Search

The article focuses on the interaction recorder, an electronic punched paper tape unit for recording speech behavior during interviews. The study of verbal interview behavior results in the accumulation of (and the ultimate necessity to process) large quantities of data. This is true whether the investigative focus is on such global phenomena as personality traits or personality change, analysis of the content or themes expressed, or on such structural characteristics as frequency and durations of single units of speech and silence. With both the Chapple Interaction Chronograph and the Interaction Recorder, a trained observer is needed in order to record the interview interaction.

The article focuses on a simple quantitative measure of pressure for use in the projective techniques. It presents a brief description on the use of a measuring technique and some implications of the scores obtained by the use of it for quantifying the variable of pressure exerted by the subject in the various projective paper-and-pencil techniques. It is applicable to such tests as HTP, Bender Gestalt group administered TAT and Rorschach, and it is particularly useful in the draw-a-person technique. In essence, the method involves the multiple reproduction of the original drawing by means of carbon paper while the subject is drawing. The amount of pressure exerted by the subject will be reflected in the number and extent of reproductions that is made under standard conditions.

This article discusses psychological types and changes with age. A considerable quantity of observations concerning retests, self and supplementary-estimates, psychiatric estimates, discrepancies; discrimination of the given estimate as relating to true inborn type or admired type or imagined type or overt type; ambivalence and overlying factors like emotions, all part and parcel of so-called clinical experience, have been discussed in a separate paper. One thousand subjects in age groups from 10 to 80 with equal incidence of each sex have been tabulated in various relations and reported in other papers. The persons observed were unselected, the questionnaire being offered wherever opportunity was found.

The present report deals with the validity of the Shipley-Hartford Retreat Scale as a brief paper-and-pencil measure of current intellectual functioning. Although the Shipley-Hartford scale was devised primarily as a scale to reflect intellectual deficit, and its subsequent evaluation has indicated limited utility as a measure of deterioration, several investigators have been interested in its usefulness as a measure of functioning intelligence. This paper presents a table that summarizes some relationships between various brief measures of intelligence and the Wechsler Bellevue Scales.

The article focuses on research papers of clinical psychology. It informs that the same definition of research was applied in culling these journals; papers were included in the survey if they presented systematic investigation of a specifically described group of subjects and the derivation of normative or comparative data from psychometrics, case histories, or therapeutic interviews; or analysis of administration, scoring, and interpretation of a given instrument. It further informs that it is necessary to recognize, however, that changes in editorial policy of certain of the journals have resulted in the acceptance for publication of a larger number of shorter papers.

This article constructs a Terminators-Remainers scale composed of those items of the Social History Questionnaire that best differentiated between Terminators and Remainers. A formidable problem encountered in clinical practice concerns the large number of clients who start psychotherapy but for various reasons terminate treatment prematurely. The initial sample of this study consisted of 95 clients accepted for psychotherapy during a 11-month period at a small mental health clinic. The measure used was the Social History Questionnaire, a 393-item, forced-choice, pencil-and-paper intake interview.

This article reports the results of a pilot study that sought to merge two lines of scientific approach. Brief paper and pencil psychobehavioral assessment was completed on subjects to determine whether the psychobehavioral variables could differentiate between high and low risk subjects and subjects with previous documented myocardial infarction from those who are still healthy. Specifiable measures of behavior and coronary risk status appear to be related. Furthermore, a basic pattern of interpersonal recall was associated with coronary risk status.

The article describes briefly the Personal Inventory, its derivation and validation. The Personal Inventory is a group test, which presents a standardized psychiatric interview in pencil-and-paper form. Its items, which are of the forced-choice type, are based on case-history dissimilarities between psychiatrically undesirable and normal military personnel. The inventory comes in two lengths, a Long Form comprising a 145-item booklet with separate answer sheet, and a Short Form of 20 items printed on a single page.

