Thematic Apperception Test

The virtual TAT? Yes.

Well, the original TAT, or thematic apperception test, was invented in the mid-30s by Morgan and Murray.

It was called a method for investigating fantasy, a method for eliciting story constructs from patients who are susceptible to interpretation by the psychiatrist.

Whoa, could I have the layman's version of that for our less informed readers? Ooh, this is a big article, dog.

Simply put, the TAT is a brilliant way of finding out what people are thinking on an unconscious level, how they view the world, how they see themselves in this world, and that is how we gain insight in treating the many ills which plague the human mind.

So what is the Virtual TAT? The Virtual TAT, or VTAT, computer people love acronyms, is something that I am developing with a CD-ROM game company here in the Rogue Valley.

It's a way people can experience a version of thematic apperception tests in their own homes.

Am I not just a character in the story, but also the subject of the video game? How does it work? The subject is shown a series of images or objects.

He returned to Cambridge years later to run the university's psychological clinic.

During the 1930s, he published a book, Explorations in Personality, which is considered by some to be a classic, and he's also the co-author of The Thematic Apperception Test, better known as the TAT.

Developed at Harvard alongside his colleague/lover, Christiana Morgan, the TAT is a personality assessment.

Uh, you're probably familiar with the Rorschach inkblot test, uh, where a doctor holds up an ambiguous picture and says, "What do you see?" Well, the TAT is kinda like that, except in Murray's test, the pictures aren't of amorphous inkblots.

They show people in the middle of doing Something.

What that something is, well, that's up to the subject to interpret.

They're encouraged to make up a story about what's going on in the photo, what the person in the image is thinking and feeling.

And that story, Murray says, reveals the personality within.

This idea that combinations of images can create combinations of ideas became known as the Kuleshov effect, and it became a foundational concept in early filmmaking and in the development of montage editing.

Now, about 20 years later, psychologists at Harvard University, including a man named Henry Murray, invented something called the Thematic Apperception Test.

In it, the scientists would show their subjects an ambiguous image of something, maybe a boy sitting alone on a porch, and they would ask the subjects to tell them a story about what they were looking at.

The scientists believe the answers could offer a window into the subjects' personalities.

This test comes up in Unabomber, a new Netflix film about one of the most infamous terrorists in American history.

Now, as it turns out, Ted Kaczynski, played in the film by former child star Jacob Tremblay, was a student of Henry Murray's, played in the film by Russell Crowe.

Now, Kaczynski took the Thematic Apperception Test, and then, at least in the film, he is granted access to a secretive and exclusive experiment where he participates in heated and often demeaning and cruel debates with grad students.

And the film postulates that these psychologically abu- abuse...

We know that Freud used dream analysis, and both he and Jung were fans of free association.

The broader school of theorists, now known as the psychodynamic camp that descended from Freud and Pals, also use other projective psychological tests, including the famous thematic apperception test.

In this kind of test, you'd be presented with evocative but ambiguous pictures, and then asked to provide information about them.

You might be asked to tell a story about the scenes, considering things like how are the characters feeling, or what's going on, or what happened before this event and what will happen after.

Or they could have unpredictable effects, quite different one from another, to the same person at another time.

Many of the different clinicians and researchers over the years had tried all these different classic psychological tests, like the MMPI or the thematic apperception test, the TAT or the Rorschach.

And none of them proved to have any predictive value for how people might respond to taking a powerful psychoactive substance, a psychedelic.

And so this young man said he was an artist, but he knew astrology.

The viewer's answers to Dr. Turner's questions shape the course of the action and the final outcome of the story.

The viewer, too, becomes one of Dr. Turner's patients, taking a series of Thematic Apperception Tests, TATs, the results of which create a progressively accumulating personal psychological profile and a complete psychological analysis by the end of the movie.

Created by the makers of 'The 11th Hour' and 'The 7th Guest,' TLC is an outrageously innovative interactive experience created specifically for DVD and touch tablet platforms." That's unfortunate.

I'm using a fucking computer.

Need for achievement, the need for affiliation, and the need for power.

And he measured this using the thematic apperception test or the TAT.

Right.

The TAT is a brilliant, projective, psychological tool.

A researcher shows you an ambiguous image, maybe like a person staring out a window and just asks you to write a story about what's happening.

OK, so how does that show your needs?

Personality encompasses your relatively stable psychophysical dispositions, your typical traits, your coping styles, your emotional regulation.

You evaluate it through those objective tests like the MMPI or the projective tests like the Rorschach and TAT.

Domain number three is interest and aptitude.

And I love how the field breaks these down because we use these words wrong all the time.