Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [209]
Murray and Morgan, in a report describing their development of the TAT, printed several pictures as examples. In one, a middle-aged woman is seen in profile facing to the left, and near her, closer to the viewer, and turned partly away from her, is a decently dressed young man, his head slightly bowed, a faint frown on his face. (The description will have to suffice; the publisher of the test does not allow reproduction of the pictures.) This is the story that Murray and Morgan said one subject made up about the picture:
Mother and boy were living happily. She had no husband. Her son was her only support. Then the boy got in bad company and participated in a gang robbery, playing a minor part. He was found out and sentenced to five years in prison. Picture represents him parting with his mother. Mother is sad, feeling ashamed of him. Boy is very much ashamed. He cares more about the harm he did his mother than going to prison.33
The boy (the story goes on) gets out for good behavior; his mother dies; he falls in love but drifts back into crime; he goes to prison again; and he emerges as an old man and spends his remaining years repentant and wretched.
Murray and Morgan interpreted the story as indicating the narrator’s perception of the dominance of bad external influences over one’s behavior; it also revealed several deep needs, among them to be nurturing (to his mother), to acquire money, and to suffer abasement. The example, said Murray and Morgan, illustrates the special value of the TAT:
The test is based upon the well-recognized fact that when a person interprets an ambiguous social situation he is apt to expose his own personality as much as the phenomenon to which he is attending. Absorbed in his attempt to explain the objective occurrence, he becomes naively unconscious of himself and of the scrutiny of others and, therefore, defensively less vigilant… The subject reveals some of his innermost fantasies without being aware that he is doing so.34
Despite its value, the TAT is cumbersome to use, and with some people yields lengthy stories and too much information but with others barren stories and too little. Still, it has proven to be a reliable and valid tool for measuring personality traits, and has been shown to have predictive power. Fifty-seven Harvard graduates who took the TAT in 1952, when they were about thirty years old, were studied fifteen years later; those whom the 1952 tests showed as having high motivation for intimacy were significantly better adjusted in their marriages, work, and other areas of interaction.35 The TAT, despite some trenchant criticisms, has continued to be widely used, though less often than the Rorschach, and has spawned many similar tests.
A large number of projective tests have been created in recent decades, and many are in current use. They include the Blacky Test, a set of picture stories about a little dog (the child makes up a story to fit each picture); word association tests (in some tests, the subject, on hearing or reading a word, mentions the first word that comes to mind; in others, uses the given word in a sentence); sentence completion tests (“I only wish my mother had __ _____ ____,” “The thing that bothers me most is __ ____ ____.” and so on); drawing tests (in one, the subject is asked to draw a house, a tree, and a person; the drawings are interpreted psychodynamically, a dead tree, for example, suggesting emotional emptiness, a leafy tree liveliness, a spiky tree aggressiveness).36
Conduct sampling or performance testing: In this category of assessment, a trained psychologist observes the individual in particular situations and measures or rates his or her behavior. Through a one-way mirror, an observer may watch children in a classroom working together on a project, playing, or responding to a contrived stimulus, like cries for help from an adjoining room. Or the unseen observer may watch a group of individuals in a special situation, like attempting to