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Thematic Apperception Test Guide

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective psychological test developed in the 1930s by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan at Harvard University. The TAT uses ambiguous pictures that subjects are asked to tell stories about in order to reveal their underlying motives, concerns, and views of the social world. Murray selected pictures from magazines and developed several versions of the test before settling on the final Series D cards still used today. To administer the TAT, an evaluator shows subjects pictures one at a time and records their verbatim stories about each, focusing on what led up to the event, what is happening, and the characters' feelings, thoughts, and the outcome. The stories are later interpreted to analyze the subject

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1K views37 pages

Thematic Apperception Test Guide

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective psychological test developed in the 1930s by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan at Harvard University. The TAT uses ambiguous pictures that subjects are asked to tell stories about in order to reveal their underlying motives, concerns, and views of the social world. Murray selected pictures from magazines and developed several versions of the test before settling on the final Series D cards still used today. To administer the TAT, an evaluator shows subjects pictures one at a time and records their verbatim stories about each, focusing on what led up to the event, what is happening, and the characters' feelings, thoughts, and the outcome. The stories are later interpreted to analyze the subject

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aisha fatima
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Composed By

A.R Rehman

Clinical Health Psychologist

Special Education Department (Lahore)


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Introduction

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective psychological test. Proponents of the

technique assert that subject' responses, in the narratives they make up about ambiguous pictures

of people, reveal their underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world

Historically, the test has been among the most widely researched, taught, and used of such

techniques

The TAT was developed during the 1930s by the American psychologist Henry A.

Murray and lay psychoanalyst Christiana D. Morgan at the Harvard Clinic at Harvard University.

Anecdotally, the idea for the TAT emerged from a question asked by one of Murray's

undergraduate students, Cecilia Roberts. She reported that when her son was ill, he spent the day

making up stories about images in magazines and she asked Murray if pictures could be

employed in a clinical setting to explore the underlying dynamics of personality.

Murray wanted to use a measure that would reveal information about the whole person

but found the contemporary tests of his time lacking in this regard. Therefore, he created the

TAT. The rationale behind the technique is that people tend to interpret ambiguous situations in

accordance with their own past experiences and current motivations, which may be conscious or

unconscious. Murray reasoned that by asking people to tell a story about a picture, their defenses

to the examiner would be lowered as they would not realize the sensitive personal information

they were divulging by creating the story.

Murray and Morgan spent the 1930s selecting pictures from illustrative magazines and

developing the test. After 3 versions of the test (Series A, Series B, and Series C), Morgan and

Murray decided on the final set of pictures, Series D, which remains in use today. Although she
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was given first authorship on the first published paper about the TAT in 1935, Morgan did not

receive authorship credit on the final published instrument. Reportedly, her role in the creation of

the TAT was primarily in the selection and editing of the images, but due to the primacy of the

name on the original publication the majority of written inquiries about the TAT were addressed

to her; since most of these letters included questions that she could not answer, she requested that

her name be removed from future authorship

Procedure

The TAT is popularly known as the picture interpretation technique because it uses a

series of provocative yet ambiguous pictures about which the subject is asked to tell a story. The

TAT manual provides the administration instructions used by Murray, although these procedures

are commonly altered. The subject is asked to tell as dramatic a story as they can for each picture

presented, including the following:

 what has led up to the event shown

 what is happening at the moment

 what the characters are feeling and thinking

 what the outcome of the story was

If these elements are omitted, particularly for children or individuals of low cognitive abilities,

the evaluator may ask the subject about them directly. Otherwise, the examiner is to avoid

interjecting and should not answer questions about the content of the pictures. The examiner

records stories verbatim for later interpretation.


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The End

Abdul Rehman

Psychologist

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