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The Thematic Apperception Test
+
INTRODUCTION:
 The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective
personality assessment psychological test
 The TAT was developed in 1935 by American psychologist
Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan at Harvard
University.
 The TAT was originally designed as an aid to eliciting fantasy
material from patients in Psychoanalysis. However, it’s uses
have evolved over the years.
+
THE TEST PROCEDURE
 The complete version of the test contains 31 picture cards.
The subject is asked to tell a story for each picture that is
presented to them, including the following:
1) what has led up to the event show
2) what is happening at the moment
3) what the characters are feeling and thinking
4) what the outcome of the story was
+
THE PICTURE CARDS:
 Out of the 31 cards, 30 cards are picture cards, all black and
white, which contain a variety of scenes designed to present
the test taker with certain classical human situations.
One card is left blank where participants are asked to imagine
a picture and then tell a story about it.
 The original 31 cards were divided into three categories, for
use with men only, with women only, or for use with subjects of
either sex.
 In practice, an examiner might administer as few as one or two
cards or as many as 31.
+
INTERPRETATION OF CARDS:
 In interpreting responses to the TAT, examiners typically focus
their attention on one of three areas:
a) the content of the stories that the subject tells
b) the feeling or tone of the stories and the participant
c) or the subject's behaviours apart from responses
These behaviours may include verbal remarks (for example,
comments about feeling stressed by the situation or not being a
good storyteller) as well as nonverbal actions or signs (blushing,
stammering, fidgeting in the chair, etc.)
 The story content usually reveals the subject's attitudes,
fantasies, wishes, inner conflicts, and view of the outside world.
 The story structure typically reflects the subject's feelings,
assumptions about the world, and an underlying attitude of
optimism or pessimism.
+
SCORING SYSTEMS:
 Several formal scoring systems have been developed for
analyzing TAT stories systematically and consistently.
Three common methods that are currently used in research are
the:
1) Defence Mechanisms Manual
2) Social Cognition and Object Relations (SCOR) scale
3) Personal Problem-Solving System—Revised (PPSS-R)
+
PSYCHOMETRIC CHARECTERISTICS:
 Reliability
 Validity
+
APPLICATIONS OF TAT:
 Personality Assessment:
Helps to evaluate a person's patterns of thought, attitudes, observational
capacity, and emotional responses to ambiguous test materials
 Expectations:
Reveals the expectations of participants in relationships with peers,
parents or other authority figures, subordinates, and possible romantic
partners.
 Recruitment:
The TAT is often used in individual assessments of candidates for
employment in fields requiring a high degree of skill in dealing with other
people and ability to cope with high levels of psychological stress— such
as law enforcement, military leadership positions, etc.
 Forensic Purposes:
TAT is sometimes used for forensic purposes in evaluating the motivations
and general attitudes of persons accused of violent crimes.
 Consumer Behaviour:
TAT is widely used to study consumer perceptions and motivations.
+
CONCLUSION:
 Despite criticisms for being unscientific, the TAT continues to
be used as a tool for research into areas of psychology such as
dreams, fantasies, mate selection and what motivates people
to choose their occupation.
 However, for accurate results, the TAT must be interpreted in
the context of the subject's personal history, age, sex, level of
education, occupation, racial or ethnic identification, first
language, and other characteristics that may be important.
 Sometimes it is used in a psychiatric or psychological context
to assess personality disorders, thought disorders, in forensic
examinations to evaluate crime suspects, or to screen
candidates for high-stress occupations
+
Thank You 

