The Hand Test and Other Aggression Indicators in Emotionally Disturbed Children

The Hand Test is a projective technique yielding an Acting Out Score (AOS) which the test authors feel is useful as a predictor of aggressive, acting-out behavior. This study produced data regarding the stability of AOS, the relation of AOS to another projective device used to assess aggressive potential and the ability of AOS to predict teacher ratings of acting-out behavior among emotionally disturbed pre-adolescents. Results indicate that for this sample of Ss the AOS lacks stability as a measurement construct, does not correlate with another projective measure of aggressive potential and is not a useful predictor of acting-out behavior as rated by teachers of emotionally disturbed pre-adolescents.