Dr Manju Antil (Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist)

Psychological testing is one of the newest disciplines of one of the youngest sciences - Psychology. It is essentially an objective and standardised measure of a sample of behaviour. Its principal function is to measure differences between individuals or the reactions of the same individual in different situations. Initially, it was employed to identify different grades of feeblemindedness. Over time, its application has grown to cover many activities, including examining emotionally maladjusted, delinquents and other subnormal deviates. In India today, schools are its significant users. They employ psychological testing to classify children between intellectually retarded and the gifted and for educational and vocational counselling. Employers use it in the selection of their crucial staff and normal interviewing.

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The science of psychological testing developed with the growing concern for the care of the mentally disabled, who was the victim of neglect, ridicule and even torture in the 19th century. With the establishment of various institutions for the mentally disabled across Europe and the United States, an objective classification system between the insane and the feebleminded was necessitated for admission to these institutions. The insane were characterised by emotional disorders which might or might not be accompanied by intellectual deterioration from an initial average level, while the feebleminded were identified by an intellectual defect present from birth or early infancy. The first statement of this distinction is probably found in a two-volume work of French physician Esquire, who had devoted over 100 pages to feeblemindedness in 1838. Based on his subject's use of language, Esquire distinguished between two grades of imbecility and three grades of idiocy. At around the same time, another French physician, Seguin, pioneered the training of the feebleminded. He rejected the notion that mental deficiency was incurable. However, the focus of most experimental psychologists at that time was on the formulation of a generalised description of human behaviour rather than the measurement of individual differences. The British biologist Sir Francis Galton was instrumental in launching the testing movement on its course. In 1882, he established an anthropometric laboratory in South Kensington Museum, London, where he measured certain physical traits of individuals such as keenness of vision and hearing, muscular strength, reaction time and other simple sensor motor -function for a small fee. To administer these tests, he devised some simple tests, such as "Gabon bar" and "Gabon whistle". Gabon believed that tests of sensor motor discrimination could serve to gauge a person's intellect. Galton also pioneered rating scale and questionnaire methods and the "free association" technique, subsequently employed for various purposes. He also developed statistical methods for the analysis of data on individual differences.

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Galton's work received a further boost when an American psychologist, James McKean Catelli, developed "mental tests" - a term used for the first time in the psychological literature - in 1890. Chattel's tests, administered annually to college students to determine their intellectual level, were carried out individually and included measures of muscular strength, speed of movement, pain sensitivity, keenness of vision and hearing, weight discrimination, reaction time and memory. Like Galton, Catelli believed that a measure of intellectual functions could be obtained through sensory discrimination and reaction time tests. Some other tests, devised by European psychologists of that period, tended to cover somewhat more complex functions. Kraepelin, for example, devised a long series of tests to measure practice effects, memory and susceptibility to fatigue and distraction. However, he was more interested in the clinical examination of psychiatric patients. French psychologists Binet and Henri formulated a long list of tests of memory, imagination, attention, comprehension, suggestibility, aesthetic appreciation, and many other functions that eventually developed the renowned Binet-Simon "intelligence scales".

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THE RISE OF INTELLIGENCE TESTS

The Binet-Simon scale, also known as the 1905 Scale, comprised 30 problems arranged in ascending order of difficulty. The difficulty level was set empirically by administering the tests to 50 normal children aged 3 to 11 years and some mentally disabled and feebleminded children. The tests were designed to cover various functions, emphasising judgment, comprehension and reasoning, which Binet regarded as essential components of intelligence. In 1908, Binet increased the number of tests, grouped them into age levels, and called them tests to determine the "mental age" - 1. E. the age of average child whose performance he equalled. In 1911, some more tests were added for ages over 11 years, and the scale was extended to the adult level.

