6/21/2023 0 Comments Inkblot personality testThe authors also looked at all the extant studies on the test's validity. The PSPI review found that therapists disagree on fully half of these variables, making the scores unreliable for diagnosis.īut it gets worse. Psychotherapists look at more than 100 different variables when scoring an answer: Did the patient focus on stray splotches rather than the main blot, or the white spaces instead of the ink? Did the patient interpret the color? That kind of thing. The authors-psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, James Wood and Howard Garb-find the Rorschach wanting in two crucial ways.įirst, the test lacks what testing experts call "scoring reliability." Scoring reliability means than you get the same results no matter who is scoring the test. Such meta-analyses are major undertakings, so although this PSPI report is a few years old, it remains the most definitive word on the Rorschach. The journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest published an exhaustive review of all data on the Rorschach (and other similar "projective" tests) in 2000. But this heated debate has failed to raise (or answer) the most important question of all: does the Rorschach work? The answer is no, and here is the best evidence: This shouting match escalated this week when The New York Times published a long articleabout the Wikipedia-Rorschach brouhaha. Free-speech advocates-including many other therapists-dismiss those claims as nonsense. Wikipedia's move has sparked a firestorm among psychotherapists who claim that publishing the norms could skew the test's results-or worse, allow patients to fool their therapists, to game the system. Therapists use these common answers-or norms-to help them diagnose abnormal behavior and thinking. I know this because Wikipedia recently published all 10 of the inkblots that Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach first introduced in his book Psychodiagnostik back in 1921-along with the most common "answers" for each of the inkblots. I don't know if my interpretation is normal or aberrant, but I do know that most people see two human beings of some kind in inkblot No. 2 of the Rorschach test, a psychological test used by clinical psychologists and other therapists to assess personality and diagnose psychopathology. They appear to be giving each other the high-five. They are sitting facing one another other. It clearly depicts two medieval wizards, with tall red hats and black cloaks. There is nothing ambiguous about the image in my mind.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |