HOW DOES THE Rorschach Inkblot TEST WORK PDF

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7 - HOW DOES THE RORSCHACH INKBLOT TEST WORK? This video talks about the Rorschach test, how does it work, who has invented it and what it really means. For nearly a century this test has been seen as a mystical personality test. Psychologists have thought for a long time that inkblots (macchie d’inchiostro) could help understand the workings of a person’s mind. This test was invented in the early 20th century by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach who wanted to study people's general approach to perception. Rorschach was interested in how visual perception varies from person to person. He studied that our senses are all connected, and that our process of perception doesn’t just register sensory inputs, but transforms them. Rorschach was also an artist and started to paint inkblots. With his inkblots he asked hundreds of healthy subjects and psychiatric patients: “What might this be?”. However, for him it wasn’t important what people saw, but how they approached the test, for example if the color helped them or distracted them, if they saw the image moving, if they focused on the entire image or only on a part of it. After this study he developed a system to code people’s responses. Analyzing the responses gave him a real insight into people’s psychology. As he tested more and more people, patterns began to pile up. Healthy subjects with the same personalities often took similar approaches; patients suffering from the same mental illnesses also answered similarly, making the test a reliable diagnostic tool. It could even diagnose some conditions difficult to pinpoint with other available methods. In 1921, the author published his coding system, alongside the 10 blots he felt gave the most nuanced picture of people’s perceptual approach. Over the next several decades the test became popular, and by the 1960s, it had been administered millions of times in the U.S. alone. Unfortunately, less than a year after publishing the test, Hermann Rorschach died. Without Rorschach, the test was used in different speculative ways. Researchers gave the test to Nazi war criminals, hoping to understand the psychology of mass murder. Anthropologists showed the images to remote communities as a sort of universal personality test. As the test left the medical field and entered the popular culture, scientists stopped to consider it a diagnostic tool. Today the point of views around this test are still controversial. In 2013 a research showed that if the test is sub-ministered properly, it gives reliable results, and it can help to diagnose mental illnesses. Obviously, this test is not a key to understanding the human mind, but its visual approach and lack of any single right answer helps psychologists in painting a picture of how people see the world, helping to understand the patterns behind our perceptions....