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GROUP TESTING

However, the Binet tests are individual scales, as they are administered to only one person at a time. Many of the tests in these scales require oral responses from the subject or necessitate the manipulation of materials. Such tests are essentially clinical instruments suited to an intensive study of individual cases. Only after the United States entered World War I in 1917 that a group of American army psychologists develop what has come to be known as Army Alpha and Army Beta tests to determine the general intellectual level of large groups. Such information was needed to facilitate administrative decisions, like rejection or discharge from military service, assignment to different types of services, or admission to officer teaming camps. At the end of the war, the army tests were released for civilian use - a measure that spurred the growth of large scale testing programs by leaps and bounds. Soon schools were using them to assess the .general intelligence level, or what is commonly known as "IQ" (intelligence quotient) of their pupils.

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SPECIAL APTITUDE TESTS

But gradually, it became apparent that intelligence tests were limited in their coverage, as they primarily measured verbal ability and, to some extent, the ability to handle numerical and other symbolic relations. Moreover, many psychologists realised that the term "intelligence test" was a misnomer since it represented only certain aspects of intelligence. This led to the rise of particular aptitude tests, such as the subjects' mechanical, clerical, musical and artistic abilities and intellectual abilities.

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MEASUREMENT O F PERSONALITY

Still, all these tests failed to measure the overall personality of an individual Efforts were, therefore, directed towards non-intellectual aspects of behaviour, and tests designed for this purpose are commonly known as "personality tested", covering such characteristics as emotional adjustment, social relations, motivation, interests and attitudes.

 An early precursor of personality testing may be recognised in Kraepelin's use of the free association tests with abnormal patients. Sommer (1894) also suggested that the free association test might differentiate between the various forms of mental disorder. Although initially devised for other purposes, many psychologists eventually employed these procedures in constructing some most common types of personality tests. The prototype of the personality questionnaire, or self-report inventory, is the personal data sheet developed by Woodworth during World War I. This test was designed as a rough screening device for identifying seriously neurotic men who would be unfit for military service. In addition, the questionnaire attempted to subdivide emotional adjustment inventories into more specific forms, such as home adjustment, school adjustment, and vocational adjustment.

 Another approach to measuring personality is applying performance or situational tests. In such tests, the subject has a task to perform whose purpose is generally disguised. Most of these tests simulate everyday life situations quite closely. The first extensive application of such techniques is found in the tests developed in the late twenties and early thirties by Harts home, May and their associates (1928-1930). This series, standardised on school children, was concerned with such behaviour as cheating, lying, stealing, cooperativeness and persistence. During World War II, the Assessment Program of the Office of Strategic Service (OSS, 1948) conducted these tests on adults. These tests were concerned with relatively complex and subtle social and emotional behaviour and required elaborate facilities and trained personnel for administration. The interpretation of the subject's responses was also somewhat subjective.

The Projective technique is a third approach to studying personality that has grown phenomenally, especially among clinicians. In such tests, the subject is given a relatively unstructured task that permits wide latitude in its solution. The assumption underlying such methods is that the individual will project his characteristic modes of response into such a task. The projective technique is also more or less disguised in its purpose, like performance and situational tests. However, all personality tests present difficulties, both practical and theoretical.

Moreover, the construction and use of personality inventories are beset with particular difficulties over and above the common problems encountered in psychological testing. For example, the question of faking and malingering is far more acute in personality measurement than in aptitude testing. Yet, there is a silver lining beyond the cloud: the research on personality measurement has reached impressive proportions since 1950, and many ingenious devices and technical improvements are under investigation.

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 TEST RELIABILITY

Psychologists have attempted to develop various methods of determining the reliability of tests. Test reliability indicates how individual differences in test scores are attributable to chance errors of measurement and the extent to which they are attributable to the differences in the characteristic under consideration. In more technical terms, every measure of test reliability denotes what proportion of the total variance of test scores is error variance. An obvious source of error variance is the random fluctuation of performance occurring from one session to another. This may result from uncontrolled testing conditions, such as extreme changes in weather, sudden noises and other distractions. This may also arise from the subject's illness, fatigue, emotional strain or anxiety. This error variance is attributed to what is known in psychological parlance as "temporal stability".