The article discusses various psychometric techniques useful in vocational guidance. One of the psychometric techniques is known as pre-test. The pre-test is an instrument, usually paper and pencil, designed to give a rough measure of the subject's mental level in a very short period of time. Another useful psychometric technique identified is the Wechsler-Bellevue Scale. This test gives a measure of verbal and non-verbal intelligence as well as an overall measure and seems to provide satisfactory differentiation at all levels of intelligence.

The article focuses on age and a group test battery as predictors of types of crime. Age and a group test battery were used to predict types of crimes committed by offenders, classified according to offense as classified into three groups: crimes against persons, crimes against property, and paper-and-pencil crimes. The data were analyzed by a stepwise discriminate function regression analysis. The cases were classified correctly into the three groups by the tests, when compared to actual crimes committed better than would be expected by chance.

The article presents a paper-and-pencil test that could discriminate the normal from manic and depressed states, a list of items was obtained which described behavior believed to be characteristic of these states. The test was ad- ministered routinely each week to patients on a research ward concerned with the manic-depressive illness. After five months, test scores were available from 9 patients who had been judged as clinically manic and 15 who had been judged as clinically depressed for various lengths of time.

The article discusses paternal reactions in childhood as described by schizophrenics and alcoholics. Factors were found which differentiated significantly between these groups. At the same time as the data on the mothers were collected, these subjects were also requested to fill out a similar form covering the fathers' reactions, and the present paper describes the results of a factor analysis of these protocols. The Perception of Parent Behavior Scale was administered to all subjects. This Scale consists of 75 items, each consisting of a brief description of some act in which a child might engage, and the subjects were requested to select at least 35 from this list which would have "bothered" their parents most when they were children.

This paper reports two experiments testing the hypotheses that the rate and degree of verbal conditioning are inversely related to the personality variables of rigidity and extraversion, these predictions being based on theoretical formulations by psychologists, R.B. Cattell and H.J. Eysenck, respectively. The most striking finding was that the conditioning procedures did not induce reliable, i.e. repeatable, changes in performance. This result which precluded an adequate test of the hypotheses under investigation is in marked contrast to previous studies using this and other methods of conditioning, and requires explanation.

The article cites a paper that extends the study of judgments of disorganization in schizophrenic thinking into the area of learning by investigating the effects of knowledge of results and of practice in the absence of external reinforcement on clinical judgments. Since there is some evidence from studies in the area of perceptual learning that absolute judgments by the method of single stimuli improve with practice even without correction, or knowledge of results, clinical judgments might also be expected to become more accurate with practice.

The paper offers a case study with a defective delinquent who was rehabilitated through intensive individual psychotherapy. The subject was selected by the staff of a large colony for male defectives as belonging to the group of "incorrigible" defective delinquents. The procedure of selection and the results of a large scale counseling and psychotherapy program have been described elsewhere. One to three therapeutic sessions of 20-50 minutes each were held weekly for 18 months except for vacation.

The article discusses how a clinician is a behavioral scientist. It is the thesis of this paper that whatever a clinical psychologist does, whether diagnosis, therapy, or teaching, he does his work properly only because he is a research worker. At present there seems to be a trend away from meticulous diagnostic work. In the face of this, it should be pointed out that only through diagnostic effort, that is, psychological measurement, can the clinician set his goal in therapy, and more importantly, know when this therapeutic goal has been reached.

The article presents information based on a study conducted by Beta-Wais within a state prison population. Large admission rates and understaffed classification sections force many prison institutions to rely on relatively short, group administered, and easily scored paper and pencil tests for appraisals of intelligence. One of the most widely used group intelligence tests in Federal and state penal institutions is the Revised Beta Examination developed for Army use during the World War I, revised for civilian use.

