THE USE OF THE TAUTOPHONE (“VERBAL SUMMATOR”) AS AN AUDITORY APPERCEPTIVE TEST FOR THE STUDY OF PERSONALITY *

In recent years apperceptive measures of personality have played an increasingly greater part in clinical and experimental psychology. Among such devices none has proved more successful or been more widely adopted than the Rorschach Test. This consists of a series of ten cards on each of which a symmetrical ink blot—sometimes in color, sometimes just black and white—appears. These cards are offered to the subject individually with the instructions that he is to say what the blot reminds him of, what it might represent. Whatever the associations produced, they are written down by the examiner and scored primarily as to certain formal characteristics—the sharpness of form perception, the prevalence of coldr or movement responses—and secondarily as to content. The psychograph resulting from the totals and relationships appearing in these scores has been shown repeatedly to be of great psychological significance for the revelation of both normal and abnormal personality characteristics. This fortunate outcome is not so surprising if it is recalled that this test—unlike many other personality tests—is a sampler of real behavior and is, moreover, scored in a way which the subject can usually not fathom in advance. The Rorschach Test employs one sensory or perceptual modality —the visual—and it is therefore natural that the impetus to exploit others, particularly the auditory, should arise. The frequent occurrence in daily life of "mishearing" with self-reference and the