Who is the rorschach test used on

By asking the person to tell you what they see in the inkblot, they are actually telling you about themselves, and how they project meaning on to the real world. But the inventor of the test, Hermann Rorschach, never intended it to be a test of personality. As a child, the young Hermann was a big fan of a popular game called Klecksographie, so much so that his nickname was Kleck.

The idea of the game was to collect inkblot cards that could be bought from local shops and make associations and stories from the inkblots. Rorschach went on to study psychiatry and while training, in , he noticed that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia made radically different associations to the Klecksographie inkblots than did normal people. He therefore developed the Rorschach test as a diagnostic tool for schizophrenia.

It wasn't until that the test was used as a projective test of personality. Rorschach himself had always been sceptical about this.

This controversy about the reliability and validity of the Rorschach has been present since its conception. Today, many - probably most - psychologists in the UK think the Rorschach is nonsense. Criticisms of the Rorschach have centred on three things:. First, some psychologists have argued that the testing psychologist also projects his or her unconscious world on to the inkblots when interpreting responses. For example, if the person being tested sees a bra, a male psychologist might classify this as a sexual response, whereas a female psychologist may classify it as clothing.

Second, the Rorschach has also been criticised for its validity. It became clear over time, however, that the test was more useful for identifying personality traits rather than mental illnesses, although the test can still produce these results. When the test is administered to a patient, the patient's brain begins trying to identify any patterns in the inkblots. Each of the inkblots has a common shape that is identified by most patients.

These common shapes are used to determine whether or not a patient is projecting their personalities onto the inkblots or not. After one round of all ten cards, the patient is typically brought through another round in which they are asked to explain more about the inkblots.

This is when the personality of the patient tends to bleed into their interpretation of the cards. Once the test is finished and the responses are recorded, the psychiatrist who administered the test will begin to evaluate the patient's response. Much of the interpretation comes from the psychiatrist's understanding of the patient's answers. Although the cards do have common interpretations , the patient's response will tell the psychiatrist about their past, their personality traits, and the way that they function in the world.

The psychiatrist will also use a scoring system that bases answers on the following characteristics:. Because of the complex nature of the responses, these characteristics will often be paired together to provide a better description of the patient's responses. As with the majority of popular scientific tests and theories, there are psychologists on both sides of the inkblot test that either support it or discredit it.

Psychologists who are on the supporting side argue that the test is an effective method to reveal how the mind works and that it is successful enough to uncover mental illnesses and personality traits based on an individual's answers. Let me direct you to a study published by the American Psychological Association in The study, conducted by Joni L. In surveys in Louttit and Browne and Sundberg , for instance, it was the fourth and first, respectively, most frequently used psychological test.

Despite its widespread use, it has also been the center of much controversy. It has often proven to be difficult for researchers to study the test and its results in any systematic manner, and the use of multiple kinds of scoring systems for the responses given to each inkblot has led to some confusion. Hermann Rorschach did not make it clear where he got the idea from the test. However, like most children of his time, he often played the popular game called Blotto Klecksographie , which involved creating poem-like associations or playing charades with inkblots.

The inkblots could be purchased easily in many stores at the time. It is also thought that a close personal friend and teacher, Konrad Gehring, may have also suggested the use of inkblots as a psychological tool.

In his work on schizophrenia patients, Rorschach inadvertently discovered that they responded quite differently to the Blotto game than others. He made a brief report of this finding to a local psychiatric society, but nothing more came of it at the time. Rorschach used about 40 inkblots in his original studies in through , but he would administer only about 15 of them regularly to his patients.

Ultimately he collected data from subjects non-patients which he used as his control group. His scoring method minimized the importance of content, instead focusing on how to classify responses by their different characteristics.

He did this using a set of codes — now called scores — to determine if the response was talking about the whole inkblot W , for instance, a large detail D , or a smaller detail.

F was used to score for form of the inkblot, and C was used to score whether the response included color. In and , he tried to find a publisher for his findings and the 15 inkblot cards he regularly used. However, every published balked at publishing all 15 inkblots because of printing costs.

Finally in , he found a publisher — the House of Bircher — willing to publish his inkblots, but only 10 of them. Rorschach reworked his manuscript to include only 10 of the 15 inkblots he most commonly used. You can review the 10 Rorschach inkblots on Wikipedia ; the rest of the Wikipedia entry on the Rorschach is full of significant factual errors.

The printer, alas, was not very good at being true to the original inkblots. Rorschach reportedly was actually quite pleased with the introduction of this new addition to his inkblots. After publishing his monograph with the inkblots, entitled a Form Interpretation Test, he died in after being admitted to a hospital for abdominal pains. Finally, he found a publisher in , who was willing to publish his inkblots, but only ten of them. Hermann reworked his manuscript and included only 10 of the 15 inkblots.

Most personality tests are objective in that they have standard methods of administration and scoring. However, in the late s, the Rorschach was classified as a projective test.

The term applied to a range of many different tasks that could be used for personality assessment, like asking people to tell imaginative stores that relate to specific images - sound familiar? The idea was that these tasks forced people to project and put forward distinctive and interesting aspects of their personality when completing an activity that does not include much external guidance.

The basic idea involves the test taker projecting their thoughts and feelings on what seems to be ambiguous and meaningless images, and the interpretation falls within the realm of the tester's judgment. The mind works hard to impose meaning on the image - the entire sense of the pictures is generated solely by the mind. Therefore, by asking the test taker to describe what they see in the inkblot, they are genuinely telling you about themselves and how they project meaning onto the real world.

Again, projective tests are contrasted with objective personality tests, which refer to self-rating questionnaires. Individuals indicate whether oral descriptions are characteristic of them, using an established set of response options i. So now that we have an underlying understanding of how the test is administered, what exactly do interpreters and psychologists of the Rorschach test look for when they analyze the patient's responses to the inkblots?

The actual content of the answers given is one thing, but the other factors are essential too. The content refers to the name or class of objects used in the patient's responses. Some standard contents include:.

There are five identified yet broad categories of inkblot determinants that the patient could be responding to:. Addressing the location of the patient's response is another element of scoring in the Rorschach test. The "Location" refers to how much of the inkblot the patient used to depict an image.

Once every card has been shown and the psychologist correctly codes each response, an interpretative report is created based on the patient's scores. The report seeks to integrate the findings from across all reactions from the test. Therefore, one outlying answer is not likely to impact the test's conclusions overall. Since many people respond to the inkblots in a complicated and detailed yet, the scoring system utilizes the concept of blends to account for complex answers that seem to take into account many objects or the way used to describe the thing.

The organizational activity of the response assesses how well-organized the reaction from the patient is.