Contents:
Scoring the Rorschach: Seven Validated Systems provides detailed reviews of the best-validated alternati Exner's Comprehensive System has attracted so much attention in recent years that many clinicians and personality researchers are unaware that alternative Rorschach scoring systems exist.
Scoring the Rorschach: Seven Validated Systems provides detailed reviews of the best-validated alternative approaches, and points to promising new paths towards the continued growth and refinement of Rorschach interpretation.
New York: Plenum. There is no single, authoritative model for understanding the etiology and pathology of any mental disorder. Psychotherapy for the personality disorders: Working with traits. Want to Read saving…. First, the authors provide strong evidence supporting the contemporary understanding that the Rorschach—as a performance- based measure of personality—should demonstrate significantly stronger associations with externally assessed outcome criteria than it should with self-reported outcomes. Clinical science and human behavior.
The editors set the stage with an extended introduction to historical controversies and cutting-edge empirical methods for Rorschach validation. Each chapter presents a different Rorschach scoring system. A brief history is followed by detailed information on scoring and interpretation, a comprehensive summary of evidence bearing on construct validity, and discussion of clinical applications, empirical limitations, and future directions. A user-friendly scoring "manual" for each system offers readers practical guidance. The systems tap a broad array of content areas including ego defenses, thought disorder, mental representations of self and others, implicit motives, personality traits, and potential for psychotherapy.
All psychologists seriously engaged in the work of personality assessment will find in this book welcome additions to their professional toolkits. Get A Copy. Kindle Edition , pages. Published February 17th by Routledge first published February More Details Original Title. Other Editions 7. Friend Reviews.
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This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Community Reviews. Showing Rating details. All Languages. More filters. Sort order. Patrick rated it really liked it Dec 26, His longstanding commitment to the Rorschach has helped generations of clinicians to realize the potential of this valuable clinical and research tool. Bornstein Gettysburg College To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, To report the behaviour of the sea monster, Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry, Observe disease in signatures, evoke Biographies from the wrinkles of the palm And tragedy from fingers, riddle the inevitable With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams Or barbituric acids or dissect The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors— To explore the womb, or tomb or dreams; all these are usual Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press; And always will be, some of them especially When there is distress of nations and perplexity Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future And clings to that dimension The fear of the unknown, the need to reduce ambiguity, and the desire to predict the future are as old as humanity. For the Romans the preferred medium for divination was bird entrails. The haruspex, the entrails reader, in the ritual of auspicium would examine the innards of a fowl to see what the Fates had in store. Skill in liver reading was so important that Cicero wrote a treatise, "De Divinatione," on the subject.
Before risking their armies to danger, the Greeks consulted the oracle to decide where and when it was safe to wage war. Though widely used, poultry were not the only media used to decipher the unknown in the early days of testing. Reading tea leaves tasseography was an ancient attempt to foretell the future and to this day there are those who practice this form of prophecy; several web sites give information and advice on tasseography. Even the Old Testament reports several instances of requests for divination. In I Samuel , Saul asks a medium to raise Samuel from the dead so Samuel can predict the outcome of a battle.
Saul was probably unhappy with the medium's prediction: He was to be killed. Questionnaires and behavioral measures also have long histories. The Summarians, too, invented a psychological test, constructing a word-association technique to help diagnose those plagued by devils: "They would pronounce a list of stimulus words and watch reactions.
When the patient became agitated, they would note the word and relate it to the devil which was bothering him" Barclay, , p. Tests of various sorts are efforts by which societies attempt to match their members' talents with group needs. Not every citizen has the aptitude necessary to become expert in farming, pearl diving, carpentry, or nursing, and the proper test, properly used, can help with this task.
In the United States the history of psychology and the history of psychological testing are inextricably intertwined. From efforts during the first World War to create an easily administered, easily scored intelligence test, to the considerably more sophisticated current attempts to assess human skills, traits, and psychiatric disorders, psychologists have been involved in test construction, administration, and interpretation. For many members of the community, psychologists are people who use psychological tests.
It is a daunting respon- 1. Those who make such decisions have a strong motive to believe in the integrity of their data and their ability to interpret those data. Many psychological tests developed a strong following during the height of the mid-twentieth-century psychometric movement, but the Rorschach Inkblot Method RIM was held by some to be a uniquely powerful means for revealing the psyche—a sort of psychological X-ray that enabled the psychologist to peer inside the mind just as a radiologist peers inside the body Frank, In , Lewis declared that the Rorschach method: reveals the basic organization of the personality structure, including the fundamental affective and cognitive features of mental life In psychiatry, the validity of the method as a diagnostic instrument has been established.
