Identifying Personality Characteristics and Psychopathology 287Weiner, 2001), and the previously referenced surveys of test
usage attest its continued widespread use in practice settings.
Picture-Story Methods
During the mid-1930s, Henry Murray (1893–1988), a psy-
choanalytically trained physician with a doctorate in bio-
chemistry who was then serving as director of the Harvard
Psychological Clinic, formulated a theory of personality that
stressed the role of idiographic needs and attitudes in deter-
mining individual differences in human behavior. In collabo-
ration with Christiana Morgan, Murray also considered the
possibility of identifying needs and attitudes, especially those
that people were reluctant to admit or unable to recognize, by
examining the fantasies they produced when asked to tell
stories about pictures they were shown. These notions led to
a seminal article about picture-story methods of studying fan-
tasy (Morgan & Murray, 1935), a classic and highly influen-
tial book called Explorations in Personality(Murray, 1938),
and eventually the publication of the Thematic Apperception
Test (TAT) (Murray, 1943/1971).
To the extent that the content of imagined stories can pro-
vide clues to a respondent’s inner life, TAT data are expected
to shed light on the particular hierarchy of a person’s needs
and the nature of his or her underlying conflicts, concerns,
and interpersonal attitudes. As was the case for the inkblot
method following Rorschach, Murray’s picture-story method
gave rise to numerous systems of coding and interpretation.
The approaches that became most commonly employed in
clinical practice were variations of an “inspection technique”
proposed by Leopold Bellak that consists of reading through
respondents’ stories to identify repetitive themes and recurring
elements that appear to fall together in meaningful ways (see
Bellak & Abrams, 1997). The popularity of such a strictly qual-
itative and uncoded approach to TAT data has limited efforts to
demonstrate the psychometric soundness of the instrument or
to develop a substantial normative database for it.
On the other hand, several quantified TAT scales designed
to measure specific personality characteristics for clinical or
research purposes have shown that the instrument can gener-
ate reliable and valid findings when it is used in a standard-
ized manner. Three noteworthy cases in point are scoring
systems developed by McClelland, Atkinson, and their col-
leagues to measure needs for achievement, affiliation, and
power (Atkinson & Feather, 1966; McClelland, Atkinson,
Clark, & Lowell, 1953); a defense preference scale devel-
oped by Cramer (1999); and a measure of capacity for adap-
tive interpersonal relationships, the Social Cognition and
Object Relations Scale (SCORS) developed by Westen, Lohr,
Silk, Kerber, and Goodrich (1985).
The original TAT also spawned numerous extensions and
spin-offs of the picture-story method intended to broaden its
scope. Two variations developed by Bellak to expand the age
range for respondents are the Children’s Apperception Test
(CAT), which portrays animal rather than human characters
in the pictures, and the Senior Apperception Test (SAT),
which depicts primarily elderly people and circumstances
common in the lives of older persons (see Bellak & Abrams,
1997). As an effort to enhance multicultural sensitivity,
the TAT approach was used to develop the Tell-Me-A-Story-
Test (TEMAS), which portrays conflict situations involving
African American and Latino characters and has been found
to elicit fuller responses from minority respondents than the
all-Caucasian TAT pictures (Costantino, Malgady, & Rogler,
1988). Finally of note is the Roberts Apperception Test for
Children (RATC), which was designed specifically to im-
prove on the TAT and CAT as measures for use with children
by portraying children and adolescents in everyday interac-
tions, rather then either adult or animal figures; by providing
an alternate set of cards showing African American young
people in similar scenes; and by using a standardized scoring
system (McArthur & Roberts, 1990).
Together with the emergence of specific quantifiable
scores for the TAT, the publication of the RATC signaled
movement in picture-story assessment toward achieving psy-
chometric respectability, much in the manner that Exner’s
Comprehensive System for Rorschach assessment moved the
inkblot method in that direction. Although the TAT still lags
well behind the RIM and most relatively structured assess-
ment instruments in empirical validation, it has long been and
remains one of the most frequently used methods for assess-
ing personality functioning. Moreover, as found in a litera-
ture survey by Butcher and Rouse (1996), the volume of
research articles published on the TAT in the 20-year-period
from 1974 to 1994 numbered 998, which was third largest
among personality measures, exceeded only by the MMPI
(4,339 articles) and the Rorschach (1,969 articles).Figure Drawing MethodsIt is difficult to say who first suggested that what people
choose to draw and how they draw it reveal features of their
personality, whether the drawing is a prehistoric sketch found
on the wall of a cave, a painting by a great master, or the doo-
dles of an ordinary citizen. Whoever it was, it was long
before Florence Goodenough (1886–1959) introduced the
first formal application of figure drawings in psychological
assessment in 1926. Seeking a nonverbal measure of intellec-
tual development in children, Goodenough (1926), devel-
oped the Draw-a-Man test, in which intellectual maturity is