考研阅读精选：习字本上的几滴墨水
『重新认识一种古老的心理学测试方法。』The Rorschach test: A few blots in the copybook
罗夏墨迹测试：习字本上的几滴墨水
Nov 12, 2011 | From The Economist
http://images.koolearn.com/casupload/upload/fckeditorUpload/2011-11-28/image/479bedf00c304862871317d159497f3d.jpg
IT SOUNDS like voodoo. But the Rorschach test, in which elements ofsomeone’s personality can be deduced, its proponents claim, by hisdescription of what he sees in a series of inkblots, has been used for90 years, and is still going strong.
The original test wasdevised by Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist, in 1921. It involvedsomeone (usually a psychologist or psychiatrist) asking someone else tolook at ten inkblot images. In each case, the interlocutor inquires ofthe viewer, “What might this be?”, notes the response and attempts todraw conclusions.
The question has always been, of course,how reliable the connection is between the response to the blots(generally, people, animals or objects) and the alleged diagnosis. Overthe years, many experiments have been done to test the link. Now GregoryMeyer of the University of Toledo and his colleagues have reviewed thedata. Their results, which form the basis of a new manual on the topic,suggest the inkblot test does have real power. But Dr Meyer also rejectssome of the traditional claims made on its behalf.
DrMeyer’s study is a review of 1,292 papers that report experimentalattempts to link Rorschach responses with personality traits that havebeen established by other means. His main conclusion is that some of theways the test has been used are, indeed, useless. He proposes, forexample, axing the alleged connection between reporting mirrored imagesin a blot and the viewer’s level of egocentricity. He would also get ridof the idea that if a viewer focuses on the details of an image ratherthan the broader picture, then he is likely to have an obsessivepersonality. A third traditional interpretation that does not passmuster, in Dr Meyer’s view, is the suggestion that when a viewer seesthings in a blot that the examiner thinks do not resemble the blot, thatindicates impaired perception, which can lead to a diagnosis ofpsychosis. Dr Meyer would not get rid of this altogether. But he thinksthe idea needs to be recalibrated.
Some Rorschach diagnosesdo seem to stand up, though. People who report seeing representations ofpassivity or helplessness in the blots are thought to have a dependentpersonality, meaning they rely on others to satisfy their needs. Some ofthe studies Dr Meyer looked at did indeed find that people who producesuch responses are more likely to request guidance in a classroom, askan experimenter for help when solving puzzles, or hold on to a guidewhen they are blindfolded. And responses in which a viewer synthesisesseveral elements in an inkblot to show how they are interrelated do seemto be correlated with intellect; such responses are found most often inpeople who also score highly on an unrelated psychological assessment,the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.
Dr Meyer disposes,too, of one perennial criticism of the Rorschach test—that it isculture-dependent. Studies in numerous countries come to broadly thesame conclusions. A qualified thumbs-up, then, for inkblots. Perhaps thebiggest threat to the test is that no one uses fountain pens any more,and so inkblots themselves have more or less become things of the past.(534 words)
文章地址：http://www.economist.com/node/21538076
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