The projective expression of needs; the effect of different intensities of the hunger drive on thematic apperception.

The first experiment in this series (7) attempted to measure the effects of different intensities of the hunger drive on perception for which the objective determinants had been reduced to a minumum. Its purpose was to seek any principles which might govern the relationship between need intensity and its expression in perception. The results provided clues as to how perceptual material should be interpreted to diagnose the strength of a drive such as hunger. But most so-called projective methods do not deal with perceptual material unless, like the Rorschach, they are concerned more with the formal.than the contentual aspects of phantasy. Therefore, the next step is to see whether the findings with perceptual material apply to a prejective method more nearly like those ordinarily employed—the Thematic Apperception Test, for example. Several previous attempts have been made to measure the effect on imaginative productions of specific experimentally induced conditions (2, 5, n), but none has dealt with the problem very extensively or attempted to control the amount of the variable, the effect of which is to be measured. In the present experiment the intensity of the hunger drive was controlled as in the previous experiment by depriving the subjects of food for one hour, four hours, and 16 hours. They then wrote out short stories about pictures drawn mostly from Murray's Thematic Apperception Test (referred to hereafter as the TAT). This design permitted the direct comparison of contentual aspects of the stories told under the influence of three degrees of intensity of the hunger drive. PROCEDURE