Psychodiagnostics
Albert A. Kurland, S. Joseph Mulé in Psychiatric Aspects of Opiate Dependence, 2019
Projective tests are primarily concerned with the elicitation of associations through the use of ambiguous test stimuli. The dynamics and assumptions underlying these measures in part relate to such processes as those influencing selection, visual imagery, the ambiguity of the stimuli, and the intensity of the conscious effort. Among the most well known of these tests is the Rorschach Perceptanalytic test, published in 1921.23 The purpose of the Rorschach test is to deduce personality traits of individuals from an analysis of spontaneously produced visual images stimulated by indeterminate stimuli – a set of inkblots. Other types of projective tests which have been developed are the Thematic Apperception Test; free drawings of human figures; and word association and sentence completion tests.
Keep Learning
Rose Cull, Daniel Cull in Museums and Well-being, 2023
Another outdated theory was that visual images could be used as a depiction of psychopathy; claiming a diagnosis could be made from the examination of artworks produced by the mentally well or ill.21 Based on earlier, now disproven theories, the Rorschach Test developed in 1921 was meant to be a diagnostic test for schizophrenia. Rorschach died the year after publication and the method was later developed to provide data about cognition and personality. During the test, a psychologist shows 10 standard cards with inkblots on them to a person and asks the person to describe what they see.22 The content of the image, however, is not the most important interpretation of the test, but it offers a chance for a psychologist to converse with the person being tested and to further examine their personality through how they take notice of the world. This test is still used by psychologists in the USA and in Japan, but it is not popular in the UK.
The Psychological Body
Roger Cooter, John Pickstone in Medicine in the Twentieth Century, 2020
The mental test encroached into further areas of interwar life. It provided a tool for assessing the child delinquent and the criminal in court and in penal institutions. It was advanced as a tool for vocational selection. In the US army, tests of aptitude and leadership qualities proved rather more successful than had intelligence tests in gaining the support of the military authorities in 1917–18. And such tests were adopted (within ‘characterology’) by the German military in the 1930s and by all sides in the Second World War. In fact, there was a sense that virtually any mental quality could be tested and classified against a norm. For instance, the Psycho-Galvanic Test of the flow of current in the body when answering questions offered the prospect of a scientific measure of moral ability, while the Rorschach test sought to assess and measure personality through the subject’s interpretation of ink-blots.
Hermann Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostics, Newly Translated and Annotated Anniversary Edition: A Critical Review
Published in Journal of Personality Assessment, 2023
Marvin W. Acklin, Patrick J. McElfresh
The new translation of Hermann Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostics is a momentous event in the world of Rorschach psychology. The new translation arrives during the centennial of the publication of Psychodiagnostics, including a centenary celebration held at the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods in Geneva, Switzerland, in July 2022. The new translation appears during a resurgence of Rorschach historiography and rethinking of test processes influenced by cognitive neuroscience, brain imaging, and theory. Rorschach’s test has remained, in the 100 years since his untimely death, a major beacon of American clinical psychology and personality assessment and has achieved the status of a fascinating cultural icon in the popular imagination. The hundred years following the publication of Psychodiagnostics saw continuing developments in Switzerland, early dissemination of the Rorschach Test to the United States through the agency of Emil Oberholzer, David Levy, and Samuel Beck, translations into French, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Romanian, and Russian languages, and proliferation and internationalization of systems of Rorschach coding and interpretation, including the Comprehensive System (Exner, 2003) and Rorschach Performance Assessment System (Meyer et al., 2011).
Introduction to Machine Learning for Ophthalmologists
Published in Seminars in Ophthalmology, 2019
Alejandra Consejo, Tomasz Melcer, Jos J. Rozema
Feature Selection and Dimensionality Reduction methods aim to reduce the number of variables in a dataset. While usually having a large number of variables provides more discriminating power, having too many variables in combination with a limited dataset size and an overly flexible algorithm could lead to an overfitted model that incorporates accidental, spurious relationships found in the training dataset, but do not exist in the general population. As such, overfitted models tend to have a low prediction accuracy for new data. To illustrate this with the student analogy, imagine that a student is requested to look at random ink blot patterns and report what he sees in them, like in the Rorschach test. The student will quickly form some mental image based on a combination of the ink blot’s geometry (the training data) and his earlier preconceptions (the parameters of the classification model). While the ink blot is randomly shaped, the student has interpolated the available data into a familiar image that is not really there.
When the Assessor’s Limits Are Tested: Enactments and the Assessment Frame in Psychological Testing
Published in Journal of Personality Assessment, 2020
In what follows, I illustrate these points through theoretical and case material. I begin with a discussion of the assessor’s conscious decision to use selective parameters in psychological assessment and then develop the idea that the assessor’s conflicted motives can also lead to the introduction of parameters, but in so doing, reflect less conscious control, organize around projective identifications and enactments, and threaten to destabilize the assessment framework (i.e., an organizing set of interpersonal boundaries and ground rules that frame the evaluation). I conclude with a case illustration involving neuropsychological and personality assessment that integrates these concepts with the patient’s history; selected Rorschach responses; feedback from Rorschach coding consultants; configurational analyses of Rorschach responses to demonstrate how frame, enactment, projective identification, and parallel processes informed the assessment and test feedback. The Rorschach test was selected to illustrate the power of transactional processes between patient–assessor and assessor–consultants because it is (a) particularly sensitive to personality characteristics that emerge under less structured conditions, (b) is often accompanied by metaphor-laden content that is open to a wide range of interpretive hypotheses about interpersonal dynamics, and (c) has a sophisticated coding scheme for structural and content responses in which challenging coding decisions embed and convey less consciously available meanings about the interpersonal aspects of the test situation.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Object Relations Theory
- Psychoanalysis
- Thought Disorder
- Schizophrenia
- Pathology
- Projective Test
- Psychological Testing
- Psychology
- Pareidolia
- Inter-Rater Reliability