The Effects of Subliminal Emotional Priming on Rorschach Responses

Abstract

Abstract. The Rorschach is one of the most popular performance-based tests and it is thought to provide information on relatively stable individual differences, including respondent inclinations and preferences. To investigate the extent to which minor, nonconscious, emotional fluctuations in the respondent’s mind could influence Rorschach scores, we used a backward masking paradigm. More specifically, each Rorschach card was presented on a computer screen twice, once under a neutral and once under an emotional priming condition. In the neutral priming condition, the target stimulus of the backward masking procedure was a neutral face; in the emotional priming condition, the target stimulus of the backward masking procedure was an angry face. A sample of 182 healthy, adult volunteers contributed to this study. Statistical analyses revealed that Rorschach scores obtained from the neutral versus emotional conditions were similar to each other.