Projective tests of personality (1)

Projective tests of Personality NTANET
(Education,Psychology) B.Ed.,M.Ed.
By
Dr. Sudha Pandeya

A projective test is a personality test designed to let a person respond to
ambiguous stimuli, presumably revealing hidden emotions and internal conﬂicts
projected by the person into the test.
Projective tests have their origins in psychoanalytic psychology of Freud, which
argues that humans have conscious and unconscious attitudes and motivations
that are beyond or hidden from conscious awareness.
Rorschach's I

The conscious mind includes such things as the sensations, perceptions, memories, feeling,
and fantasies inside of our current awareness. Closely allied with the conscious mind is the
preconscious (or subconscious), which includes the things that we are not thinking of at the
moment but which we can easily draw into conscious awareness
Things that the conscious mind wants to keep hidden from awareness are repressed into the
unconscious mind. While we are unaware of these feelings, thoughts, urges, and emotions,
Freud believed that the unconscious mind could still have an inﬂuence on our behavior.
Things that are in the unconscious are only available to the conscious mind in disguised form.
For example, the contents of the unconscious might spill into awareness in the form of dreams.
Freud believed that by analyzing the content of dreams, people could discover the unconscious
inﬂuences on their conscious actions.

The Iceberg Metaphor
Freud often used the metaphor of an iceberg to describe the two major aspects of human
personality.The tip of the iceberg that extends above the water represents the conscious mind.
As you can see in the image on top, the conscious mind is just the "tip of the iceberg." Beneath
the water is the much larger bulk of the iceberg, which represents the unconscious.
While the conscious and preconscious are important, Freud believed that they were far less
vital than the unconscious.
The things that are hidden from awareness, Freud believed, exerted the greatest inﬂuence over
our personalities and behaviors

We might not presently be thinking about how to do long division, but we
can access the information and bring it into conscious awareness when
we are faced with a math problem. The preconscious mind is a part of the
mind that corresponds to ordinary memory. These memories are not
conscious, but we can retrieve them to conscious awareness at any time

Projective Techniques are
• Unstructured, indirect form of questioning that encourages respondents to
project their underlying motivations, beliefs, attitudes or feelings regarding the
issues of concern.
• In projective techniques, respondents are asked to interpret the behavior of
others.
•In interpreting the behavior of others, respondents indirectly project their own
motivations, beliefs, attitudes, or feelings into the situation

Projective technique is
Any assessment procedure that consists of a series of relatively ambiguous
stimuli designed to elicit unique, sometimes highly idiosyncratic, responses that
reﬂect the personality, cognitive style, and other psychological characteristics of
the respondent. Examples of this type of procedure are the Rorschach Inkblot Test
and the Thematic Apperception Test, as well as sentence-completion,
word-association, and drawing tests. The use of projective techniques has
generated considerable discussion among researchers, with opinions ranging
from the expressed belief that personality assessment is incomplete without data
from at least one or more of these procedures to the assertion that such
techniques lack important psychometric features such as reliability and validity.

Projective tests are as follow
Rorschach Inkblot test •
A projective psychological test : created in 1921 with the publication of
Psychodiagnostik by Hermann Rorschach.
• The best known and most frequently used projective test • consisting of 10
inkblots printed on cards (ﬁve in black and white, ﬁve in color)
• A subject is shown a series of ten irregular but symmetrical inkblots, and asked
to explain what they see.

The subject's responses are then analyzed in various ways:
• what was said
• but the time taken to respond
• which aspect of the drawing was focused on
• how single responses compared to other responses for the same drawing.

Qualities perceived - colour,form ,movement
Kind of things reported - like anatomical parts, animals, plants and people song
and other incidental behaviour during the test session.
From the various responses the tester infers certain personality traits. For the
purpose of scoring the responses are marked as location, contents, originality and
determinants.
Location - it refers to the part of the inkblot with which the subject has associated
with each response.

