THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST

DESCRIPTION

• Projective techniques are procedure that consist of a series of relatively ambiguous stimuli designed to elicit unique sometimes highly idiosyncratic, responses that reflect the personality, cognitive style and other psychological characteristics of the respondent.(Apa,2022)
• The thematic apperception test (TAT) consists of 31 achromatic cards measuring 91 /4 × 11 inches.
• 14 of the cards show a picture of a single person, 11 cards depict two or more people engaged in some kind of relationship, 3 are group pictures of three or four people, 2 portray nature scenes, and 1 is totally blank.
• The cards are numbered from 1- 20.
• 9 of the cards are additionally designated by letters intended to indicate their appropriateness for boys (b) and girls (g) aged 4 to 14, males (m) and females (f) aged 15 or older ,or some combination of these characteristics(as in 3bm,6gf,12bg, and 13mf).
• Twenty cards are designated for each age and gender group.

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HISTORY

• Murray is known for having originated the thematic apperception test.
• Henry murray was to become one of the best-known and highly respected personality theorists in the history of psychology. He remains recognized today for his pioneering emphasis on individual differences rather than group tendencies, which became identified in technical terms as an idiographic approach to the study of persons (as distinguished from an nomothetic approach emphasizing characteristics that differentiate groups of people).
• The main thrust of what murray called “personology” was attention to each person’s unique integration of psychological characteristics, rather than to the general nature of these characteristics.
• For murray, the study of personality consisted of exploring individual experience and the kinds of lives that people lead, rather than exploring the origins, development, and manifestations of specific personality characteristics like dependency, assertiveness, sociability, and rigidity .

HISTORY

• He had studied history as an undergraduate at Harvard, received his medical degree from Columbia in 1919,did a 2-year surgical internship and devoted himself to laboratory research.
• Two personal events in the mid-1920s had attracted him to making this career change.
• One of these events was reading Melville's Moby dick and becoming fascinated with the complexity of the characters in the story, particularly the underlying motivations that influenced them to act as they did.
• The second event was meeting and beginning a life long friendship with christiana Morgan, an artist who was enamored of the psychoanalytic conceptions of carl Jung.
• His extensive reading in the psychological and psychoanalytic literature, combined with his background inpatient care and laboratory research, made him far better prepared to head up the Harvard psychological clinic.

HISTORY

• During his tenure as director from 1928 to 1943 during his first major project, Murray orchestrated an intensive psychological study of 50 male Harvard students, each of whom was assessed individually with over 20 different procedures.
• Included among these procedures was a picture-story measure in which Murray had become interested in the early 1930s.
• A conviction had formed in his mind that stories told by people can reveal many aspects of what they think and how they feel, and that carefully chosen pictures provide a useful stimulus for eliciting stories that are rich in personal meaning.
• In collaboration with Morgan , he experimented with different pictures and eventually selected 20 that seemed particularly likely to suggest a critical situation or at least one person with whom an examinee would identify. These 20 pictures constituted the original version of the TAT, first described in print by C. D. Morgan and murray (1935) as “a method for investigating fantasies.”

HISTORY

• The results of Murray's Harvard study were published in a classic book, explorations in personality, which is best known for presenting his idiographic approach to studying people and his model of personality functioning (murray, 1938).
• In Murray's model, each individual’s personality is an interactive function of “needs,” which are the particular motivational forces emerging from within a person, and “presses,” which are environmental forces and situations that affect how a person expresses these needs.

HISTORY

• The original TAT used in the Harvard clinic study was followed by three later versions of the test, as C. D. Morgan and Murray continued to examine the stimulus potential of different kinds of paintings, photographs, and original drawings. The nature and origins of the pictures used in four versions of the test are reviewed by W. G. Morgan (1995, 2002, 2003).The final 31-card version of the test was published in 1943(murray,1943/1971) and remains the version in use today.
• Ever the curious scientist, Murray might have continued trying out new cards if he had not to go for lending a hand in the world war 2.
• Murray (1943/1971) presented in his manual a detailed procedure for rating each of 28 needs and 24 presses on a 5-point scale for their intensity, duration, frequency, and importance whenever they occur in a story.

