Projective aspects on cognitive performance: distortions in emotional perception correlate with personality

Psychological theories of projective tests

For psychoanalysis, the ego uses defence mechanisms, which are strategies to transform drives into suitable content for the environment. One of those mechanisms is projection. In a letter from 1895, Freud (1950/2006) proposed the concept whilst studying paranoia, suggesting that projection was the attribution to the outside world of an internal content that was incompatible with the ego. That way, an inner perception would be recognized by consciousness as external. In later writings, Freud (1913/2006) developed the idea that the projection takes place not only in conflict situations, but it would also be a healthy personality mechanism, changing the perception that individuals have of the world, based on their affects.

Based on the principle of projection, Frank (1939) proposed that the personality, when introduced to unstructured, ambiguous stimuli that lacked intrinsic meaning, would have a tendency to organize itself to assign a meaning to that. The author then considered that the personality assessment techniques available at the time – Rorschach inkblots, Thematic Apperception Test, among others – would start this process, allowing aspects of the individual’s private world to be revealed like an x-ray, thus, creating the term “projective methods”.

Beyond psychoanalysis and derived practices, other theoretical approaches have considered regarding the phenomenon of having a personally meaningful performance on unstructured stimuli. In radical behavioural analysis, Skinner (1936) developed an assessment tool based on the theoretical assumption that the presentation of a stimulus tends to elicit a response that is similar to it. The behaviourist created a phonograph that repeatedly reproduced meaningless syllables recorded on a disc he titled Verbal Summator. Subjects were instructed to listen to the recording and to report as soon as they identified something that made sense to them. The reported word or phrase, of course, was not truly present in the recording. Because such verbal responses were not evoked by any real stimuli at that moment, the author considered that, by approximation, the test would elicit the strongest responses from the subject.

Although further studies pointed to the possibility of differentiating between psychiatric patients (for a review, see Rutherford 2003), with time, the complex machinery and redundancy compared to other tests eventually lessened interest in the Verbal Summator, causing it to virtually disappear by the end of the 1950′s. Nevertheless, Skinner (1936, 1953/2003) still listed the advantages of such an instrument, considering that projective tests create a laboratory situation, enabling control over stimuli in the observation of behaviour and facilitating the emergence of behaviours that are not known by the subject, especially the verbal ones.

Cattell (1951/1978), who furthered the psychometric approach to psychological phenomena, proposed new classifications that represent forms of personality assessment. Within the objective test group, in which an artificial situation is created to observe the subject’s behaviour, the author created the category of distortion or bad perception tests, which measure an unusual perception and a particular meaning of a real, objective fact that included projective techniques.

Since the perceptual distortions would not be influenced by intellectual capacities, Cattell (1951/1978) considered that the performance would then be a reflection of the reproduction (memory) of previous emotional experiences. To explain the occurrence of this phenomenon, the author proposed that internal perceptions alter interpretation of reality. In this sense, people that see themselves as incapable and worthless would see other people as distant and disinterested, justifying their own depression.

In the perspective of Gestalt psychology, events are experienced from the organization of the perceived stimuli, overcoming a vision of simple summation of latent traits and assigning a particular meaning to each stimulus presented (Koffka 1935/1975; Köhler 1947/1968). In this respect, the individual’s particular way of acting consists of a series of dynamic characteristics, and from them, external stimuli are organized according to experience. Thus, experiences are characterized by an individual structure.

Individuals perceive stimuli in a meaningful perspective of their own, featuring their own way of perceiving, feeling, associating and acting beyond the presented stimulus, aggregating experiences and memories. Therefore, their interaction with the stimulus, including psychological tests, takes place according to their daily interaction in other situations, and the properties of parts of the stimulus depend on their relationship with the whole (i.e., the place, the meaning, and the function that it has in relation to the whole) as they are perceived by the individual (Crisi 2007; Freitas 1993; Kinget 1952).

In the field of neuropsychology, it is possible to find projective techniques being recommended, especially as ways of evaluating neurological trauma (Gabowitz et al. 2008; Spreen and Strauss 1998) due to their ability to measure perceptual organization, processing and stimuli integration (Acklin & Wu-Holt, 1996; Lezak et al. 2004). Although not yet numerous, studies often use Rorschach’s Inkblots Method to assess phenomena, such as mirror neuron activation during the production of movement responses (Porcelli et al. 2013), the role of amygdala as emotional interference during the process of perceiving and producing unusual frequency responses (Asari et al. 2010), Rorschach variables associated with Alzheimer’s disease (Perry et al. 1996), among others.