The responses of the subject may be symbolised as
W - whole blot
D - large blot
w - part of inkblot
d - minor details
s - related to white space

Content - refers to the actual meaning of the word seen by the subject in the
inkblot. The common symbols used for scoring the contents of responses are
H - human beings, A = animal forms, Hd = human details, Ad = animal details,
N = natural objects like rivers and O = manmade objects
Originality - for originality certain responses are scored as popular (p) because of
their common occurrence whale others as extremely infrequent (O) or Originality
of response.
Determinants - it takes the note of directing perceptual activity M - movement, F-
form, C- colour, K- its shading

If the subject is
1.Utilising whole card has ability to solve his problem in comprehensive manner,
indicates high mental ability.
2.Responding large details suggest a practical approach towards problems of life.
3. Indicating observation of minute details express emotional conﬂicts.
4.Too many colour responses is related to individual’s impulsiveness.
5. Predominance of human movement indicates clean imagination
6. Frequent reference of animal ﬁgures expresses stereotype thinking

7.if responses are based on shaded parts - anxiety
Thus with the help of inkblot test we can diagnose normal and abnormal
personalities.

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) •
It is a projective psychological test.
• Developed during the 1930s by the American psychologist Henry A. Murray and
psychoanalyst Christiana D. Morgan at the Harvard Clinic at Harvard University.
• A person's responses reveal underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see
the social world through the stories they make up about ambiguous pictures of
people

The complete version of the test contains 32 picture cards. Some of the cards
show male figures, some female, some both male and female figures, some of
ambiguous gender, some adults, some children, and some show no human figures
at all.
• One card is completely blank and is used to elicit both a scene and a story about
the given scene from the storyteller.
• Although the cards were originally designed to be matched to the subject in
terms of age and gender, any card may be used with any subject.

Picture Arrangement Test
• The Picture Arrangement Test is a psychological test performed by giving the subject
pictures of a person with various facial expressions.
• The test consists of 25 sets of three pictures that the subject is asked to tell a story
with by putting a card in sequence and writing a sentence about it.
• The test was created by Silvan Tomkins who used it to practice reading facial
expressions by watching a recording of the story being told with no sound. Word
association test
• Word association testing is a technique developed by Carl Jung to explore complexes in
the personal unconscious.

• Jung came to recognize the existence of groups of thoughts, feelings, memories,
and perceptions, organized around a central theme, that he termed psychological
complexes.
• This discovery was related to his research into word association, a technique
whereby words presented to patients elicit other word responses that reﬂect
related concepts in the patients’ psyche, thus providing clues to their unique
psychological make-up .

Word Association Test.
In word association, respondents are presented with a list of words, one at a time and
asked to respond to each with the ﬁrst word that comes to mind. The words of interest,
called test words, are interspersed throughout the list which also contains some neutral,
or ﬁller words to disguise the purpose of the study. Responses are analyzed by
calculating:
(1) the frequency with which any word is given as a response;
(2) the amount of time that elapses before a response is given; and
(3) the number of respondents who do not respond at all to a test word within a
reasonable period of time.

This is one of the oldest projective techniques originally employed by Jung.On the
basis of responses C. G. Jung divided personality into introvert, extrovert and
ambivert

Sentence completion tests •
Sentence completion tests are a class of semi structured projective techniques. •
Hermann Ebbinghaus is generally credited with developing the ﬁrst sentence
completion test in 1897.
• Sentence completion tests typically provide respondents with beginnings of
sentences, referred to as “stems,” and respondents then complete the sentences
in ways that are meaningful to them.
• The responses are believed to provide indications of attitudes, beliefs,
motivations, or other mental states.
• Therefore, sentence completion technique, with such advantage, promotes the
respondents to disclose their concealed feelings

• Sentence completion tests require the subject complete sentence "stems" with
their own words. The subject's response is considered to be a projection of their
conscious and/or unconscious attitudes, personality characteristics, motivations,
and beliefs.
The sentences are like
I feel happy when………….
I am worried over…………….

CARTOON TEST
Construction Techniques
In cartoon tests, cartoon characters are shown in a speciﬁc situation related to
the problem. The respondents are asked to indicate what one cartoon character
might say in response to the comments of another character. Cartoon tests are
simpler to administer and analyze than picture response techniques

PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES are
• Helpful when the issues to be addressed are personal, sensitive, or subject to
strong social norms.
• Helpful when underlying motivations, beliefs, and attitudes are operating at a
subconscious level.

Projective tests of personality (1)

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