Another problem is presented by the greater situational specificity of responses in the sphere of personality. E.g. an individual might be quite sociable and extroverted at the office, but elsewhere not. Such specificity, in turn, relates to the difficulty of grouping items into clearly defined categories of personality traits. First, personality inventories may be recognised as intrinsically crude instruments and their application restricted accordingly. Most psychologists today would probably accept some combination of the two approaches, although a few may align themselves exclusively behind one or the other. Personality inventories may also be evaluated more fundamentally regarding their theoretical assumptions and underlying rationale. The first concern the type of information that the personality inventories are designed to elicit. The second pertains to the inherent ambiguity of inventory responses. Because the early personality inventories were designed as a rapid substitute for the psychiatric interview, it is frequently assumed that the response to each symptom or die other behaviour characteristics described by the question. Personality inventories have been attacked from another angle because their responses are necessarily ambiguous.

In interpreting test scores, personality and aptitudes cannot be kept apart. An individual's performance on an aptitude test, as well as his performance in school, on the job, or in any other context, is influenced by his achievement drive, his persistence, his value system, his freedom from handicapping emotional problems, and every other characteristic traditionally classified under the heading of "personality". The cumulative effect of personality characteristics on the direction mid extent of the individual's intellectual development is even more critical. The relationship between personality and intellect is reciprocal. Personality characteristics affect intellectual development, but intellectual level also affects personality development. The individual's success in developing and using his aptitudes is bound to influence his emotional adjustment, interpersonal relations, and self-concept. In the self-concept, we can see the mutual influence of aptitudes and personality.

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• Arguing with people. 

• Wasting energy on one-sided relationships.

• Overcommitting my time when I didn't have the energy.

• Going along to get along.

• Overlooking my blessings & comparing my life to someone else's.

• Abandoning myself, my truth, and my integrity to "fit in."

• Waiting for external validation to boost my confidence. 

• Accepting & excusing toxic behaviour because that was more comfortable: than change.

• Allowing dysfunctional family members to steal my joy. 

• Trying to fix people as an "act of "love."

• Discarding my boundaries to fit (uncomfortably) in other people's lives

• Pretending to be happy when I was hurting.

• Silencing my voice & not naming my needs.

• Overthinking about my past & things I cannot change. 

• Holding onto people I've outgrown because of the "time 2 invested."

• Trying to change people who were committed to staying the same.

Evaluation of the structure, functioning, and pathology of personality has traditionally been an essential and challenging psychological assessment component. Various assessment methods have been used for the realization of this aim, such as subjective, objective, and projective. Each of these methods has some strengths and weaknesses (Blais and Baity, 2008). There has been controversy regarding the projective methods’ nomenclature, and whether these should be labelled as projective tests or projective techniques. Many scholars preferred to call these devices projective techniques because most projective instruments lack the psychometric properties possessed by an objective test. Projective techniques compared to the subjective and objective assessment methods in which assessment is made either in terms of information obtained from others (case history, interview) or based on the direct description of people by themselves (inventories), are based on fundamentally different assumptions; people can project their personality dispositions if presented with unstructured ambiguous stimuli and provided the liberty to respond.

Projective techniques have a long and rich history, William Shakespeare wrote about the projective usefulness of clouds, and William Stern used cloud images as test stimuli before Rorschach's use of inkblots. Galton suggested the use of the word Association Methods, and Kraepelin used these methods for clinical diagnosis and categorization. Binet and Henry (1896) initially used pictures and inkblots as the projective indices of intelligence and other mental abilities, i.e., creativity and imagination. Adler also used the recall method as a kind of projective approach in which the subject was asked to recall his first memory. Even in ancient epics like Upnishads, Bible, and stories in Sufism, there are references to the importance of interpreting narrative information (Groth-Marnat, 1992). Utterances of Greek oracles like inkblots were open to varying interpretations. Interpretations of artistic works have also been considered to reveal something about the artist and his or her subject (Hammer, 1958).

