Let’s start with the picture’s original purpose, as part of a set of examinations for aphasia. It is pure fucking science, converting the story someone tells about a picture (“description task”) into diagnostic data assessing the presence and severity of multiple language and cognitive disruptions. Let us gaze upon this simple line drawing depicting childhood misbehavior (left) and passive-aggressive maternal coping mechanisms (right). If I’m being honest: the image “Cookie Theft,” from the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination, or BDAE, is my favorite diagnostic test. Rorschach? Please look at these pictures and tell me what you see while I sneak away for a milkshake.) Thematic Apperception Test (Here’s my inkblot: how ridiculously fine was young Dr. The inkblots, with their high profile and bad reputation, are now almost 100 years old and crossing into new disciplines despite it all. Taylor is not a psychologist but a scientist trying to build a bionic eye, and the research was to figure out how to make that eye interpret things more like our in-house pair does. ![]() In 2013, some hardcore Inkblottos (I’m trying this term out) published in Psychological Bulletin a meta-analysis of all the published research on the inkblot test and claimed to identify excellent support for the usefulness of the test in assessing 13 variables, from situational stress to information processing to suicide.Īnother group of scientists, led by Richard Taylor at the University of Oregon, found that the more complex the blot, the fewer interpretations it carried. The objectivity of testers, inter-rater reliability, the verifiability and general validity of the test, bias of the test’s pathology scales towards greater numbers of responses, the limited number of psychological conditions which it accurately diagnoses, the inability to replicate the test’s norms, its use in court-ordered evaluations, and the proliferation of the ten inkblot images, potentially invalidating the test for those who have been exposed to them. Good ol’ Wikipedia helpfully provides a list: He died in 1922, but his 10 blots lived on, and were used to assess seemingly every domain of a person’s personality, thoughts, feelings, actions, and motivations–the test was “ hyped as an X-ray of the soul.” But, it turns out, there are problems with using a series of abstract inkblots for diagnostic purposes. (The origin story, so far, seems straightforward.) Rorschach ended up painting his own inkblot series, developed them as a diagnostic test for schizophrenia, and, in 1921, published his findings. Klecksographie’s most famous fan later played it with his patients, noticing that those affected by schizophrenia made different connections–sometimes radically so–than a majority of people. ![]() The game encouraged players to collect inkblot cards and to make up stories about them. Growing up, Hermann Rorschach loved playing a then-popular game called Klecksographie.
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