Personality and perceptions of situations from the thematic apperception test: quantifying alpha and beta press

Theoretical models posit that the perception of situations consists of two
components: an objective component attributable to the situation being perceived and a
subjective component attributable to the person doing the perceiving (Murray, 1938;
Rauthmann, 2012; Sherman, Nave & Funder, 2013; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). In this
study participants (N = 186) viewed three pictures from the Thematic Apperception Test
(TAT; Murray, 1938) and rated the situations contained therein using a new measure of
situations, the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). The RSQ
was used to calculate the overall agreement among ratings of situations and to examine
the objective and subjective properties of the pictures. These results support a twocomponent
theory of situation perception. Both the objective situation and the person perceiving that situation contributed to overall perception. Further, distinctive perceptions of situations were consistent across pictures and were associated with the Big Five personality traits in a theoretically meaningful manner. For instance, individuals high in Openness indicated that these pictures contained comparatively more humor (r = .26), intellectual stimuli (r = .20), and raised moral or ethical issues (r = .19) than individuals low on this trait.