Scoring the Rorschach

Seven Validated Systems

Robert F. Bornstein, Joseph M. Masling, Robert F. Bornstein, Joseph M. Masling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135704568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie clinique

Exner's Comprehensive System has attracted so much attention in recent years that many clinicians and personality researchers are unaware that alternative Rorschach scoring systems exist. This is unfortunate, because some of these systems have tremendous clinical value. Scoring the Rorschach: Seven Validated Systems provides detailed reviews of the best-validated alternative approaches, and points to promising new paths towards the continued growth and refinement of Rorschach interpretation.The editors set the stage with an extended introduction to historical controversies and cutting-edge empirical methods for Rorschach validation. Each chapter presents a different Rorschach scoring system. A brief history is followed by detailed information on scoring and interpretation, a comprehensive summary of evidence bearing on construct validity, and discussion of clinical applications, empirical limitations, and future directions. A user-friendly scoring "manual" for each system offers readers practical guidance.
The systems tap a broad array of content areas including ego defenses, thought disorder, mental representations of self and others, implicit motives, personality traits, and potential for psychotherapy.
All psychologists seriously engaged in the work of personality assessment will find in this book welcome additions to their professional toolkits.

1
Scoring the Rorschach: Retrospect and Prospect

Joseph M.Maslings

SUNY-Buffalo

Robert F.Bornstein

Gettysburg College

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,

To report the behaviour of the sea monster,

Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,

Observe disease in signatures, evoke

Biographies from the wrinkles of the palm

And tragedy from fingers, riddle the inevitable

With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams

Or barbituric acids or dissect

The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—

To explore the womb, or tomb or dreams; all these are usual

Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press;

And always will be, some of them especially

When there is distress of nations and perplexity

Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.

Men’s curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension…

—Eliot (1943, p. 27)

In the beginning was the test. The fear of the unknown, the need to reduce ambiguity, and the desire to predict the future are as old as humanity. For the Romans the preferred medium for divination was bird entrails. The haruspex, the entrails reader, in the ritual of auspicium would examine the innards of a fowl to see what the Fates had in store.¹ The haruspex relied considerably on form and color, as with inkblots, though the material examined was liver rather than cardboard cards. Skill in liver reading was so important that Cicero wrote a treatise, “De Divinatione,” on the subject. Before risking their armies to danger, the Greeks consulted the oracle to decide where and when it was safe to wage war.

Though widely used, poultry were not the only media used to decipher the unknown in the early days of testing. Reading tea leaves (tasseography) was an ancient attempt to foretell the future and to this day there are those who practice this form of prophecy; several web sites give information and advice on tasseography. Even the Old Testament reports several instances of requests for divination. In I Samuel 28:3–19, Saul asks a medium to raise Samuel from the dead so Samuel can predict the outcome of a battle. (Saul was probably unhappy with the medium’s prediction: He was to be killed.)

Questionnaires and behavioral measures also have long histories. More than 4,000 years ago, Chinese officials developed a series of tests to predict success in civil servant positions (Kaplan & Saccuzzo, 2001). The Summarians, too, invented a psychological test, constructing a wordassociation technique to help diagnose those plagued by devils: “They would pronounce a list of stimulus words and watch reactions. When the patient became agitated, they would note the word and relate it to the devil which was bothering him” (Barclay, 1991, p. 196).

Tests of various sorts are efforts by which societies attempt to match their members’ talents with group needs. Not every citizen has the aptitude necessary to become expert in farming, pearl diving, carpentry, or nursing, and the proper test, properly used, can help with this task. In the United States the history of psychology and the history of psychological testing are inextricably intertwined. From efforts during the first World War to create an easily administered, easily scored intelligence test, to the considerably more sophisticated current attempts to assess human skills, traits, and psychiatric disorders, psychologists have been involved in test construction, administration, and interpretation. For many members of the community, psychologists are people who use psychological tests.

THE RORSCHACH INKBLOT METHOD AS A PROVIDER ANSWERS OF

It was inevitable that as assessment became more widespread, both the public and psychologists would hold unrealistic expectations for psychological tests, the public because it needed to believe that psychological science could provide answers to its problems, and psychologists because they needed to believe that their recommendations about the fate of others were based on scientific evidence. It is a daunting responsibility to determine which job candidate should be hired, whether someone can benefit from psychotherapy (and if so what type), whether it is safe to discharge a psychiatric patient from the hospital, or whether a defendant was legally insane at the time of a crime. Those who make such decisions have a strong motive to believe in the integrity of their data and their ability to interpret those data.