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Thematic apperception test

  • 2. + INTRODUCTION:  The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective personality assessment psychological test  The TAT was developed in 1935 by American psychologist Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan at Harvard University.  The TAT was originally designed as an aid to eliciting fantasy material from patients in Psychoanalysis. However, it’s uses have evolved over the years.
  • 3. + THE TEST PROCEDURE  The complete version of the test contains 31 picture cards. The subject is asked to tell a story for each picture that is presented to them, including the following: 1) what has led up to the event show 2) what is happening at the moment 3) what the characters are feeling and thinking 4) what the outcome of the story was
  • 4. + THE PICTURE CARDS:  Out of the 31 cards, 30 cards are picture cards, all black and white, which contain a variety of scenes designed to present the test taker with certain classical human situations. One card is left blank where participants are asked to imagine a picture and then tell a story about it.  The original 31 cards were divided into three categories, for use with men only, with women only, or for use with subjects of either sex.  In practice, an examiner might administer as few as one or two cards or as many as 31.
  • 5. + INTERPRETATION OF CARDS:  In interpreting responses to the TAT, examiners typically focus their attention on one of three areas: a) the content of the stories that the subject tells b) the feeling or tone of the stories and the participant c) or the subject's behaviours apart from responses These behaviours may include verbal remarks (for example, comments about feeling stressed by the situation or not being a good storyteller) as well as nonverbal actions or signs (blushing, stammering, fidgeting in the chair, etc.)  The story content usually reveals the subject's attitudes, fantasies, wishes, inner conflicts, and view of the outside world.  The story structure typically reflects the subject's feelings, assumptions about the world, and an underlying attitude of optimism or pessimism.
  • 6. + SCORING SYSTEMS:  Several formal scoring systems have been developed for analyzing TAT stories systematically and consistently. Three common methods that are currently used in research are the: 1) Defence Mechanisms Manual 2) Social Cognition and Object Relations (SCOR) scale 3) Personal Problem-Solving System—Revised (PPSS-R)
  • 8. + APPLICATIONS OF TAT:  Personality Assessment: Helps to evaluate a person's patterns of thought, attitudes, observational capacity, and emotional responses to ambiguous test materials  Expectations: Reveals the expectations of participants in relationships with peers, parents or other authority figures, subordinates, and possible romantic partners.  Recruitment: The TAT is often used in individual assessments of candidates for employment in fields requiring a high degree of skill in dealing with other people and ability to cope with high levels of psychological stress— such as law enforcement, military leadership positions, etc.  Forensic Purposes: TAT is sometimes used for forensic purposes in evaluating the motivations and general attitudes of persons accused of violent crimes.  Consumer Behaviour: TAT is widely used to study consumer perceptions and motivations.
  • 9. + CONCLUSION:  Despite criticisms for being unscientific, the TAT continues to be used as a tool for research into areas of psychology such as dreams, fantasies, mate selection and what motivates people to choose their occupation.  However, for accurate results, the TAT must be interpreted in the context of the subject's personal history, age, sex, level of education, occupation, racial or ethnic identification, first language, and other characteristics that may be important.  Sometimes it is used in a psychiatric or psychological context to assess personality disorders, thought disorders, in forensic examinations to evaluate crime suspects, or to screen candidates for high-stress occupations

Notas del editor

  1. The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective psychological test. Proponents of this technique assert that 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.
  2. If these elements are omitted, particularly for children or individuals of low cognitive abilities, the evaluator may ask the subject about them directly. Otherwise, the examiner is to avoid interjecting and should not answer questions about the content of the pictures. The examiner records stories verbatim for later interpretation. 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. Murray hypothesized that stories would yield better information about a client if the majority of cards administered featured a character similar in age and gender to the client.‪[7]‬
  3. Reliability[edit] Internal consistency, a reliability estimate focusing on how highly test items correlate to each other, is often quite low for TAT scoring systems. Some authors have argued that internal consistency measures do not apply to the TAT. In contrast to traditional test items, which should all measure the same construct and be correlated to each other, each TAT card represents a different situation and should yield highly different response themes.‪[10]‬ Lilienfeld and colleagues ‪[11]‬ countered this point by questioning the practice of compiling TAT responses to form scores. Both inter-rater reliability (the degree to which different raters score TAT responses the same) and test–retest reliability (to degree to which individuals receive the same scores over time) are highly variable across scoring techniques.‪[13]‬ However, Murray asserted that TAT answers are highly related to internal states such that high test-retest reliability should not be expected.‪[11]‬ Gruber and Kreuzpointner (2013) developed a new method for calculating internal consistency using categories instead of pictures. As they demonstrated in a mathematical proof, their method provides a better fit for the underlying construction principles of TAT, and also achieved adequate Cronbach's alpha scores up to .84 ‪[14]‬ Validity[edit] The validity of the TAT, or the degree to which it measures what it is supposed to measure,‪[15]‬ is low.‪[11]‬ Jenkins ‪[16]‬ has stated that “the phrase ‘validity of the TAT’ is meaningless, because validity is specific not to the pictures, but to the set of scores derived from the population, purpose, and circumstances involved in any given data collection." That is, the validity of the test would be ascertained by seeing how clinician's decisions were assisted based on the TAT. Evidence on this front suggests it is a weak guide at best. For example, one study indicated that clinicians classified individuals as clinical or non-clinical at close to chance levels (57% where 50% would be guessing) based on TAT data alone. The same study found that classifications were 88% correct based on MMPI data. Interestingly, using TAT in addition to the MMPI reduced accuracy to 80%.‪[17]‬ Alternate considerations[edit] Despite the conflicting information about the psychometric characteristics of the TAT, proponents have argued that the TAT should not be judged using traditional standards of reliability and validity. According to Holt,‪[18]‬ “the TAT is a complex method of assessing people, which does not lend itself to the standard rules of thumb about test standards [. . .]” (p. 101). For example, it has been argued that the purpose of the TAT is to reveal a wide range of personality characteristics and complex, nuanced patterns, as opposed to traditional psychological tests that are designed to measure unitary and narrow constructs.‪[16]‬ Hibbard and colleagues‪[19]‬ examined several considerations about traditional views of reliability and validity as they apply to the TAT. First, they noted that traditional views of reliability may limit the validity of a measure (such as occurs with multi-faceted concepts in which characteristics are not necessarily related to each other, but are meaningful in combination). Further, Cronbach's alpha, a commonly used measure of internal consistency, is dependent on the number of items in scale. For the TAT, most scales use only a small number of cards (with each card treated like an item) so alphas would not be expected to be very high. Many clinicians also discount the importance of psychometrics, believing that generalizability of the findings to a given client’s situation is more important than generalizing findings to the population.‪[16]‬