Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1993

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Psychology

Major Professor

Alvin G. Burstein

Committee Members

Wesley Morgan, Mark Hector

Abstract

An assumption held in many psychological theories is the idea that people have characteristic ways of viewing their world as basically gratifying and benevolent, or ungratifying and malevolent in affective quality. The aim of this study was to investigate the affective quality of object representation as they appear in the Rorschach responses and earliest memories of 100 gifted college students. The affective ratings of these productions were compared to scores on the MPQ, an objective personality instrument which identifies two higher-order personality traits called "Positive Emotionality" and "Negative Emotionality." It was hypothesized that the affective ratings given to the Rorschach percepts would correlate with affective ratings of early memories and with the emotionality traits measured by the MPQ (Tellegen, 1982). The Burstein-Loucks Rorschach scoring system (1989) was utilized to assess the affective quality of the Rorschach percepts. The Explicit Motivational Valuation category was used to determine whether Rorschach percepts containing human movement and/or human emotion were benevolent, malevolent or neutral in affective tone. Likewise, the Implicit Motivational Valuation category was used to evaluate the affective tone of percepts containing no human movement or human emotion. Items from an early memory rating system developed by Acklin and his colleagues (1991) were used to evaluate the affective quality of the earliest memory provided by each of the gifted college students. Results from the study were mixed. The Explicit Benevolent, Implicit Benevolent and Explicit Malevolent Rorschach ratings were found to be related to Positive and Negative Emotionality on the MPQ. The Implicit Malevolent rating, however, was found to either unrelated to the MPQ factors, or related in the unanticipated direction. Overall, the Explicit ratings were better than the Implicit ratings in predicting the emotionality factors. The Rorschach and Early Memory ratings were generally found to be unrelated with only one significant correlation found in 18 comparisons. Furthermore, the Early Memory ratings were found to be unrelated to the Positive and Negative Emotionality factors on the MPQ. Instead, the Early Memory ratings appeared to tap into a different phenomenon having to do with behavioral constraint and control rather than emotionality.

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