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HISTORY

• This complex scoring scheme proved too cumbersome to gain much acceptance among researchers and practitioners who took up the TAT after its 1943 publication made it widely available.
• Consequently, many other systems for interpreting the tat emerged over the next 15 to 20 years.
• Some them followed Murray in emphasizing content themes, and others attended as well to structural and thematic features of stories.

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TYPES OF DATA COLLECTED

• Structural data.
• The length of the stories people tell can provide information about whether they are approaching this task.
• How he faces other situations in their lives as well in a relatively open and revealing fashion (long stories) or in a relatively guarded manner that conceals more than it reveals (short stories).
• Story length can also provide clues to a person’s energy level, perhaps thereby identifying depressive lethargy in one person (short stories) and hypomanic expansiveness in another person (long stories), and clues to whether the individual is by nature a person of few or many words.
• Shifts in the length of stories from one card to the next, or in the reaction time before the story telling begins, may identify positive or negative reactions to the typical themes suggested by the cards, which are described later in the chapter.

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TYPES OF DATA COLLECTED

• Structural data
• Aside from their length in words, TAT stories can vary in detail from a precisely specified account of who is doing what to whom and why (which might reflect obsessive-compulsive personality characteristics), to a vague and superficial description of people and events that suggests a shallow style of dealing with affective and interpersonal experience.
• Most of the tat pictures contain:
• Some prominent elements that are almost always included in the stories people tell;
• Some minor figures or objects that are also included from time to time;
• Many peripheral details that are rarely noted or mentioned.
• Card 3bm, for example, depicts a person sitting on the floor (almost always mentioned), a small object on the floor by the person’s feet (frequently but not always mentioned), and a piece of furniture on which the person is leaning (seldom mentioned).

TYPES OF DATA COLLECTED

• Thematic data
• The content of TAT stories provides clues to a person’s underlying needs, attitudes, conflicts , and concerns. Because they depict real scenes, the TAT cards provide more numerous and more direct opportunities than the Rorschach inkblots for examinees to attribute characteristics to human figures in various circumstances.
• Typical tat stories are consequently rich with information about the depicted characters’ aspirations, intentions, and expectations that will likely reveal aspects of how people feel about themselves, about other people, and about their future prospects.

TYPES OF DATA COLLECTED

• Thematic data
• We can get four kinds of information from it.
• How the people in a story are identified and described (e.G., “Young woman,” “president of a bank,” “good gymnast”) and whether examinees appear to be identifying with these people or seeing them as representing certain other people in their lives (e.g., Parent, spouse).
• How the people in a story are interacting; for example, whether they are helping or hurting each other in some way.
• The emotional tone of the story, as indicated by the specific affect attributed to the depicted characters (e.g., Happy, sad, angry, sorry, enthused, indifferent).
• The plot of the story, with particular respect to outcomes involving success or failure, gratification or disappointment, love gained or lost, and the like.

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TYPES OF DATA COLLECTED

• Behavioural data
• The way people behave and relate to the examiner during a TAT administration provides clues to how they typically approach task-oriented and interpersonal situations.
• Whether they appear self-assured or tentative, friendly or surly, assertive or deferential, and detached or engaged can characterize individuals while they are telling their tat stories, and these test behaviors are likely to reflect general traits of a similar kind.
• The aspect of the way they handle the cards also proves benifitial in collecting the information regarding the behavioural cues of the individual.

ADMINISTRATION

• Murray intended that persons taking the TAT would be asked to tell stories to all 20 of the pictures appropriate to their age (child/adult) and gender (male/female).
• The 20 pictures were to be shown in two 50-minute sessions, with a 1-day interval between sessions and people would be instructed to devote about 5 minutes to each story.
• In actual practice over the years, tat examiners have typically administered 8 to 12 selected cards in a single session.
• Most commonly, cards are selected on the basis of whether they are expected to elicit stories that are rich in meaning and relevant to specific concerns of the person being assessed.
• Teglasi (2001, p. 38) has reported a consensus among TAT clinicians that the most useful TAT cards are 1, 2, 3BM, 6BM, 7GF, 8BM, 9GF, 10, and13mf.

