Holtzman and his colleagues created a second set of inkblot tests. The inkblots that professionals use today were created with more intention than Rorschach’s original ten. What did the patient see? How long did it take the patient to share their interpretation of the card? If the patient saw a dog or an explosion or a friend in the inkblots, the therapist would have to decipher what those interpretations meant. The therapist had ten cards, showed each individual card to a patient, and then asked for their response to the card.

The test didn’t really gain the widespread popularity it has now until the 1960s when the movement toward uncovering the unconscious took off.Īt first, these ink blots were completely random.

He originally created the test to diagnose people with schizophrenia. It’s named after its creator, a Swiss psychiatrist named Hermann Rorschach. The Rorschach Test has been around since the 1920s. Let’s take a look at the two most well-known projective tests and what they can reveal about your personality. While projective tests face criticism, they are still widely used by psychologists and experts, even in the criminal justice field. If you complete a projective test yourself, you may not be able to directly pin the results to our personality or symptoms of a mental disorder that is a therapist’s job. The answers to projective tests often seem silly or unrelated, but only because it is revealing a deeper, unconscious thought process that you are not aware of. Tests that ask us to evaluate ourselves require a lot of conscious thought, and these thoughts may be biased by how we want to perceive ourselves or what we might be ashamed to admit. Projective tests are personality tests that aim to look at what is happening beyond the conscious mind. In this video, I’m going to talk about two of the most well-known projective tests: the Rorschach test and the TAT (aka, the Thematic Apperception Test.) These are more abstract tests that are still used today to dig deeper into our personalities and reveal some more serious conditions. Not all personality tests involve answering statements with “strongly disagree” or “strongly agree.” Some personality tests don’t even use words to reveal what you are thinking.

Rochard test online