Gallery: The Beautiful Yet Twisted History of Psychological Testing
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The early 20th century saw a boom in psychological diagnostic tests. Newfangled, experimental, and beautiful, but ultimately fraught, most of these tests are no longer in use. This one is a Make a Picture Story Test.
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Invented in 1942, it asks patients to put one of these characters into a setting (a bedroom, a kitchen, a street) and tell a story based on the scene. Pathological disorders could then be deduced from there.
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One of the most frightful old examples in Psychobook is the Szondi Test. Subjects look at photographs of real people who had been hospitalized for mental disorders (epileptics, homosexuals, and depressives, to name a few varietals) and choose their favorites and least favorites. You are what you pick, the thinking goes.
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Open-ended tests have proved more enduring. The Feeling Test, here, asks patients to identify with one of a number of blob-like cartoon characters in a drawing. There’s little trickery involved, because the characters look more like benign ghosts than real people, making them neutral proxies for different kinds of emotions.
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Rorschach’s inkblot tests are still in use today. In a study published this summer, 53.6 percent of psychologists reported using them in their assessments with patients.
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Blocks that ask patients (mostly kids) to match, sequence, and create patterns are a nonlinguistic tests from the early 20th century.
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These handmade cards—that may as well be Wes Anderson film props—go with the blocks.
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This test was used less for assessing recognition and connection skills.
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The first color tests came out in 1947. Psychologists believed they could get a complete emotional and mental profile of a patient by asking a patients to identify colors they like most, and least. Someone who dislikes purple, for instance, would have been thought to "want to experience all life has to offer without having to suffer from nervous exhaustion." Hardly scientific.
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Drawing completion tests, created by psychiatrist Ehrig Wartegg in 1934, asks patients to fill in the basic shapes with drawings of their own imagination. It was thought to reveal aspects of personality.