ADMINISTRATION

• People are asked to tell a story about each of the cards they are shown.
• They are told that their stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end and should include four aspects:
• What is happening in the picture
• What led up to this situation
• What the people in the picture are thinking and feeling
• What the outcome of the situation will be.
• When people have finished telling their story about a picture, they are asked to add story elements they have omitted to mention (e.g., “How did this situation come about?”).

ADMINISTRATION

SCORING

• Bellak’s scoring system
• The cumbersome detail of the TAT coding scheme originally proposed by murray (1943/1971) discouraged its widespread adoption in either clinical practice or research.
• The only comprehensive procedure for coding tat stories that has enjoyed even mild popularity is an “analysis sheet” developed by bellak for use with his inspection method.
• Bellak’s analysis sheet calls for examiners to describe briefly several features of each story, including its: main theme, the needs and intentions of its characters, the kinds of affects that are being experienced, the nature of any conflicts
• Each story is additionally rated for the degree to which it appears to reflect strengths or weaknesses in an individual’s personality integration (e.G., A relatively good or poor sense of reality, high or low tolerance for frustration).
• Despite being the best known comprehensive tat scoring system, yet it is not very widely used.

SCORING

• Social cognition and object relations scale (SCORS)
• There are three notable content rating scales have been developed for measuring specific dimensions of personality with the TAT.
• Western, lohr, silk, Kerber, and Goodrich (1989) constructed the social cognition and object relations scale (scors)
• They codify TAT imagery in ways that would tap persons’ underlying attitudes toward themselves, toward other people, and toward social relationships. Western et al. Initially defined four dimensions of object relationships that could be evaluated in TAT stories, and western (1995) later expanded this number to the following eight SCORS dimensions, each of which is coded on a 7-point scale for the maturity level reflected in the actions and attitudes of the characters in a story.
• The numerical ratings from 1 (least mature) to 7 (most mature) are assigned for the content of each of a person’s stories, and these ratings are averaged over the number of cards administered to give a summary score for each of the eight dimensions.

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SCORING

• Defense mechanism manual (DMM)
• Cramer (1991, 1996, chap. 7, 2006) based the defense mechanism manual (DMM) on a fairly traditional definition of defense mechanisms as efforts to ward off feelings of anxiety and guilt and by so doing to protect one’s self-esteem and sense of well-being.
• Some of the psychological defenses are relatively mature and adaptive, cramer noted, whereas others are childish or infantile. The less mature a person’s defenses are, the more likely they are to detract from rather than safeguard the individual’s ability to feel comfortable and function effectively.
• Research findings have confirmed that the developmental level of their preferred defense mechanisms has implications for how much happiness and success people find in their lives and their susceptibility to particular kinds of psychopathology (vaillant, 1977, 1994).

SCORING

• Need for achievement (n-ach)
• The need for achievement (n-ach) scale emerged from the experimental psychology of motivation.
• McClelland and his colleagues (McClelland et al., 1953, 1958) hypothesized that TAT stories would reflect the strength of a person’s psychological needs and could be used to measure it.
• To test their hypothesis, they considered first the need to achieve and constructed a scoring scheme for identifying six presumably achievement-related features of stories:
• A stated desire to reach some goal;
• Activity intended to reach that goal;
• Anticipation of success or failure in reaching the goal;
• Obstacles that impede goal-directed activity;
• Assistance from someone else in achieving the goal;
• An affective state associated with success or failure in attaining an achievement goal.

INTERPRETATION: STORY MEANING

• Like the Rorschach inkblots, the TAT cards tend to draw certain patterns of response that constitute their “card pull.”
• In addition, the tat pictures commonly suggest certain themes or plots in the stories that are told to them.
• As a third aspect of tat card pull, many of the pictures remind people of issues in their lives (e.g., Parent-child relationships) or particular concerns they have (e.g., Managing anger). Familiarity with the frequently noted features, commonly elicited story lines, and issues often tapped for each card provides a backdrop for grasping the meaning of the stories people tell.