According to Acklin (1994), the Rorschach method can be used by both neuropsychology and cognitive psychology by focusing on the response process. Information processing is understood as a cognitions sequence between stimulus and response that would work through behaviour selection, processing, and management. When one observes a Rorschach inkblot, a network of schemes is activated by combining current context and past experiences stored in long-term memory – or, more specifically, in episodic memory, which contains autobiographical information. Activated schemes are then managed by control processes that select and censor content (representations of ideas and feelings) to adapt to the characteristics of the stimulus (Acklin 1994; Acklin and Wu-Holt 1996). Although the authors only suggest the use of episodic memory, it is likely that semantic memory also influences the alterations of perception. Semantic memory is understood as the personal knowledge of facts and concepts, and is the basis of human activities that require use of symbols and their meanings, understanding of reality, and relationships between ideas (Binder and Desai 2011; Budson and Price 2007).

Considerations regarding alteration of perception in psychological tests

Considering what was presented, it is possible to understand that there is a convergence in literature pertaining to the assertion that individual emotional aspects can influence the perception or interpretation of the world, and such phenomenon can be detected through performance on projective tests. However, as perception is a psychological activity that happens not only in those tests, we hypothesize that performance on other instruments would also be influenced by personality traits, and such influence can be measured.

Internationally, research has been conducted in this regard. In one study of patients with eating disorders (Joos et al. 2009), pictures of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) were presented to 19 patients with bulimia nervosa, 15 with anorexia nervosa and 25 controls, and participants were asked to observe each image and to report on a scale the emotion they were feeling. The results showed that, when observing aggressive images, the group with anorexia reported feeling more afraid than the other groups, which the authors considered a reflection of those patients’ typical avoidance of conflict.

In a study with 46 obsessive compulsive disorder patients compared with 23 controls, beyond the greater sense of social responsibility that is already known to the disorder, Moritz et al. (2011) found stronger latent (i.e., unexpressed) traits of aggression and distrust in the first group. These characteristics were identified in self-report questionnaires with items regarding desire to attack strangers on the street or lack of confidence in close people. For the authors, the expression of aggressiveness is contained by a high moral sense and then transformed into a perception of the world as dangerous and harmful.

In Brazil, intelligence tasks such as the Wechsler scales (Wechsler 2013) and the G-36 (Boccalandro 2003) provide instructions to score and classify errors and distortions occurring in performance. However, such distortions are presented only as cognitive data; there are no studies linking them to aspects of personality.

Goal and hypotheses of the study

We identified a gap in the research regarding the influence of personality characteristics on performance in instruments beyond projective tests. The present study aimed to analyse the distortions of perception on a cognitive ability test through correlation with personality instruments as well as other cognitive abilities. We chose a test of emotional perception, which assesses the ability to identify the emotions expressed in videos of people. Distortion was understood as the perception of something not present in the original stimulus (i.e., perceiving an emotional expression on a person’s face that is not actually present). According to the literature review, we hypothesized that distortions would not be related to cognitive performance, but with the particular forms that the subjects perceive in themselves and the world. The following hypotheses were designed to be compatible with the variables of the tests we used and the meaning of each emotion, according to the literature in the field (Ekman 2003; Niedenthal et al. 2006; Plutchik 2002; Strongman 2003).

Hypothesis 1. Distortion of joy (gain of something socially valued) will correlate with increased interest in human contact.

Hypotheses 2 and 3. Distortion of love (feeling of being accepted) will correlate with more positive views of interactions and a greater need to receive attention from others.

Hypotheses 4, 5, and 6. Distortion of fear (attention to threatening stimulus) will correlate with higher frequencies of oppositional behaviours and attention to aggressive movements and contents.

Hypothesis 7. Distortion of sadness (feelings of losing something and negative thoughts) will correlate with greater perceptions of damaged, spoiled or harmed objects.

Hypothesis 8, 9, and 10. Distortion of disgust (attention to aversive stimuli) will correlate with increased need for contact due to feelings of loneliness, suspicion, and concern about intentions of others, and belief that others can humiliate and criticize.

Hypotheses 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. Distortion of anger (attention to aggressive and hostile stimuli) will correlate with lower frequencies of exploratory behaviour, greater need for contact and feelings of loneliness, attention to aggressive movements and content, disregard and aggressive behaviours toward others, suspicion and concern about intentions of others, and belief that others can humiliate and criticize.