Many psychological tests developed a strong following during the height of the mid-twentieth-century psychometric movement, but the Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM) was held by some to be a uniquely powerful means for revealing the psyche—a sort of psychological X-ray that enabled the psychologist to peer inside the mind just as a radiologist peers inside the body (Frank, 1939). In 1942, Lewis declared that the Rorschach method:

reveals the basic organization of the personality structure, including the fundamental affective and cognitive features of mental life…. [It is] remarkably effective in estimating the intellectual status of an individual; in revealing the richness or poverty of his psychic experience; in making known his present mood…. In psychiatry, the validity of the method as a diagnostic instrument has been established. It points the way to new understanding of mental disorders, (p. ix)

Two decades later, Schachtel (1966) asserted that the Rorschach test offered “the first major contribution to the problem of perception and personality, which, in the past twenty or thirty years, has become one of the foremost issues in psychology” (p. 1).

These optimistic statements, however well intentioned, were born of hope and faith, not replicated empirical results. Their unabashed optimism helped produce a backlash against the RIM that continues to this day (see Wood, Nezworski, Lilienfeld, & Garb, 2003).

The quasi-formlessness of the Rorschach inkblots compels respondents to provide interpretations based on their prior experiences, associations, personal histories, and culture. In its most basic form, the projective hypothesis held that “we reveal ourselves in the way we deal with unstructured stimuli” (Korchin, 1976, p. 126). However, the many meanings of projection (see Juni, 1980, for a useful discussion) make this concept unreliable as a descriptor of those assessment methods that bear its name. A lively controversy over the extent to which projection can be said to underlie responses to inkblots was recently developed by Hibbard (2003); as usual, proponents and critics of the Rorschach method have diametrically opposing views on the subject.

A MORE CAREFUL EXAMINATION OF THE RIM

In due time, academic psychologists began to investigate empirically the claims made by Rorschach proponents (see Masling, 2002). As might be expected, the training and professional affiliations of the investigators influenced the methods they chose and the results they reported. Thus, when Levy and Orr (1959) examined 168 Rorschach validity studies published between 1951 and 1955, they found systematic differences in methodology and outcome as a function of the researchers’ professional affiliation. Academic psychologists investigated construct validity far more often than criterion validity (73 studies vs. 35), whereas nonacademic researchers’ experimenters had a more even balance (28 construct validity studies vs. 32 criterion validity studies).

Professional affiliation also moderated the outcome (as well as the content) of RIM investigations in Levy and Orr’s (1959) survey: Academic psychologists who studied construct validity found positive results more frequently than negative ones by about a 2- to-1 ratio, but when they studied criterion validity the ratio of significant to nonsignificant results was 1 to 2. In contrast, positive and negative results obtained by the nonacademic psychologists were about evenly divided for construct and criterion validity studies. Clearly, those on each side of the issue came to this question showing the effects of particular training programs, institutional loyalties, and theoretical preferences.

When the reliability and validity limitations of the Rorschach method were made known, disillusion replaced the prior unrealistic expectations. The earlier claim that the Rorschach test could do everything was replaced in some circles by the conclusion that it could do little or nothing (see Bornstein, 2001, for a discussion of this shift). Some critics believed that Rorschach interpretation, though less messy, was no more scientific than bird hepatoscopy. Jensen (1965) summarized this disparaging attitude toward the Rorschach method quite directly:

It seems not unreasonable to recommend that the Rorschach be altogether abandoned in clinical practice…. Meanwhile, the rate of scientific progress in clinical psychology might well be measured by the speed and thoroughness with which it gets over the Rorschach. (p. 509)

More recently, Garb (1999) recommended a moratorium on the use of the Rorschach test in clinical and forensic settings.

Jensen’s (1965) conclusion continues to be widely cited by RIM critics, but because that statement was made 40 years ago a good deal of creative, methodologically solid research has been conducted, demonstrating that, properly used, the RIM can be employed validly (as the other chapters in this volume illustrate). A number of scholars (e.g., Hiller, Rosenthal, Bornstein, Berry, & Brunell-Neuleib, 1999; Meyer et al., 2001), have also documented acceptable levels of reliability and validity in Rorschach studies.

Nevertheless, critics continue to maintain that the RIM has unacceptable validity and minimal utility (Garb, 1999; Lilienfeld, Fowler, & Lohr, 2003; Lilienfeld, Wood, & Garb, 2000; Lohr, Fowler, & Lilienfeld, 2002; Wood, Lilienfeld, Garb, & Nezworski, 2000). Naturally, those who use the Rorschach method have found these criticisms unfounded (Hiller et al., 1999; Meyer et al., 2001; Weiner, Spielberger, & Abeles, 2002, 2003). The conflicting positions of scholars on each side of this controversy is reminiscent of an observation made over 70 years ago by Bertrand Russell: “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day” (1928, p. 28).

