Word association and ink blot responses as a function of instructional sets and psychopathology

Instructions, word association, and the hospitalized psychiatric patient

Hospitalized psychiatric patients who had high scores on MMPI Scale 8 were given word-association tests under three instructions, namely, free association, instructions to give the responses most people would give, and instructions to give responses no one else besides themselves would give. These Ss, in contrast to Ss in previous studies selected for either psychiatric hospitalization or high Scale 8 scores alone, failed to produce a significant change in either popular or original responses under “most people” instructions. It is evidently only the combination of psychometrically defined “schizophrenia” and psychiatric hospitalization which predicts the inability to show more conventional associative processes when asked to do so.