It points the way to new understanding of mental disorders, p. These optimistic statements, however well intentioned, were born of hope and faith, not replicated empirical results. The quasi-formlessness of the Rorschach inkblots compels respondents to provide interpretations based on their prior experiences, associations, personal histories, and culture.
In its most basic form, the projective hypothesis held that "we reveal ourselves in the way we deal with unstructured stimuli" Korchin, , p. However, the many meanings of projection see Juni, , for a useful discussion make this concept unreliable as a descriptor of those assessment methods that bear its name.
A lively controversy over the extent to which projection can be said to underlie responses to inkblots was recently developed by Hibbard ; as usual, proponents and critics of the Rorschach method have diametrically opposing views on the subject. Thus, when Levy and Orr examined Rorschach validity studies published between and , they found systematic differences in methodology and outcome as a function of the researchers' professional affiliation.
Academic psychologists investigated construct validity far more often than criterion validity 73 studies vs. Professional affiliation also moderated the outcome as well as the content of RIM investigations in Levy and Orr's survey: Academic psychologists who studied construct validity found positive results more frequently than negative ones by about a 2-to-1 ratio, but when they studied criterion validity the ratio of significant to nonsignificant results was 1 to 2.
In contrast, positive and negative results obtained by the nonacademic psychologists were about evenly divided for construct and criterion validity studies. Clearly, those on each side of the issue came to this question showing the effects of particular training programs, institutional loyalties, and theoretical preferences. When the reliability and validity limitations of the Rorschach method were made known, disillusion replaced the prior unrealistic expectations.
The earlier claim that the Rorschach test could do everything was replaced in some circles by the conclusion that it could do little or nothing see Bornstein, , for a discussion of this shift. Some critics believed that Rorschach interpretation, though less messy, was no more scientific than bird hepatoscopy. Jensen summarized this disparaging attitude toward the Rorschach method quite directly: It seems not unreasonable to recommend that the Rorschach be altogether abandoned in clinical practice Meanwhile, the rate of scientific progress in clinical psychology might well be measured by the speed and thoroughness with which it gets over the Rorschach.
Jensen's conclusion continues to be widely cited by RIM critics, but because that statement was made 40 years ago a good deal of creative, methodologically solid research has been conducted, demonstrating that, properly used, the RIM can be employed validly as the other chapters in this volume illustrate. A number of scholars e.
Naturally, those who use the Rorschach method have found these criticisms unfounded Hiller et al. The conflicting positions of scholars on each side of this controversy is reminiscent of an observation made over 70 years ago by Bertrand Russell: "Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day" , p.
These arguments persist in part because psychologists on each side cite different data; when common findings are discussed, they tend to be interpreted differently by RIM proponents and critics. A particularly telling recent example of selective citation may be found in Wood et al. Although Wood et al. Thus, Fisher and Cleveland's Barrier-Penetration BP index was never mentioned, even though BP studies have been conducted in at least fifteen countries, and Fisher's volume includes citations of published BP investigations.
The plus published studies involving Holt's Primary Process pripro scoring system were also ignored. Clearly the RIM has been wonderfully heuristic, a quality valued by empirically oriented psychologists; however, this feature was not given much weight either in the Wood et al. Not surprisingly given such selective citation, projective tests, particularly the Rorschach, continue to get a drubbing in Psychology texts.
One popular book declared that "projective tests tend to have problems of reliability and validity Another made a similar claim: "The validity and reliability [of the Rorschach and TAT] have been questioned Perhaps as a result, their use has declined since the s" Morris, , p.
This theme is repeated by Huffman, Vernoy, and Vernoy , who reported that "the reliability and validity of the Rorschach are low" p. These statements suggest that skepticism regarding the RIM has become the accepted position within mainstream scientific psychology.
What is worse, this skepticism is being passed on to the next generation of psychologists and consumers of psychology even before they graduate from college. These reviews suggest a plausible interpretation for much of the animosity of RIM critics: Rather than reviewing the breadth of research on the RIM, many contemporary critics have chosen to equate the test with one widely used interpretive method, Exner's , Comprehensive System CS.
The same error has been made by textbook authors, who draw sweeping and inaccurate conclusions regarding the RIM by focusing exclusively on research examining the CS.