Compared to other personality assessment methods, particularly objective tests, i.e., inventories and rating scales, projective techniques are usually less evident in intent, which makes them less vulnerable to faking, motivated distortions, and response sets. As the test material in projective techniques is relatively unstructured in content and open-ended in terms of responses yielded, it is assumed that the test material's mental structure reflects the projection of the subject's personal perception of things. It is also assumed that the more the test material is unstructured, the greater the probability of revealing important implicit facets of personality. A Group of these assumptions is called ‘projective hypotheses.

Freudian psychoanalytic framework strongly influenced the early conceptualization of projective assessment. The projective techniques were defined in terms of the Freudian notion of unconscious processes and ego defence mechanisms, particularly projection. It is reflected in that the greatest development and the reliance on projective tests occurred between 1930 to 1960 when Psychoanalysis was the most dominating force in Psychology. Some experts do not intend to stick to the Freudian definition of projective techniques with the assertion that a relationship between projection as conceptualized by Freud and projective techniques cannot be ascertained in all cases. So, the projective techniques are called so for another reason: because these are constructed so that the subject can project into his responses significant components of his personality. The responses to the stimuli of projective techniques are determined not only by the stimuli to which he is responding but by his personality.

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Many definitions of projective tests/ techniques have been offered over the years (Anderson and Anderson, 1951; Landzey, 1961; Murstein 1963; Semenoff, 1976; Freeman, 1962). Perhaps, the pragmatic one can be taken from a Psychological Dictionary (English and English 1958) which defines projective techniques as “a procedure for discovering a person’s characteristic modes of behaviour by observing his behaviour in responses to a situation that does not elicit or compel a particular response.”

In general, it is considered that projective techniques are based on projection, an unconscious process in which (1) attributions of thoughts, attitudes, emotions, and other characteristics are made by the individual to other persons or certain characteristics of objects in his environment; (2) attributions of his own needs, drives, and motives to others in his environment; or (3) individual draws inferences based on his past experience, on the basis of which test stimuli are meaningfully organized. Projection is not considered as being of personal origin as the content of projection is experienced as an external perception and of external origin. In this light, a projective test technique is one in which a subject is presented with a stimulus situation providing him with an opportunity to impose upon it his personal needs and his specific perceptions and interpretations.

Wholistically projective techniques tend to embody the following distinguishing characteristics (Rotter, 1954):

1.   In projective techniques, ambiguity or lack of structure of test material is a prerequisite that is, different people perceive it differently. In response to the unstructured and ambiguous stimulus, subjects are forced to impose or project their own structure, and in doing so, they reveal something about themselves such as needs, wishes, conflicts, and Ambiguity. in test stimuli can be introduced by choice of stimuli, by the instructions given to the subjects, or by combining both.

2. Projective techniques employ a wide range of stimuli such as inkblots, incomplete sentences, line drawings, and pictures. No matter what stimuli are selected and used, the examination procedure is set up to ensure the highest degree of ambiguity and unstructureness. These unstructured situations are presented to the subject for resolution with the underlying assumption that the handling of this ambiguous task will involve various aspects of personality make-up and its dynamic structure

3. Projective techniques are indirect in the sense the subjects are not aware of the purpose of the test to some extent, i.e., the purpose and intent of projective techniques are disguised, and respondents are also not aware of the relevance and significance of their responses. In the projective techniques, there is no attempt on the examiner's part to ask the subjects directly about their needs, wishes, impulses, or troubles; the route is indirect which prompts the subjects to provide more elaborated data.

4. Projective techniques, in contrast to other assessment techniques, provide more freedom in the choice of responses. It captures the uniqueness of the personality of the respondent.

5. Since there are no bindings on the respondent in projective techniques, they yield more responses. These responses can be interpreted as dealing with more variables. Since the range of responses is broad, the examiner can make interpretations along multiple dimensions (cognitive, conative, and affective) such as motives, adjustment, diagnostic category, defence mechanisms, coping, and so on. Most objective tests provide a single score for a disposition, whereas projective techniques can provide both quantitative and qualitative multiple information about a disposition or trait, or attribute.