The article informs that self-report techniques have been utilized to measure personality attributes since R.S. Woodworth's "Personality Inventory." The traditional self-report methodology requires the S to respond to a series of statements by indicating whether they are true or false when applied to himself, and his responses are scored by a key developed after an item analysis of the responses given by variously defined criterion groups. The technique for assessing self descriptions with which this paper is concerned lies somewhere between the above two methods of self-report, and consists of having subjects complete three sentence stems by selecting adjectives to describe their feelings, their study or work habits, and their social reaction pattern.

The article discusses the validity of clinical judgments of schizophrenic pathology-based on verbal responses to intelligence test items. The reliability of clinical judgment has been the subject of a series of studies using single responses to intelligence test items obtained from psychiatric patients and judgments by trained clinicians based on a seven-point rating scale. It has been possible to demonstrate reliability in judgments of disorganization in schizophrenic thinking, as well as more specific aspects of schizophrenic thinking. The question now arises whether clinicians can make global appraisals of complete test protocols with as great reliability as they can judge single test items. This paper extends the study of reliability, defined as interjudge agreement, to global judgments in which whole protocols are ranked according to severity of schizophrenic pathology.

This paper gives a short review of the literature on the syndrome of alternating two-day cyclic behavior changes. An illustrative case presents the life history, clinical findings and test results of a 42-year-old male with a history of two day cyclic behavior changes, including a comparison of two Rorschach records administered at a five-day interval on a "bad" and a "good" day. The comparison covers productivity, utilization of original intellectual endowment, ego strength, affective life, social adaptation, aggression, feelings of insecurity, and intellectual viscosity.

This paper studies the efficacy of the Pain Apperception Test as a research tool by investigating the consistency of individual response as to pain apperception, neuroticism, manifest anxiety, and self-appraisal. The research design involved the PAT, a medical questionnaire, Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, and a pain experience questionnaire. Data from responses to these instruments permitted studying the relationship of pain apperception to personality characteristics, and to subjects' ratings of their comparative past pain experience. Relationships also were examined regarding the comparative apperception of pain in the counterpart PAT pictures, thus investigating Anticipation versus Felt-Sensation.

This article discusses context effects in judgment as a function of experience. Since many of the classical phenomena of psychophysics have been found in all areas of judgment, there is every reason to assume their existence in the processes of clinical judgment and to hope that their further investigation here will lead to the refinement and improvement of clinical prediction. This paper is concerned with those shifts or distortions in judgment which can be produced by altering the context within which the stimulus appears.

This paper reports one aspect of the Nobles County, Minnesota Mental Health Survey which has been underway since 1949. The general investigation had three main aims: (1) to undertake a study of the prediction of adjustment over time, (2) secure age data on personality and adjustment measures, and (3) develop screening instruments for locating children and adolescents in need of special attention. The first of these aims, the prediction of adjustment, is reported on here. The predictions cover a four year period and the results reported are for the men in the sample. The problems of the present prediction study can be reduced to (1) the development of predictors, (2) the development of criteria, and (3) the relation of predictors to criteria.

The article discusses some of the major implications of the developing area of objective psycho-diagnostics that were selected for special consideration and for the bearing they have for some of the research papers appearing in 1955. The antecedent probability, or base rate, of a given characteristic in the general run of clinical cases being seen is of crucial importance in determining the efficiency of a cutting point on any score distribution. Since these values will fluctuate from installation to installation and undoubtedly from time to time in any given clinical agency, the test producer cannot provide this additional information for the individual clinician in the use of a diagnostic device.

The purpose of this paper is to show how a new nonparametric method, manifest structure analysis, may be used for a quantitative analysis of case histories or very general information files, it is well known that mature adults do not like to take most conventional tests. These same adults, however, generally show far less antagonism to interviews, the taking of a case history, etc. In the present study, information files were compiled for management personnel in an industrial organization, a manifest structure analysis of these information files was made, and a test or scale constructed for use in estimating the actual value of employees to management.

