Using the TAT to Assess the Relation Between Gender Identity and the Use of Defense Mechanisms

The purpose of this study is to explore whether 2 different dimensions of personality, when assessed at an implicit level with the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1943 Murray, H. A. (1943). Thematic Apperception Test manual. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]) will show a theoretically meaningful coherence not demonstrated when 1 is assessed at an implicit level and the other at an explicit level. Gender identity and defense mechanisms were assessed implicitly using the TAT. Gender identity was compared with a self-report measure of gender-related attributes assessed at the explicit level. The results showed a theoretically meaningful coherence when different dispositions were assessed at the same level, but a lack of agreement when similar dispositions were assessed at different levels. The study is based on a secondary analysis of data from 2 previously published papers (Cramer, 1998 Cramer, P. (1998). Threat to gender representation: Identity and identification. Journal of Personality, 66, 335–354.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Cramer &; Westergren, 1999 Cramer, P., &; Hogan, K. (1975). Sex differences in verbal and play fantasy. Developmental Psychology, 11, 145–154.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).     

Evidence for Change in Children's Use of Defense Mechanisms

ABSTRACT Using a cohort-longitudinal design, children's use of the defeneses of denial. projection, and identification was assessed at four points over a 2-year time span, covering the age period from 6 years, 6 months to 9 years, 5 months. The results showed a clear decrease in the use of denial from early to middle childhood, a sharp increase in the use of projection, and an increase in the use of identification. These findings, predicted by a theory of defense mechanism development, are consistent with cross-sectional results reported previously.     

Reliability of an Idiographic Q-Sort Measure of Defense Mechanisms

Despite the important insights the concept of defense mechanisms may offer to our understanding of human behavior, no standardized definitions of defense mechanisms have been universally accepted. Inconsistencies in the definition and conceptualization of defense mechanisms has limited the practical utility of research involving these constructs. In addition, lack of interrater reliability, use of anecdotal evidence, and reliance on self-reports has retarded their investigation. Conducting methodologically rigorous investigations with a psychometrically sound instrument is the first step in addressing some of the issues concerning defense mechanisms and their theoretical postulates. This study was conducted to determine the reliability associated with the Defense-Q, an observer-based Q-sort measure of defense mechanisms. Thirty participants who had undergone an interpersonally stressful interview (the Type A Structured Interview; Rosenman, 1978) were rated by 11 trained coders, both for their use of the 25 defense mechanisms and for their ego strength. Reliability was assessed using Cronbach's alpha. Individual defense mechanisms demonstrated reliability ranging from .28 (undoing) to .92 (humor), with an average reliability of .73. Coder reliability ranged from .63 to .76, with an average of .69. These results indicate that defense mechartisms can be reliably assessed by the Defense-Q. Reliability of the Defense-Q is compared to existing observational measures of defense mechanisms.     

Use of Services Prior to and Following Intensive Family Preservation Services

A goal of short-term intensive family preservation services (IFPS) is to facilitate access to other services. However, service use following IFPS has rarely been studied. I describe the types of aftercare services that IFPS therapists recommended and use of these services in the two months following IFPS termination. Since families were using services that were not on the recommended aftercare plans, use of these services is also described. Primary caregivers of families who received family preservation through either child welfare or mental health were interviewed at two months after family preservation for the purpose of ascertaining service use. Different types of services were recommended and used based on whether families received IFPS through child welfare or mental health. However, there were also differences in the presenting problems and demographics between families in child welfare and mental health. Future research should include an independent assessment of need in order to determine the relationship between need and the types of services recommended and used. Even though families used services prior to IFPS, the findings indicated that IFPS facilitated use of new services. More research is needed on the process of how therapists decide what services to recommend and what they do to help families access services. It is also important to examine whether use of less restrictive services helps prevent out-of-home placements and the relationship between informal support and use of formal services.     

