APPERCEPTIVE NORMS FOR THE THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST.

The purpose of the present investigation was tentatively to establish adult apperceptive norms for selected pictures of the 1943 published TAT series. It was intended to determine the common ways in which the cards are described and interpretively used by a group of normal men and women. The test was to be administered in the usual fashion and the responses for each card then subjected to analysis with the human figures, the objects and the story content as the chief headings. The aim was not to examine the productions for any "deep" interpretations or to study thematic sequences in the record of an individual subject, but to ascertain merely what the subjects as a group made of the stimulus materials descriptively. Since such treatment of the figures and objects is readily understood, the handling of the plots or stories alone requires further comment. Problems and outcomes were to be analyzed not in relation to the subject's personality but purely as literary expressions. For example, a story involving murder was to be classified as murder, or, at most, as an instance of hostility, never as indicating latent or repressed aggression.