What's Wrong With The Rorschach

Science Confronts the Controversial Inkblot Test

Scott O Lilienfeld author James M Wood author M Teresa Nezworski author Howard N Garb author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:John Wiley & Sons Inc

Published:7th Apr '11

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

What's Wrong With The Rorschach cover

Since its creation more than eighty years ago, the famous Rorschach inkblot test has become an icon of clinical psychology and popular culture. Administered over one million times world-wide each year, the Rorschach is used to assess personality and mental illness across a wide range of circumstances: child custody disputes, educational placement decisions, employment and termination proceedings, parole determinations, and even investigations of child abuse allegations. The test's enormous power shapes the lives of hundreds of thousands of people -- often without their knowledge. In the 1970s, this notoriously subjective test was supposedly systematized and improved. But is the Rorschach more than a modern variant on tea leaf reading?

What's Wrong With the Rorschach? challenges the validity and utility of the Rorschach and explains why psychologists continue to judge people by their reactions to ink blots, in spite of a half century of largely negative scientific evidence.

What's Wrong With the Rorschach? offers a provocative critique of one of the most widely applied and influential - and still intensely controversial - psychological tests in the world today. Surveying more than fifty years of clinical and scholarly research, the authors provide compelling scientific evidence that the Rorschach has relatively little value for diagnosing mental illness, assessing personality, predicting behavior, or uncovering sexual abuse or other trauma. In this highly engaging, novelistic account of the Rorschach's origins and history, the authors detail the wealth of scientific evidence that the test is of questionable utility for real-world decision making.

What's Wrong With the Rorschach? presents a powerfully reasoned case against using the test in the courtroom or consulting room - and reveals the strong psychological, economic, and political forces that continue to support the Rorschach despite the research that has exposed its shortcomings and dangers.

James M. Wood (El Paso, TX) is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, at the University of Texas at El Paso.

M. Teresa Nezworski (Dallas, TX) is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Dallas.

Scott O. Lilienfeld (Atlanta, GA) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta.

Howard N. Garb (Pittsburgh, PA) is on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Studying the Clinician: Judgement Research and Psychological Assessment.

ISBN: 9781118087121

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 907g

462 pages