This study examined Three Wishes (a projective technique commonly used with children) in boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a fatal, progressive illness (n = 74). A reliable and parsimonious scoring system was developed to code wish type. Probands' responses were compared with unaffected siblings (n = 32) and a male comparison group (n = 43). Contrary to what was expected, the DMD gro...

One hundred and fifty-eight clinical psychologists practising in Britain completed a questionnaire concerning their use of and views about psychological assessment. The respondents reported spending on average slightly more than 50% of their working day on face-to-face clinical work and 13% of their time with clients on individual assessment. The results were compared to those of a similar surv...

This study examines whether coding open answers in a picture-based test, as to the extent they reflect the fear of being laughed at (i.e., gelotophobia), demonstrates sufficient validity to construct a semi-projective test for the assessment of gelotophobia. Previous findings indicate that cartoon stimuli depicting laughter situations (i.e., in the pilot version of the Picture-Geloph; Ruch et a...

BACKGROUND Studies on popular names of birds help to understand the relationship between human beings and birds and it also contributes to the field of ornithology. METHODS This study aims to register the ethnotaxonomy of birds in the village of Pedra Branca, Santa Teresinha municipality, Bahia State, Brazil, by cataloguing and identifying their popular names, besides understanding the ethnoc...

In 3 studies, we document various properties of perceiver effects--or how an individual generally tends to describe other people in a population. First, we document that perceiver effects have consistent relationships with dispositional characteristics of the perceiver, ranging from self-reported personality traits and academic performance to well-being and measures of personality disorders, to...

The current study tested the hypothesis that mothers who have experienced child maltreatment and aggression within their adult relationships may be at particular risk for misinterpreting infant emotions, leading to less sensitive parenting behaviors. Participants were 120 pregnant women recruited for a larger, longitudinal study investigating the role of psychosocial and environmental risk on w...

Projective tests are considered to uncover unconscious emotions while avoiding psychological resistance. However, the results of projective tests may be affected by conscious emotions. This study investigates whether self-disclosure, which is a conscious factor, affected the results of a sentence completion test (SCT), which is a projective test. Eighty-five university students completed a ques...

Projective techniques continue to be widely used by school psychologists despite frequent criticisms of their use. This article reviews contemporary validity issues in the use of projective techniques with children and adolescents, including incremental validity, treatment validity, and problems associated with professional judgment and experience. A discussion of these issues and their implica...

The term "projective tests" is customarily applied to several of the sharpest and most valuable weapons in the clinical psychologist's armoury. Some of these?the Rorschach test, for example?are well known; others are not, and indeed some depend for their effectiveness upon their deceptive similarity to verbal intelligence tests. There are, nevertheless, essential differences between them and th...

This book is a major contribution to the literature on delinquency. Professor Merrill surveys the resources of the clinician in the tasks of assessing social environment and understanding delinquent personalities; and she describes the use of intelligence tests and projective techniques. The behaviour of delinquent children is understandable only in terms of the basic needs of the individual ch...