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This article reports on a study to know attitudes toward mental hospitals. Six groups of subjects were selected which seemed to have varying degrees of familiarity with a mental hospital setting. Group I, 22 employees kept on the intensive treatment service of the Norfolk State hospital. These employees had been exposed to an intensive training program attempting to familiarize them with personality theory, psychopathology and therapeutic attitudes toward patients on the part of a psychiatric aide. They work under the close supervision of psychiatric nurses and psychiatrists.

According to the frame of reference adopted herein, professor L. Szondi test may be considered as a projective technique, consisting of partially structured stimulus materials to which the subject responds in his own unique manner, thereby revealing something of his personality structure. Within this frame of reference three assumptions seem basic and necessary, as well as sufficient the individual test pictures have consistent meanings or content values for a given population. The stimulus values of the pictures with respect to the associations evoked are known to the examiner. A given subject's selections among the test pictures result from personal affective investment rather than from the affective valences or stimulus values of the pictures. The alternatives for selection must all have a reasonably equivalent potential for reaction in order for choices to be considered as reflection of individuality rather than as conformity with group selection trends. The Szondi test is designed to appraise personality from an individual's affective discriminations among pictures of mental patients.

The purpose of the present paper is to formulate the basic assumptions of a relatively new and untested technique, the Szondi Test, and to make a start towards their investigation. In order to have testable assumptions, the writers have found it necessary to modify the basic rationale of the test somewhat for experimental purposes. Even assuming that the pictures have associative valences which are consistent and along lines expected on the basis of the rationale in the European population on which the test was originally developed, the problem as to whether this is equally true for the U.S. still remains. It seems evident from results of this study that the Szondi Test is at present in a rather ambiguous situation. The assumptions made concerning the stimulus pictures are correct to an extent, which would make one loath to discard the present test pictures. On the other hand, the associative valences of the pictures, although present in 44 of the pictures, agree with Szondi's designations in only 50 percent of the cases. It is clear, however, that other segments of the population need to be studied in order to discover how generally valid results of the present study may be.