The purpose of this paper is to focus attention on the problems of report writing and to attempt to increase interest in the experimental study of clinical reports. With these objectives, the approaches to the improvement of clinical writing which have already been used will be reviewed. In the conduct of his diagnostic duties the clinical psychologist invests a substantial portion of his time in the preparation of psychological reports. Whether such investment of time, and indeed whether the time spent in diagnostic testing is justified, depends upon the effectiveness with which the psychologist is able to communicate his findings.

The purpose of this paper is to present an illustrative case study written up following the systematic method for evaluating all possible factors "organizing personality integration" developed by this author in his outline of principles of psychological examining. The rationale of the method is based on a general theory of personality integration which postulates that a principal problem of diagnosis is to identify and evaluate the various levels of factors organizing behavior by relating the interactions of sub functions to the organization of personality as a whole. Behavior may be interpreted as reflecting the attempts of the organism to maintain itself at the highest possible level of organization depending upon the harmonious and sell-consistent interactioning of all lower level supporting functions.

The article presents a report of the similarity of reproductions of the Bender-Gestalt designs when two different methods of motor manipulation are employed. In this study 32 subjects duplicated all the Bender-Gestalt designs on paper and five of them by placing pieces of felt on a felt board. Their performances were rated as to degree of similarity to the standard stimuli on both media and the ratings obtained on the two compared. The results indicate that uniformity actually occurs a minimum of 77 percent of its theoretical possibility and that total disagreement or extreme disagreement occurs only 6 percent of the time. These data are interpreted as indicating that the reproduction of the Bender-Gestalt figures is more influenced by covert perceptual responses than by motor techniques.

The article informs that the selection and validation of criteria to measure psychotherapeutic experience are important problems in current research. In an increasing number of studies the utility of psychological tests as guides to selection of suitable patients for psychotherapy is being investigated. Although the validation of such tests rests, to a large degree, upon the adequate measurement of the success or failure of the patient's therapeutic experience, insufficient research has been directed towards this area. The present paper reports on an empirical investigation of the relationship between the manner in which therapy is terminated and length of treatment and training and experience of the therapist.

The article informs that drawings of a "Man" have frequently been used for estimating the mental level of children and subnormal or abnormal adults. Correlations with objective intelligence tests have at times been high. On the other hand there is much evidence that correlations are often so low as to 1e of little help in practical work and hence the drawing has been frowned on as an emergency test for quick assessment of mental level. This paper has attempted to demonstrate that under certain circumstances the drawing of a "man" predicts with reasonable accuracy the Wechsler non-verbal intelligence level of certified mental defectives.

The article discusses individual bias in psychological reports. There has been considerable study of the relationship between the examiner and subject during conventional test administration and of the influence of the examiner upon the subject's responses in a variety of testing situations. Individual differences in examiners' processing data secured from the use of projective techniques have also been studied and reports are beginning to appear about the influence of the personality of the examiner on his reports about subjects. The present paper is a report of a study designed to examine the systematic variation in the content of psychologists' reports and their individual biases. The subjects were three graduate students in psychology who were serving their internship-training year at Duke Hospital a few years ago.

The article presents information about skills of clinicians in analysis of projective tests. With the recent sudden increase in the number of psychologists engaged in clinical practice, there has arisen an interest in the selection of persons to be trained for this work and to that end an interest in the development of reliable measures of diagnostic skill. A group of the University of Michigan was interested in the possibility of demonstrating the relative and cumulative effectiveness of all available techniques as predictive of future professional success in this highly individualized specialty. In addition to paper and pencil tests of intelligence, achievement, personality, attitudes and temperament, and interviews, this group used individual and pooled ratings based on situational and real life procedures designed to reveal aptitude for effective interpersonal relationships.

The article presents a study, which attempts to determine the different ways in which spontaneous colored chalk productions differentiate between patients with psychoneurosis and those with cerebral pathology. The materials used were white paper, an ordinary stopwatch, five colored chalks, blue, green, red, yellow, and black. The most significant finding refers to the high percentage of patients with cerebral pathology who produce either a series of simple colored strips or use one color in completing the entire surface of the page. The neurotic patients, on the other hand, tend to organize their work into higher-level designs.