Anger and the Use of Defense Mechanisms in College Students

ABSTRACT It was hypothesized that experimentally induced anger would result in an increased use of defense mechanisms in college students. As predicted from the theory of defense mechanism development, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) stories of angered students showed a higher level of use of projection and identification, and the use of these defenses was significantly correlated with the presence of aggressive content in the stories. The results were consistent with previous studies in showing that the predominant defenses of late adolescents are projection and identification, and that men use more projection than women.     

The Qualified Pronoun Count as a Measure of Change in Family Psychotherapy

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the original Multiple Family Psychotherapy group at Georgetown University, Department of Psychiatry. The author, a clinician, used the technique of content analysis of recorded interviews and developed a “change ratio” which is called the “qualified pronoun count.” Although “therapeutic improvement” is not the main goal of the treatment strategy under research here, ordinarily anyone that exhibits the kind of change in differentiation from “family ego mass” ( 1 ) reflected in this study, also experiences diminution or remission of symptoms. Preliminary findings indicate this new system of observing change is useful in determining variations in differentiation, and that these families did change.     

Defense Mechanism Card Pull in TAT Stories

This study investigates the question of whether different Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1943 Murray, H. (1943). Thematic Apperception Test manual. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]) cards are likely to prompt stories that are characterized by different defense mechanisms. This condition is known as card pull and refers to the probability that different TAT cards elicit different personality scores for the same variable. If so, the assessment of defense use would be importantly influenced by the TAT cards used in an assessment. TAT stories from 3 different community samples were examined (Ns = 91, 98, 121), using a statistical method developed by Stein et al (2014 Stein, M. B., Slavin-Mulford, J., Siefert, C. J., Sinclair, S. J., Renna, M., Malone, J., … Blais, M. A. (2014). SCORS–G stimulus characteristics of select Thematic Apperception Test cards. Journal of Personality Assessment, 96, 339–349.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The results indicated that different TAT cards pull for different defenses, as assessed by the Defense Mechanism Manual (DMM: Cramer, 1991b Cramer, P. (1991b). The development of defense mechanisms: Theory, research and assessment. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). However, the nature of card pull was not always consistent across samples. These dissimilarities could be due to group differences, or to the presence of different TAT cards used in the test battery, indicating that card pull is importantly determined by context.     

Channels of Change: Contrasting Network Mechanisms in the Use of Interventions

This study informs community science, and seeks to narrow the research-to-practice gap, by examining how the interpersonal networks within a setting influence individuals' use of interventions. More specifically, it explores the role of two network mechanisms-cohesion and structural similarity-in urban elementary school teachers' use of interventions designed to improve academic and behavioral outcomes for students. Lagged regression models examine how position in advice giving networks influenced weekly use of the daily report card and peer assisted learning by kindergarten through fourth grade teachers in three schools. Results indicate that intervention use spreads among teachers with similar patterns of advice-giving relationships (i.e., via structural similarity), rather than from teachers who are sources of advice (i.e., via cohesion). These results are consistent with findings in other settings, and suggest that researchers wishing to increase the use of an intervention should select change agents based on their patterns of their relationships, rather than on their direct connections.     

Meaning and Change in Psychotherapy

Starting from two accounts of psychological change in therapeutic settings, based respectively on the analysis of metaphors (Faccio et al. 2011, this issue) and on transformative moments in self narratives (Ribeiro and Gon?alves 2011, this issue), this paper examines core processes of psychological change. Drawing on sociocultural psychology, the paper first argues that core processes of change in such therapeutic settings take place at the level of the organization of a person's semiotic sets. Second, the paper suggests that such therapeutic frames are likely to provoke changes in other aspects of a person's life as these aim at transforming the persons thinking capacities, and as these have as objects situations external to them.     