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Controversy over the use and relevance of projective techniques has been one of the most significant controversies and debates in Psychology. Advocating scholars assert that projective techniques provide deep information and knowledge about various dimensions of a person’s functioning unobtainable through other assessment techniques (Growth & Marnat, 2009). So, the projective techniques are usually described as X-rays of the mind or a kind of “open sesame” into the unconscious. Over the last four decades, a considerable amount of research has been conducted, organized, and cited in this regard. On the other hand, critics have highlighted the weakness of projective techniques including flawed norms, subjective scoring, the vulnerability of responses to situational factors, over-reliance on impressionistic interpretations, poor inter-rater reliability, poor test-retest reliability (low stability), unsupported research for many interpretations, subjectivity in interpretations, the fake ability of results, poor prediction of criterion or external behaviours and general poor validity ( Camar et al.,2000, Groth- Marnat 2006)

Beyond the criticisms mentioned above, projective testing/techniques continue to be highly popular among mental health professionals. Recent surveys of practitioners of projective techniques indicate that three (Rorschach, TAT and House Tree Person of the 10 most widely used tests by clinical psychologists are projective (Camara et al, 2000).

Many forms of the projective method such as inkblots, pictures, incomplete sentences, word associations, own writings and drawings, and others have been developed oriented to elicit responses that can reveal the individual's personality structure, thoughts, values, motives, emotions, modes of coping and adjustment, or complexes. One thing common among all these projective techniques is the ambiguity or unstructureness of the material presented to the subjects. Projective techniques have been classified according to different plans which are, interm of nature of test material, modes of responses or interpretations. In terms of the degree of ambiguity and nature of test material, Lindsey (1959) classifies the projective techniques as (1) Association techniques, (2) Completion techniques, (3) Construction techniques, and (4) Expression techniques.

Association techniques are based on the psychological process of association in which connections are established among experiences, stimuli, and other events and then are stored in the mind. The associative techniques have a long history in psychological experimentation dating back to Galton (1879). Was experimentally studied in psychological laboratories with a growing interest in psychoanalysis after 1900 association techniques emerged as a clinical technique. Jung and other dynamic psychologists made extensive use of the association method for the detection of complexes. Word Association Tests by Jung, Cant, and Rossenoff are the main representatives of this technique. These tests are oriented to minimize ideation and emphasize the immediacy of response. In these, subjects are instructed to reply to the word stimuli by the first word, image, or percepts that come into mind first.

Constructive techniques include all those test situations where the examinee is to construct or frame structures out of unstructured material Inkblot tests like Rorschach Inkblot Test, Holtzman Inkblot Technique, and Somatic Inkblot Series (SIS) are the best examples and representatives of this category of projective technique. TAT also belongs to it as its subject is to construct or create a story about the given picture.

In completion techniques, some incomplete verbal material is presented and the subjects are to complete these sentences or informants. The completing informants are considered to come from the unconscious of a person. Incomplete Sentences Blank (Rotter and Willerman, 1947) is the true representative of this technique.

In Refractive techniques, examinees are provided with the opportunity to their personality in the forms of paintings, drawings, handwriting, etc. In Expressive Playing Techniques, the subjects are given a situation in which they are to perform a particular role for a certain period in a group of two or more persons. Here, subjects can also be provided with the situation in which they are to express themselves as in psychodrama or dance.  

In choice /ordering techniques, the subject is to order the given item (photos, sentences, etc.) as per their choices or preferences. Another plan of categorization of projective technique is in terms of the degree of ambiguity of test material. In this plan, the projective technique can be classified into three categories (1) Unstructured (inkblots), (2) Semi-Structured (TAT), and (3) Structured (Sentence Completion, Word Association, Role-Playing, Psychodrama, Draw-a-man, etc.)

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