This article focuses on quantification on the Eight Card Redrawing Test (8CRT). The 8CRT is an attempt to answer this problem of quantification. The 8CRT consists of eight interrelated drawings, each a development of the immediately preceding one. Transparent paper is used so that the subject sees the immediately preceding figure as he draws over it. In this way change can be observed on a continuum. Group administration is just as effective as is an individual administration and does not decrease the projective nature of the test.

This article focuses on an alternate form of the Series Completion test. The Series Completion test, requires that the subject form abstractions from visually presented problems and use these abstractions to complete a series. Since practice effect on this test may play a role in repeated testing, as, for example, in follow up studies of electro-convulsive. shock or prefrontal lobotomy in which several testings may be given-an alternate form has been developed, by use of which it is hoped to tap the same abilities now measured by Series Completion I. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of the alternate form, Series Completion II, and to present tentative norms for the evaluation of results.

This article discusses frustration, anger and hostility states. The purpose of this paper is to propose a classification system descriptive of a group of pathological states characterized by acute or chronic frustration-anger-tension-aggression reactions. In contrast with the anxiety-tension states which have been well described in the literature, relatively little attention has been given to behavior reactions characterized by anger. These anger reactions range from infantile rage reactions responding to restriction of movement, through childhood temper tantrums to adult rage reactions of homicidal degree.

The article presents a discussion on the reflection hypothesis, proposed by psychologist Carl Rogers. Rogers defined reflection as a type of response to the client in which the counselor tries to understand from the client's point of view and to communicate that understanding. To test this hypothesis, an investigation was made on the responses made by clinically trained and untrained people to hypothetical counseling situations via pencil-and-paper methods. Findings suggest that clinical skills have been shown to be considerably more than a simple extension of knowledge of interpersonal relations possessed by any reasonably intelligent and emotionally mature person. This appears to be the case at least insofar as one testable notion about therapy, namely, reflection, is concerned.

The article reports on Masculinity-Femininity scales. Masculinity-Femininity "scales," abbreviated MF, are found in several widely used psychological tests including the Strong Interest Blank and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss the rationale for defining M F and to summarize the two statistical studies of it. There are two procedures possible in constructing an MF scale. One may either weight a given number of responses in such a way that they maximally discriminate the sexes, or one may search for entirely new responses which, when so weighted, will give some optimum discrimination. MF may be derived as the continuous variable which best represents the discrete variable, Male-Female. The mathematical problem of abstracting any test scale has a unique solution once the pool of discriminating responses has been chosen.

The article cites the study to approach the adult female obese personality through the use of the Rorschach test. The authors' plan is (1) to determine if there are reliable and differentiating Rorschach quantitative indices which characterize the personality structure of obese women as contrasted with women within the ideal weight range, (2) to determine the degree in which these differentiating indices are present, and (3) to attempt to reconstruct a pattern of psychic-economic distribution of personality energy typical of the personality structure of obese women. Later papers will treat nuclear conflicts and crucial relationships in the personality of obese women as reflected in other projective techniques.

The article focuses on sex differences and variability in the performance of retarded children on Raven, Binet and Arthur tests. Specifically the aim of the paper were to determine the performance of a sample of the Wayne County Training School population on the Raven test, to see whether the Raven suggests a dimension of capacity other than those revealed by the Binet and the Arthur; and to investigate sex differences in these test performances. Since the child's performance relative to his group is significant for the appraisal of his potential response to special programs, quotients for all three tests were individually expressed in z-scores.

The article focuses on a comparison of personality test scores and medical psychiatric diagnosis by the inverted factor techniques which is concerned with a population of n individuals each of whom has been measured by m tests. The author administered four paper and pencil personality tests including the Bernreuter Personality Inventory, the Bell Adjustment Inventory, the Guilford Martin Series, and the Minnesota Multiphasic inventory to twenty five neuropsychiatric patients at a the Mare Island Naval Hospital in northern California. It was found that the symptomatology of the cases on each factor--both negatively and positively loaded cases--were similar enough to make tentative interpretation.