Use of the TAT to measure change in defense mechanisms following intensive psychotherapy

Changes in the use of defense mechanisms (denial, projection, and identification) were examined over a period of approximately 15 months of intensive treatment of 90 seriously disturbed young adults who were hospitalized in an intensive, open, long-term treatment setting. Patients independently judged to have primarily an anaclitic or an introjective personality configuration (Blatt, 1974; Blatt & Shichman, 1983) were assessed for psychiatric symptoms and aspects of interpersonal behavior both on admission and after an average of 15 months of treatment. Findings based on an independent assessment of TAT protocols at these two times indicated a significant (p less than .05) decline in total use of defenses for the entire sample, but especially for introjective patients. Further, this decline in total use of defenses in the TAT was significantly associated with a reduction in psychiatric symptoms. Also, sex-incongruent patients (anaclitic men and introjective women) were found to use different defenses and to change in ways different from sex-congruent patients (anaclitic women and introjective men).     

The Effects of Success and Failure on Children's Use of Defense Mechanisms

ABSTRACT The effects of moderate stress on the use of defense mechanisms by 64 second- and sixth-graders were determined The use of denial, projection, and identification was assessed from stones told to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) prior to, and subsequent to, an experimentally controlled experience of success or failure Subjects who experienced failure were more likely to use the lower level defenses of denial and projection, while the experience of success was followed by greater use of identification The results also were consistent with previous studies in demonstrating age and sex differences in the use of defense mechanisms     

Psychotherapy Process Measure Research and the Evaluation of Psychotherapy Orientation: A Narrative Analysis

This article discusses the need for a systematic method that enables researchers to evaluate integrative therapy approaches using a range of therapy process measures. The Narrative System Process Coding (NPCS; Angus, Hardtke, & Levitt, 1996) is proposed as such a method, and is applied with the Experiencing Scale (Klein, Mathieu, Gendlin, & Keisler, 1970) and the Levels of Client Perceptual Processing (LCPP; Toukmanian, 1986) to three brief good outcome integrative therapy modalities to illustrate this need. The study found higher Experiencing Scale scores to be most strongly related to an experiential approach to therapy and to the NPCS internal narrative processes. Higher LCPP scores were most strongly related to the NPCS reflexive narrative process and to a perceptual-processing approach. The discussion initiates a discourse on the importance of explicating process measures' origins when comparing different therapy approaches in order to allow for the meaningful consolidation of process research findings.     

The Development of Defense Mechanisms

ABSTRACT It is proposed that defense mechanisms may be characterized as forming a hierarchy, from least to most complex, and that the lowest level defenses emerge early in life, while the more complex defenses emerge later in development Three defenses–Denial, Projection and Identification–were chosen to test this assumption A method for assessing the use of these defenses in Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) stories was developed and validated in a study of four age groups preschool, elementary school, early adolescent, and late adolescent The results of the study were consistent with the prediction Denial was used most frequently by preschool children, and decreased in use thereafter Identification was used minimally by preschool children but increased steadily through adolescence The use of Projection was most frequent in the two middle age groups Some evidence for sex differences, based on the internal/external orientation of the defense, also was found     

Observer-Rated Measures of Defense Mechanisms

Observer-rated measures of defense mechanisms are the direct lineal descendants of Freud's clinical proposition that an observer can reasonably infer defensive operations in an individual of which the individual himself or herself is unaware. Assessment methods of defenses have used both projective testing and clinical interview data. Recent Rorschach test methods have focused on borderline and neurotic-level defenses used to discriminate diagnostic groups and predict other aspects of functioning. A TAT method has demonstrated some evidence for age progression in the development of defensive functioning and for regression in defensive functioning following psychological stress. While interrater reliability is generally good, the methods are limited by the availability of the testing situation and the need to demonstrate generalization to external situations.
Following the early introduction of systematic methods by Haan and Vaillant, a number of methods use clinical interview data to assess specific defenses and overall defensive functioning. These methods identify defenses either as qualitative categories, rank-ordered scores by Q-sort, or actual counts of each instance a defense is used. Summary scores are generally of good reliability, with wider variation for individual defenses. There is wide variation on training required, ease of use, and levels of validation.
A review of some correlates of each method suggests that the instruments have a robust potential for use in fundamental and applied clinical research. While each method has some clear applications, the quantitative clinical interview methods appear best adapted to microanalytic process research on issues of defensive change in treatment.