a word-association test is relatively uncomplicated; a list of words is presented one at a time to the subject who is asked to respond with the first word or idea that comes to mind. Many of the stimulus words may appear to be emotionally neutral (e.g., building, first, tree); of special interest are words that tend to elicit personalized reactions (e.g., mother, hit, love). The amount of time the subject takes before beginning each response and the response itself are used in efforts to analyze a word association test. The idiosyncratic, or unusual, nature of one’s word-association responses may be gauged by comparing them to standard published tables of the specific associations given by large groups of other people.
Sentence-completion techniques
The sentence-comple-tion technique may be considered a logical extension of word-association methods. In administering a sentence-completion test, the evaluator presents the subject with a series of partial sentences that he is asked to finish in his own words (e.g., “I feel upset when . . . ”; “What burns me up is . . . ”). Users of sentence-completion methods in assessing personality typically analyze them in terms of what they judge to be recurring attitudes, conflicts, and motives reflected in them. Such analyses, like those of TAT, contain a subjective element.
Behavioral assessment
Objective observation of a subject’s behaviour is a technique that falls in the category of behavioral assessment. A variety of assessments could be considered, for example, in the case of a seven-year-old boy who, according to his teacher, is doing poorly in his schoolwork and, according to his parents, is difficult to manage at home and does not get along with other children. The following types of assessment might be considered: (1) a measure of the boy’s general intelligence, which might help explain his poor schoolwork; (2) an interview with him to provide insights into his view of his problem; (3) personality tests, which might reveal trends that are related to his inadequate social relationships; (4) observations of his activities and response patterns in school; (5) observations of his behaviour in a specially created situation, such as a playroom with many interesting toys and games; (6) an interview with his parents, since the boy’s poor behaviour in school may by symptomatic of problems at home; and (7) direct observation of his behaviour at home.
Making all of these assessments would be a major undertaking. Because of the variety of data that are potentially available, the assessor must decide which types of information are most feasible and desirable under a given set of circumstances. In most cases, the clinician is interested in both subjective and objective information. Subjective information includes what clients think about, the emotions they experience, and their worries and preoccupations. Interviews, personality inventories, and projective techniques provide indications of subjective experience, although considerable clinical judgment is needed to infer what is going on within the client from test responses. Objective information includes the person’s observable behaviour and usually does not require the assessor to draw complex inferences about such topics as attitudes toward parents, unconscious wishes, and deep-seated conflicts. Such objective information is measured by behavioral assessment. It is often used to identify behavioral problems, which are then treated in some appropriate way. Behavioral observations are used to get information that cannot be obtained by other means. Examples of such observations include the frequency of a particular type of response, such as physical attacks on others or observations by ward attendants of certain behaviours of psychiatric patients. In either case, observational data must meet the same standards of reliability as data obtained by more formal measures.
The value of behavioral assessment depends on the behaviours selected for observation. For example, if the goal of assessment is to detect a tendency toward depression, the responses recorded should be those that are relevant to that tendency, such as degrees of smiling, motor activity, and talking.
A type of behavioral assessment called baseline observations is becoming increasingly popular. These are recordings of response frequencies in particular situations before any treatment or intervention has been made. They can be used in several ways. Observations might be made simply to describe a person’s response repertoire at a given time. For example, the number of aggressive responses made by children of different ages might be recorded. Such observations also provide a baseline for judging the effectiveness of behaviour modification techniques. A similar set of observations, made after behaviour modification procedures have been used, could be compared with the baseline measurement as a way of determining how well the therapy worked.
Behavioral observations can be treated in different ways. One of these is to keep track of the frequency with which people make designated responses during a given period of time (e.g., the number of times a psychiatric patient makes his own bed or the number of times a child asks for help in a novel situation). Another approach involves asking raters to support their judgments of others by citing specific behaviour (critical incidents); a shop foreman, for example, may rate a worker as depressed by citing incidents when the worker burst into tears. Critical incidents not only add validity to ordinary ratings, but they also suggest behavioral details that might be promising predictors of success on the job, response to psychiatric treatment, or level of academic achievement.
Behavioral observations are widely made in interviews and in a variety of workaday settings. Employers, supervisors, and teachers—either formally or informally—make use of behavioral observations in making decisions about people for whom they have responsibility. Unfortunately the subject may know he is being studied or evaluated and, therefore, may behave atypically (e.g., by working harder than usual or by growing tense). The observer may be a source of error by being biased in favour of or against the subject. Disinterested observers clearly are to be preferred (other things being equal) for research and clinical purposes. The greater the care taken to control such contributions to error, the greater the likelihood that observations will prove to be reliable.
Cognitive assessment
The types of thoughts experienced by individuals are reflective of their personalities. Just as it is important to know what people do and how their behaviour affects others, it is also necessary to assess the thoughts that may lie behind the behaviour. Cognitive assessment provides information about thoughts that precede, accompany, and follow maladaptive behaviour. It also provides information about the effects of procedures that are intended to modify both how subjects think about a problem and how they behave.
Cognitive assessment can be carried out in a variety of ways. For example, questionnaires have been developed to sample people’s thoughts after an upsetting event. Beepers (electronic pagers) have been used to signal subjects to record their thoughts at certain times of the day. There are also questionnaires to assess the directions people give themselves while working on a task and their theories about why things happen as they do.
The assessment of thoughts and ideas is a relatively new development. It has received impetus from the growing evidence that thought processes and the content of thoughts are related to emotions and behaviour. Cognitive assessment provides information about adaptive and maladaptive aspects of people’s thoughts and the role their thoughts play in the processes of planning, making decisions, and interpreting reality.
Bodily assessment
Bodily responses may reveal a person’s feelings and motivations, and clinicians pay particular attention to these nonverbal messages. Bodily functions may also reflect motivations and concerns, and some clinicians also pay attention to these. Sophisticated devices have been developed to measure such physiological changes as pupil dilation, blood pressure, and electrical skin responses under specific conditions. These changes are related to periodic ratings of mood and to other physiological states that provide measures of stability and change within the individual. Technological advances are making it possible to monitor an individual’s physiological state on a continuous basis. Sweat, heartbeat, blood volume, substances in the bloodstream, and blood pressure can all be recorded and correlated with the presence or absence of certain psychological conditions such as stress.
Personal facts
One type of information that is sometimes overlooked because of its very simplicity consists of the subject’s life history and present status. Much of this information may be gathered through direct interviews with a subject or with an informant through questionnaires and through searches of records and archives. The information might also be gathered by examining the subject’s personal documents (e.g., letters, autobiographies) and medical, educational, or psychiatric case histories. The information might concern the individual’s social and occupational history, his cultural background, his present economic status, and his past and present physical characteristics. Life-history data can provide clues to the precursors and correlates of present behaviour. This information may help the investigator avoid needlessly speculative or complex hypotheses about the causation of personality traits when simple explanations might be superior. Failure on the part of a personality evaluator to be aware of the fact that someone had spent two years during World War II in a concentration camp could result in misleading inferences and conjectures about the subject’s present behaviour.