This article presents a study of the validity of some hypothesis for the qualitative interpretation of the H-T-P for children of elementary school age. Drawings were obtained by teachers from the children in their respective classrooms, and this was done on a group basis. Essentially, the instructions used for the individual examination were followed except for such additional instructions as to warn the children against copying from their neighbors. First the house was drawn, then the tree, and finally the person. The drawings were done on sheets of paper of legal size folded so as to make the equivalent of the standard H-T-P form except for the absence of the printed word at the top of each drawing space.

The article reports that in the field of psychotherapy, there has been practically no progress in the matter of evaluating the relative efficacy of various methods because of failure to quantify the nature and malignancy of the clinical case materials under study. Adherents of various schools of psychotherapy have made a large number of claims and counter claims which cannot be proved or disproved until the exact nature of the clinical material on which the findings are based has been established. It is the purpose of this paper to outline a method for quantifying the malignancy of case materials by the use of a rating scale which has been called the prognostic index.

The article reports that one of the major clinical developments of the past decade has been the attempt to derive methods of personality diagnosis from the scatter and proffle analysis of psychometric data. Following the initial reports suggesting that scatter and profile might have differential diagnostic significance, many clinical psychologists attempted to interpret psychometrics according to the new-found "signs." Unfortunately, subsequent research has failed to confirm the validity of these diagnostic signs. The present paper represents an attempt to evaluate the rationale of scatter and profile analysis of psychometric data with specific reference to published research on personality diagnosis with the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale for Adults.

The article presents a comparative evaluation of the Wechsler-Bellevue mental deterioration index for various adult groups. In recent articles the value of the Wechsler Mental Deterioration Index (MDI) in screening patients with brain damage from normal patients has been considered. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the MDI further as a tool for differential diagnosis; that is, to determine whether a significant loss in this index is related solely to deterioration such as is found in subjects who have had organic brain injury or damage. The MDI's for the following seven groups of subjects were compared: brain injured, applicants for vocational counseling with psychoneurotic diagnoses, and with other than psychoneurotic diagnoses, mental hygiene clinic patients diagnosed as anxiety tension state, mental hygiene and hospital patients diagnosed as schizophrenic, and two groups of normals.

The article reports on the psychometric localization of brain lesions. This paper is the outgrowth of a psychometric study of patients who had suffered focal brain damage and in whom the locus of the lesion had been ascertained either by surgery, e.g., in cases of brain tumor, or, in gun shot wound cases, by x-ray demonstration of metallic foreign bodies in the brain. The analysis described herein was performed to test the hypothesis that there are no significant differences between the Minnesota multiphasic profiles of the patients with frontal lobe lesions and the profiles of those patients with lesions involving the parietal lobe.

The article reports on psychological research in the community mental health service in the United States. The need is obvious for the development of public health practices which will control the causes of mental ill health as effectively as is now done with many other diseases. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss the opportunities and the methodological problems for the psychologist doing research in the field of community mental hygiene. Research on community mental hygiene, it seems to the author, can best be attacked by studying those factors in total community life which prevent or promote the development of healthy patterns of adjustment by individuals or groups. Stating this a little differently, research in community mental hygiene might best be concerned with the nature and the origin of conflicts, frustrations, or confusions for persons or groups which are part of the community way of life.

The article reports that not many years ago, Rorschach's test was conceived largely as a diagnostic instrument, and it was common knowledge that one did not cure patients merely by diagnosing their disorder. The present paper offers the suggestion that certain of the so-called projective tests may be employed in such a manner that their use will have a distinct psychotherapeutic effect. This psychotherapeutic effect is to be considered as the primary purpose for which the particular projective technique is to be used, the relative value of this particular form of therapy is to be used.