TAT--Thematic Apperception Test

Hi! In this blogpost, I will be talking about the TAT, also known as the Thematic Apperception Test. It is a test to test a persons cognitive skills and is also popularely called the picture interpretation technique. It uses a set of ambiguous pictures printed on cards and the subject must tell a story using the pictures provided. Each set consists of 31 cards and includes pictures such as a man, a woman or sometimes a blank card.But even though the set consists of 31 cards, the tester would normally give only 10-14 cards to be used for testing. The subject would be asked to tell the story as dramatic as possible and will show to have low cognitive skills if he omitted the following when he told the story: What leading up to the event in the picture; what is happening at the picture; what the characters are feeling or thinking; and what is the outcome.

TAT was created by two American physiologist called Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan in the 1930s. their pupose was to explore the concepts of human personality such as dominant drives and interests. The SCOR scale was used to evaluate and it consists of 4 components: Complexity of the subjects nature; affect tone of relationship; capacity for emotional investments and understading of social causality.

Now TAT is used not only to find out the cognitive skills of people, it is also widely used to find out about dreams, fantasy, mate selection and motivation to select a particular occupation. Sometimes, crime suspects are also evaluated using the TAT.It is also proven that this test gains more popularity than the Rohschach test involving inkblots.

In the past, seperate sets of cards are used for people of different age, gender or race, but recently, they removed the practise and used the same set of cards for different patients. There are two approaches in interpreting TAT, the nomothetic and idiographic. To put it simply, nomothetic means that the subject would prefer to use ideas using the normal society life while the idiographic means that the subject thinks out of the box. Needless to say, examiners would usually prefer the idiographic approach. examiners would usually focus their attention on three points which is the content of the stories, feeling or tone in the story and non verbal remarks such as blushing or fidgeting.

Well thats all I have to say in this blogpost. See you in my next blogpost. Bye!