These arguments persist in part because psychologists on each side cite different data; when common findings are discussed, they tend to be interpreted differently by RIM proponents and critics. A particularly telling recent example of selective citation may be found in Wood et al.’s (2003) volume, which describes in detail many of the flaws and limitations in past and current RIM research. Although Wood et al. raised a number of important issues regarding problems with the RIM, they ignored a vast literature documenting the efficacy of the empirically validated RIM scoring systems described in this volume. Thus, Fisher and Cleveland’s (1958) Barrier-Penetration (BP) index was never mentioned, even though BP studies have been conducted in at least fifteen countries, and Fisher’s (1986) volume includes 175 citations of published BP investigations. The 130-plus published studies involving Holt’s (1978) Primary Process (pripro) scoring system were also ignored. Clearly the RIM has been wonderfully heuristic, a quality valued by empirically oriented psychologists; however, this feature was not given much weight either in the Wood et al. volume or in earlier criticisms of the RIM.

Not surprisingly given such selective citation, projective tests, particularly the Rorschach, continue to get a drubbing in Psychology 101 texts. One popular book declared that “projective tests tend to have problems of reliability and validity…. The validity of projective tests is also low” (Bootzin, Bower, Crocker, & Hall, 1991, p. 511). Another made a similar claim: “The validity and reliability [of the Rorschach and TAT] have been questioned…. Perhaps as a result, their use has declined since the 1970s” (Morris, 1996, p. 479). This theme is repeated by Huffman, Vernoy, and Vernoy (1994), who reported that “the reliability and validity of the Rorschach are low” (p. 501).

These statements suggest that skepticism regarding the RIM has become the accepted position within mainstream scientific psychology. What is worse, this skepticism is being passed on to the next generation of psychologists (and consumers of psychology) even before they graduate from college.

THE RIM AND THE COMPREHENSIVE SYSTEM

The reliability and validity of seven RIM scoring methods are documented in the following chapters of this volume. These reviews suggest a plausible interpretation for much of the animosity of RIM critics: Rather than reviewing the breadth of research on the RIM, many contemporary critics have chosen to equate the test with one widely used interpretive method, Exner’s (1993, 2000) Comprehensive System (CS). The same error has been made by textbook authors, who draw sweeping (and inaccurate) conclusions regarding the RIM by focusing exclusively on research examining the CS.

The psychological literature contains many instances where Exner’s (1993, 2000) CS is called the “Rorschach test” (see, e.g., Garb, 1999; Lilienfeld et al., 2003). Such a synecdoche—confusing a class with one of its members—wrongly implies that the CS and the Rorschach test are synonymous. As the chapters in the present volume demonstrate, the CS is only one of a series of methods for scoring responses to the Rorschach blots (see also Masling, 2002). The RIM is really a family of scoring systems, and statements made about one member of this family do not always apply to others.²

THE CHALLENGES OF INTERPRETING RESPONSES TO INKBLOTS: SOURCES OF ERROR AND BIAS

The observation that ambiguous stimuli can be seen in many different ways is centuries old. Consider the famous scene in Hamlet, wherein the title character toys with Polonius (act 3, scene 2, lines 376–382):

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.

Hamlet: Or like a whale?

Polonius: Very like a whale.

Systematic use of inkblots to capture personality traits did not begin until the early twentieth century, when Hermann Rorschach, after 10 years of experimentation, published his set in 1921, only 1 year before his death at age 38. Although Alfred Binet suggested using inkblots as a personality measure in 1894, he did not pursue this idea. The Rorschach blots were introduced in the United States by a psychiatrist, David Levy, some years after scholars in Spain, Russia, and Japan had shown interest in the blots (Weiner & Greene, in press). The first publication in English on the Rorschach blots was written by Beck in 1930; Beck also wrote the first American dissertation (1932) based on the RIM (Kaplan & Saccuzzo, 2001). Beck’s (1944) manual on Rorschach administration and interpretation was widely used in many clinical psychology training programs, even though his norms for determining the adequacy of the form quality of a response were primitive by today’s standards.

In the absence of any well-defined, objective manual for working with responses to inkblots, the first generations of clinicians who used the test were perforce compelled to rely on their own experiences and intuitions, the suggestions of their supervisors, and what they could glean from the writings of Rorschach experts, combining all these in some informal amalgam. Learning to assemble and interpret the hundreds of bits of information available in any Rorschach protocol is extremely difficult because, for most neophyte clinicians, objective feedback regarding the validity of their conclusions is rarely available. Thus, inexperienced examiners often have only one criterion to satisfy: their instructor’s evalua...