INTERPRETATION: STORY MEANING

• The stories people tell to the TAT pictures typically reflect many of their attitudes, intentions, and expectations, both those they recognize in themselves and some that have not been in their conscious awareness.
• Tat stories also contain clues to a person’s affective disposition, preferred coping style, and cognitive integrity.
• This approach to interpretation closely resembles Bellak’s inspection method, which was identified earlier as the most commonly used interpretive procedure in clinical practice.
• The more clearly and directly interpretations are based on what is depicted in the cards and on the content of the stories told to them, the more likely they are to capture accurately some characteristics of an individual’s mental and emotional life.

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ATTITUDES, INTENTIONS, AND EXPECTATIONS

• The characteristics that people attribute to the characters and events in their TAT stories often reflect some of their own attitudes, intentions, and expectations. A card 1 story about a “talented” boy who wants to master the violin, practices diligently, and becomes a world-famous performer suggests positive attitudes of confidence in one’s capabilities, intent to work hard toward ambitious goals, and expectations of success in what one tries to accomplish.
• As a third possibility, stories may seem silent with respect to success and failure, and they may be peopled with inactive characters who show little interest in pursuing clearly defined goals.
• The way figures are described may reveal how people wish they were, or dream of being, rather than how they actually see themselves. The distinction between actual and ideal self-representations in TAT stories must often rest on other sources of information

AFFECTIVE DISPOSITION

• The emotional tone of the TAT stories people tell, together with the emotions they display while telling their stories, usually provides clues to how they feel. Pronounced or recurrent tendencies to describe characters in stories as being happy or sad, anxious or comfortable, or angry or at peace with the world suggest that a person may be experiencing similar affects.
• Events in the story that are seen as having elicited these affects may provide clues to the kinds of life situations that are likely to result in the person’s feeling this way.
• Familiarity with the previously presented card pull information is often helpful in evaluating the implications of story tone for a person’s affective state.

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COPING STYLE

• TAT stories in which story characters deal with their circumstances often provide clues to a person’s preferred coping style.
• The stories told by the first of these two persons suggest that he or she is a somewhat passive individual, more of a follower than a leader, who tends to defer to the judgment and wishes of others and prefers to let other people take responsibility.
• The stories of the second person suggest an active coping style characterized by preferences to be in charge, to seek and accept responsibility, and to shape events rather than be shaped by them.
• This difference in storytelling is likely to identify a corresponding difference in an ideational/expressive dimension of coping style.

COPING STYLE

• People who are more comfortable with thoughts than feelings on the TAT may be the kind of person who is known as a thinker rather than a doer.
• Such people tend to be contemplative individuals who make decisions by considering alternative possibilities in a deliberate manner before taking action, and who solve problems conceptually, by mulling over possible solutions in their minds before trying them out. By contrast, individuals who appear more comfortable with feelings than thoughts in their TAT performance are likely to be doers who decide what actions to take on the basis of intuition rather than reflection, are guided more by how they feel than what they think, and solve problems by trying out various possible solutions to them.
• As these brief descriptions indicate, coping preferences along the active/passive and ideational/expressive dimensions have substantial implications for how people are likely to conduct themselves in various situation.

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COGNITIVE INTEGRITY

• The structural characteristics of TAT stories and the manner in which they are expressed frequently contain clues to the integrity of people’s cognitive functioning—particularly their attention, perception, and thinking.
• Persons who are functioning well cognitively tend to notice and comment on the obvious and commonly noted stimulus elements of the pictures, as identified in the earlier discussion in this chapter on card pull, and they avoid becoming distracted by or preoccupied with minor or rarely mentioned details.
• As for perception, cognitively intact examinees typically perceive the people in their tat stories realistically and construct plots that reflect likely relationships among events.
• Accordingly, failure to take account of central stimulus features of the pictures and excessive emphasis on peripheral features are likely to identify an unbalanced and potentially maladaptive focus of attention. Such faulty focusing could reflect obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit or dissociative disorder, or anxiety reactions to particular cards, or perhaps other possible etiologies.

