Using HyperCard to administer a figural test on the Apple Macintosh

To date, applications of automated assessment techniques in personality testing have largely been limited to objective personality instruments with text stimuli; few assessment applications have involved graphic stimuli. Although projective personality instruments generally include ambiguous graphic or pictorial stimuli, computer applications with these procedures have been limited to automated scoring and interpretation, administration of sentence completion devices employing text stimuli, and the use of mechanical methods rather than computer graphics to display visual stimuli. In the present report, we describe a Macintosh HyperCard application for administering an objective personality test with visual stimuli, the Barron-Welsh Revised Art Scale of the Welsh Figure Preference Test. This test consists of a series of figural stimuli and a binary “like”/“dislike” response format, and it thus represents an administration procedure between standard objective self-report inventories involving text stimuli and a “true”/“false” response or variant, and tests such as the Rorschach or TAT that are both figural and free-response. The HyperCard language provides a variety of promising techniques useful for microcomputer test administration.