Rorschach inkblot test is a projective personality test that has been one of the major projective personality assessments used by psychologists since the 1940s (Aiken & Groth-Marnat, 2006). The test is named after Hermann Rorschach who developed the inkblots in 1921. The Rorschach inkblot test consists of 10 cards with inkblots on them (five black and white and five colored) and is currently marketed by Pearson Assessments. The test is designed to be used with individuals five years of age and older (Exner, 2002). The test is reported to generally take about an hour to administer, although it certainly can take significantly longer than that.
The major assumption of projective tests is that environmental stimuli are organized by a person based on their own motives, needs, perceptions, and conflicts. The need to organize environmental stimuli becomes more salient when the stimuli are ambiguous and do not have culturally or socially defined parameters associated with them (Aiken & Groth-Marnat, 2006). The principle on which the Rorschach is based is that the process at which a person approaches and organizes the responses to the ambiguous stimuli on the Rorschach cards is representative of how they approach other situations that require them to organize information and make judgments about situations in their lives.
The test is administered in two general phases following a set of standardized instructions to the client: (1) a free association stage where the individual simply describes what the inkblot is in their subjective viewpoint, and (2) a longer inquiry phase where the administrator reviews the responses produced in...
In other words, instead of simply asking the patient what he sees in the inkblot, the clinician will say something like 'To you does this image look more like a person, an animal, a flower, or a food?' Juni (1993) asserts that this approach reduces the need for "trained judges" to interpret the results, and also provides a sense of standardization that maximizes the projective content. The phenomenon known as
While different scorers might have very different reactions to a subject that saw a bunny in one blot, for example, the use of color and white space was thought to be something more observable than opinionated. However, the controversy about the test is far from 'blotted out' by Exner's system. Despite its use in court-ordered assessments of mental stability and the fact that "a great strength of Exner's system
client was depressed how might the Rorschach scoring appear? The Rorschach inkblot test is a projective test: subjects view a series of standardized inkblots and their subjective impressions to the test are recorded and scored. "The theory underlying Rorschach's technique was that in the course of interpreting a random inkblot, attention would be drawn away from the subject so that the person's usual psychological defenses would be weakened" ("Projections of
The Jungian personality inventories are to some degree 'Westernized' one could argue, in the sense that they were originally developed by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, around Western archetypes of personality. The MMPI also makes use of such tests in its more extensive survey, but more flexible use of the Jung system has yielded less dogmatic career recommendation and personality type instruments. After answering a series of questions, the tester receives
Further, the subjectivity in scoring and interpretation is a huge issue (Sutherland, 1992). For example, if one believes that a relationship exists between say, a Rorschach feature such as color and a personality trait such as emotional style, then one's prior beliefs can bias judgment (Vyse, 1997). As evidence, psychologists were prone to say a relationship existed between a test response and a psychological condition -- if it accorded
Psychological Test There have been many definitions of a test. For example, Kline (1993, P. 16) defines a psychological test as a standardized measure of behavior. Hogan (2007, p.41) considers such definitions lacking and instead offers a more comprehensive definition, "A test is a standardized process or device that yields information about a sample of behavior or cognitive processes in a quantified manner." Categories of Psychological Tests According to Hogan (2007) there
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