THE RORSCHACH TEST

Dr Aarti Gorwadkar

HERMAN RORSCHACH8 November 1884 – 1 April 1922

HISTORY & DEVELOPMENT

• Rorschach primarily wanted to establish empirically based discriminations among different groups and was only minimally concerned with the symbolical interpretation of contents.

• 1940s and 1950s, the name Rorschach was almost synonymous with clinical psychology.

• Unfortunately, Rorschach died at age 37, shortly after the publication of his major work, Psychodiagnostik (1921/1941).

• One of the early difficulties in establishing the psychometric properties of the Rorschach was in making meaningful comparisons across various studies.

• By 1957, five Rorschach systems were in wide use, the most popular being those developed by Beck and Klopfer.

• The wide range of often competing approaches resulted in numerous detrimental practices.

Cont..

• Beck emphasized that the response to the Rorschach involved primarily a perceptual-cognitive process in which the respondents structure and organize their perceptions into meaningful responses.

• B. Klopfer emphasized the symbolical and experiential nature of a respondent’s Rorschach contents.

Cont…

• Exner (1969) for the first time provided a comparative analysis of these different systems.

• The general conclusion, based on these findings, was that the research on and the clinical use of the Rorschach were seriously flawed.

• The final product was first published in 1974 as The Rorschach: A Comprehensive System.

RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY

• Establishing the validity of the Rorschach as a whole has been complicated by the many scoring categories and quantitative formulas, each of which has varying levels of validity.

• Early meta-analyses indicated that validity ranged from .40 to .50

• With the exception of a few disorders (schizophrenia, borderline personality, bipolar disorder), the Rorschach has not been very effective at assisting with making formal psychiatric diagnosis, according to a few analysts.

PRINCIPLE

• Stimuli from the environment are organized by a person’s specific needs, motives, and conflicts, and by certain perceptual “sets.”

• This need for organization becomes more exaggerated, extensive, and conspicuous when subjects are confronted with ambiguous stimuli, such as inkblots.

Cont..

• The process by which persons organize their responses to the Rorschach is representative of how they confront other ambiguous situations requiring organization and judgment.

Purpose

• Cognitive structuring

• Thematic imagery

• Motivations

• Response tendencies

• Cognitive operations

• Affectivity

• Personal and Interpersonal perceptions

ADVANTAGES

• High resistance to faking.

• Can be used with an individual from any age group.

• Can be used even when no relatives or attendants are available to substantiate or give history.

• Cross cultural researches on basic personlaitystructures.

Cont….

• Evaluate the therapeutic efficacy ( before and after application of a specific therapy)

• Can be used to explore the unconscious motives for the behavior.

• For cases of compensation neurosis for disability who intentionally pretend to have more disability.

• One frequently noted asset is that the Rorschach is considered to be excellent at bypassing a person’s conscious resistance.

LIMITATIONS

• Scoring and interpretation are often quite complicated and time-consuming.

• It is one of the most complex psychological tests in current use, error can potentially be introduced from many different directions.

• Reliability and validity studies performed on one system did not necessarily mean that the findings from these studies could be generalized to any of the other systems.

LIMITATIONS

• With the exception of a few disorders (schizophrenia, borderline personality, bipolar disorder), the Rorschach has not been very effective at assisting with making formal psychiatric diagnosis.

• Time required to analyze results.

• Learning curve is very long.

• Often been considered to have limited use with children.

APPARATUS

• Complete set of 10 Rorschach plates

• Rorschach location charts (Mini Plates)

• Plain paper, pencil and pen

• A decent, comfortable and naturally or artificially lit room is very important.

THE TESTING PLACE

• Test MUST ALWAYS be administered in a very peaceful environment.

• Test should be administered in privacy and in a non disturbing area.

• The entry of unknown people while testing is in progress should be avoided. This is very crucial.

INSTRUCTION TO THE TESTER

• Exner recommends that the examiner hand the subject the first card and ask, “What might this be?”

• Commentary on, or discussion of the cards by the examiner, should be avoided as much as possible.

• The main objective is to give the subject maximum freedom to respond to the stimuli in his or her own manner.

• The tester must have a clear idea in his mind as to what is the purpose of the administration of this test to a certain patient.

INTRODUCING THE TEST TO THE RESPONDENT

• Rapport formation.

• Clear introduction to the testing procedure, obtaining personal history, answering questions.

• Emphasize relatively neutral words such as inkblot, interests, or imagination, rather than potentially anxiety-provoking words such as intelligence or ambiguous.

Cont..

• Any specific information regarding what subjects should do or say is to be avoided.

SAMPLE INTRODUCTION

• You will be taking an interesting test of thinking and imagination ability today.

• It requires about an hour or sometimes more.

• This test would help me in understanding your problems, strong and weak points in your personality. It would be helpful in overall management of the treatment plan.

• I shall be giving you one by one a series of 10 plates made of inkblots. Some of them are in black and white and some are multicolor.

• On seeing the plate, you’re supposed to tell me everything what you see on the plate.

• You are to tell me everything that might be represented by these blots.

• People see all sorts of things on these inkblot pictures. Tell me what it might be for you, what it looks like, what it resembles with.

• There are no right or wrong answers. So, you are free to tell me whatever comes to your mind on seeing the plate without feeling embarassed if its right or wrong.

• You are free to ask any question.

THE TEST PROPER

THE RESPONSE (ASSOCIATION) PHASE• Time the interval:

1) First see the card and ends when they make their initial response.

2) total time they spend with each card.

• Recording of time should be done as inconspicuously as possible.

• The average number of responses is 22.32

• The testee should be encouraged regularly to tell whatever comes to his mind.

• The encouragement should be reduced progressively and after the 5th or 6th plate, the encouragement should be stopped.

• After that, if the testee returns back any plate without any response before 1min, then and only then the tester should try to encourage.

Cont… • A client who produces an extremely brief

protocol (fewer than fourteen responses) should be immediately retested and provided with a clearer request to provide more responses.

• If a client provides six or more responses to the first inkblot, the examiner should remove the inkblot.

• All responses must be recorded verbatim.

Cont…• A set of abbreviations used throughout all the

Rorschach systems consists of the symbols (V, > ,ᴧ, < ) in which the peak indicates the angle of the card.

• Note any odd or unusual responses to the cards.

INQUIRY• Most important phase for scoring and

interpretation.

• The inquiry should begin after all 10 cards have been administered.

• It is intended to clarify the responses that have already been given, not to obtain new responses.

• Any questions should be as nondirective as possible.

• Tester should repeat the original response given.

Cont..

• In this phase, responses can be recorded either verbatim or in the abbreviated style whichever is suitable.

• An additional feature of the inquiry is to test the subject’s awareness of his or her responses.

• Thus the emphasis is on: location and determinants for each percept.

• It is critically important to prepare the respondent.

• Thorndike’s law of recency.

SAMPLE INTRODUCTION

• Now we are going to go back through the cards again. It won’t take very long. I want to see the thing that you said you saw and make sure that I see them like you do.

• We’ll do them one at a time. I’ll read what you said and then I want you to show me where it is in the blot and then tell me what there is there that makes it look like that to you, so that I can see it too, just like you did.

• Is that clear?

PLATE 1

PLATE 2

PLATE 3

PLATE 4

PLATE 5

PLATE 6

PLATE 7

PLATE 8

PLATE 9

PLATE 10

REFERNCES

• A practical manual for the rorchach test by Dwarka Pershad and Suresh Parekh.

• Handbook of psychological assessment 4th

edition by Gary Groth Marnat.

• En.wikipedia.org/

• http://oink.elrellano.com/desastre/rorschach_inkblot_test.html