he drawing of the person, the presence of scars, teeth, massive shoulders (in males) and the absence of arms are all thought to be highly correlated with hostility and aggression.
When conducting a Rorschach or TAT test, subjects are shown an ambiguous image and asked to describe what they see. These tests work on the assumption that the unconscious will steer their interpretation of the image.
One humorous incident with the Rorschach administration is recounted by Joseph Masling, winner of the Bruno Klopfer Distinguished Award from the Society for Personality Assessment. While still in graduate school, Murray Levine, a colleague of Masling, was administering the Rorschach test to a keen patient. However, every response to a series of Rorschach inkblots, regardless of whether the response was offered immediately or after considerable effort was, “This looks like a pelvic girdle.” After the test was completed, the patient, upon returning to the ward and being asked by the ward psychologist how the test went, responded, “Whew, that was the toughest pelvic girdle test I ever took.”
What interpretation should a clinician make when a patient sees every inkblot as a pelvic girdle? Well, coming from a Freudian background, the patient might be seen as having a fixation with the genitals.
The problem with projective tests is that, because the interpretation of the results is subjective, there is a potential for misdiagnosis. Furthermore, since the tests rely on the unconscious, the subject’s physical surroundings can contribute to their answers. This tendency has been examined as far back as the 1960s by psychological researchers. Two of the many variables which they found influence participant’s responses include the physical appearance of the examiner and the pictures on the wall of the testing room.
Other studies have looked specifically at the percentage of misdiagnoses with the Rorschach test, with many studies producing above 50 per cent misdiagnosis rates. In one study, where well-validated measures for emotional health like the Conner Parent Rating Scale (CPRS) were used in conjunction with the Rorschach test, 60 per cent of individuals who were deemed emotionally healthy according to the CPRS had pathological scores on the Schizophrenia Index indicated by their Rorschach test results. Studies producing similar results are not rare and other researchers have reported upwards of 75 per cent of normal individuals as being psychiatrically disturbed according to Rorschach tests.
Projective tests contrast with less ambiguous and more rigid measures of psychological assessment commonly known as objective tests. Objective tests rely on a subject self-reporting and then having their answers scored by a standardized procedure, as opposed to being directly analyzed, as in projective tests. An example of this kind of tool is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which determines if you’re an ESTJ (Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judgment), an INFP (Introversion, Intuition, Feeling, Perception) or some mixture of those acronyms. Self-report measures are not without their problems, and a fundamental limitation is that their intent is often easy to discern and, thus, participants can fake their responses. This is one of the reasons why projective tests are often used in conjunction with objective tests in an effort to cross-validate the assessment, because with projective tests, self-censorship is more difficult.
Although this article focused on the negative aspects and questioned the validity of psychological assessment tools like the Rorschach, there are a lot of studies published which demonstrate their worth as a diagnostic tool for clinicians. While the controversy rages on, it’s important to ground the significance of these tests in their real world applications; both clinical and legal decisions including mental health determinations and custody battles hinge sometimes on how well a person is drawn, or whether an inkblot is seen as a butterfly or a penis.