APPLICATIONS

• The TAT derives its applications from the information it provides about an individual’s personality characteristics.
• The tat functions best as a measure of underlying needs, attitudes, conflicts, and concerns, its primary application is in clinical work, mostly in planning psychotherapy and monitoring treatment progress.
• The possible sources and implications of adjustment difficulties than in distinguishing among categories of psychological disorder.
• The interpretive implications of tat stories often prove helpful in planning, conducting, and evaluating the impact of psychological treatment.
• Tat findings typically go well beyond interview data in illuminating issues that should be addressed in psychotherapy.

APPLICATIONS

• Inferences based on TAT stories are particularly likely to assist in answering the following four central questions in treatment planning:
• What types of conflicts need to be resolved and what concerns need to be eased for the person to feel better and function more effectively?
• What sorts of underlying attitudes does the person have toward key figures in his or her life, toward certain kinds of people in general, and toward interpersonal relatedness?
• What situations or events are likely to be distressing or gratifying to the person, and how does this person tend to cope with distress and respond to gratification?
• Which of these unresolved conflicts, underlying attitudes, or distressing experiences appears to be a root cause of the emotional or adjustment problems that brought the person into treatment.
• By providing such information, tat findings can help guide therapists plan their treatment strategies, anticipate obstacles to progress, and identify adroit interventions.

FORENSIC AND ORGANIZATIONAL APPLICATIONS

• Forensic and organizational applications of TAT assessment have also been limited.
• Forensic psychologists report using the tat in their practice, and tat assessment easily meets the general acceptance criterion for admissibility into evidence.
• Tat assessment appears clearly to have achieved general acceptance in the professional community.
• This tat measure of achievement motivation showed higher correlations with outcome criteria in these studies than self-report questionnaire measures of motivation to achieve.

GROUP ADMINISTRATION, CROSS-CULTURAL RELEVANCE, AND RESISTANCE TO IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT

• Three other aspects of the TAT are likely to enhance its applications for various purposes.
• First, the suitability of the tat for group administration facilitates largescale data collection for research purposes and creates possibilities for using the instrument as a screening device in applied settings.
• Second, since early in its history, the tat has been used as a clinical and research instrument in many different countries and has proved particularly valuable in studying cultural change and cross-cultural differences in personality characteristics.
• Third, as a performance-based measure, the tat is somewhat resistant to impression management. People who choose to conceal their inner life by telling brief and unelaborated stories can easily defeat the purpose of the examination.

DIAGNOSTIC EVALUATIONS

• The TAT does best—generate hypotheses about a person’s inner life—rarely plays a prominent role in clinical diagnostic evaluations.
• Nevertheless, certain thematic, structural, and behavioral features of a tat protocol may be consistent with and reinforce diagnostic impressions based on other sources of information.
• Research with the SCORS and DMM scales has demonstrated that objectified tat findings can identify personality differences among persons with different types of problem.
• Examples of this diagnostic relevance include suspicion-laden story plots that suggest paranoia, disjointed narratives that indicate disordered thinking, and a slow rate of speech that points to depressive lethargy.

STRENGTHS

• Richness of personality description
• Reflects current concerns
• Describes interpersonal issues, patterns, motivations
• Taps unconscious material
• Wide variety of applications
• Helps the person experience their feelings well.
• Helps explore themes about persons personal life.

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LIMITATIONS

• Questionable reliability and validity
• No standardization
• Multiple scoring system
• Time consuming
• Relies on clinical institution
• There is a risk of interpretation bias
• Requires a trained person to administer it.

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DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RIM AND TAT

RORSHACH INKBLOT TEST

• This is less structured and ambiguous as it consist of inkblots.
• The instructions are structured and to the point.
• It is a measure of perception and association.
• It is based on projective hypothesis

THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST

• They are more structured and less ambiguous as it consist of real pictures.
• The instructions are less structured and open ended.
• It requires the people to use more of their imagination.
• This is based on theory given by Henry Murray.

CONCLUSION

TAT is a widely used personality test which is also known has a “picture interpretation test”. Developed by Murray at Harvard university enjoys a lot of popularity. This is one of the widely researched and clinically used personality test. It has a number of limitations yet its wide variety of applications overpower it this is the only reason that it is widely used.