Thematic Apperception Test

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The Thematic Apperception Test' or TAT is amongst the most widely used, researched, and taught psychological tests. It uses a standard series of 31 provocative yet ambiguous pictures about which the subject must tell a story. A subject is asked questions such as:

  • What dialogue might be carried on between characters?
  • How might the "story" continue after the picture shown?

For this reason, the TAT is also known as the 'picture interpretation technique'.

Each story created by a subject is carefully analyzed to uncover underlying needs, attitudes, and patterns of reaction. Subjects can respond orally or in writing and there are specific subsets of pictures for boys, girls, men, and women. The TAT is a projective test in that, like the Rorschach test, its assessment of the subject is based on what he or she projects onto the ambiguous images.

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History

TAT was developed by the American psychologists Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan at Harvard during the 1930s to explore the underlying dynamics of personality, such as internal conflicts, dominant drives, interests, and motives. Specifically, TAT assesses motives, including needs, for achievement, power, intimacy, and problem-solving abilities.

After World War II, the TAT was adopted more broadly by psychoanalysts and clinicians to evaluate emotionally disturbed patients. Later, in the 1970s, the Human Potential Movement encouraged psychologists to use the TAT to help their clients understand themselves better and stimulate personal growth.

Today, the TAT is widely used as a tool for research around areas of pschology such as dreams, fantasies, mate selection and what motivates people to choose their occupation. Sometimes it is used in a psychiatric context to assess disordered thinking, in forensic examinations to evaluate crime suspects, or to screen candidates for high-stress occupations. It is widely used in France and Argentina following the "French School" concepts. There is also a British and a Roman School.

The Israeli army uses the test for evaluating potential officers.

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Criticisms

The TAT has been criticized because:

  • It is not administered in a standardized way, and because it is challenging to standardise interpretation of the stories it produces. A scoring system for analysis was created by psychologist David McClelland in an attempt to introduce more rigour.
  • Research has shown that factors including race, sex, and social class of both examiners and subjects influence the stories told and how they are interpreted.
  • The 31 standard pictures have been criticized as negative in tone and therefore tending to limit the range of personality characteristics that the TAT can explore.
  • Arguably, Murray's concept of latent needs (similar to the Freudian theory of repression) that underlies the TAT has fallen out of favor in mainstream Western psychology and so its use is likely to decline.
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External links

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