Rorschach Texture Responses Are Related to Adult Attachment via Tactile Imagery and Emotion
Abstract
This study examined an underlying mechanism of the relationships among Rorschach texture responses and adult attachment dimensions (attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance), focusing on the vividness of tactile imagery and emotion as mediators. In Study 1, Japanese undergraduate students (n = 20) completed the Rorschach and the Vividness of Tactile Imagery Scale. A poisson regression analysis revealed that greater vividness of tactile imagery was associated with an increased number of texture responses. In Study 2, Japanese undergraduate students (n = 224) completed the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale for the Generalized Other and the Vividness of Tactile Imagery Scale. A path analysis revealed that attachment avoidance weakened the strength of emotional responses accompanying the generation of tactile imagery, and greater emotional responses enhanced the vividness of tactile imagery. These results suggest the possibility that attachment avoidance indirectly reduces texture responses on the Rorschach.
References
(1996). Contributions of cognitive science to the Rorschach technique: Cognitive and neuropsychological correlates of the response process. Journal of Personality Assessment, 67, 169–178.
(1959). Texture response in the Rorschach and in a sorting test. Journal of Projective Technique, 23, 391–402.
(2004). Fantasy-proneness, mental imagery ability, and reality monitoring. Personality and Individual Differences, 36, 1747–1754.
(2005). Negative BOLD differentiates visual imagery and perception. Neuron, 48, 859–72.
(2008). Right temporopolar activation associated with unique perception. Neuroimage, 41, 142–152.
(2010a). Amygdalar enlargement associated with unique perception. Cortex, 46, 94–99.
(2010b). Amygdalar modulation of frontotemporal connectivity during the inkblot test. Psychiatry Research, 182, 103–110.
(2005). Rorschach correlates of self-reported attachment dimensions: Dynamic manifestations of hyperactivating and deactivating strategies. Journal of Personality Assessment, 84, 70–81.
(1909). The distribution and functions of mental imagery (Contribution to Education, No.26). New York: Columbia University, Teachers College.
(2012). Rorschach score validation as a model for 21st-century personality assessment. Journal of Personality Assessment, 94, 26–38.
(1998). Self-reported measurement of adult attachment: An integrating overview. In , Attachment theory and close relationships (pp. 46–76). New York: Guilford.
(2004). Determinants of the vividness of visual imagery: The effects of delayed recall, stimulus affect and individual differences. Memory, 12, 479–488.
(1992). On texture: Scoring and interpretation. British Journal of Projective Psychology, 37, 3–7.
(2000). Alexithymia and mental imagery. Personality and Individual Differences, 29, 787–791.
(2009). The Rorschach texture response: A conceptual validation study using attachment theory. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91, 601–610.
(1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 20, 37–46.
(1991). The study of vividness of images. In , Mental images in human cognition (pp. 305–312). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland.
(1997). Do vision and haptics share common representations? Implicit and explicit memory within and between modalities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 153–163.
(2008). Avoiding interference: Adult attachment and emotional processing biases. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 171–181.
(2003). The Rorschach: A comprehensive system. Vol.1: Basic foundations and principles of interpretation (4th ed.). New York: Wiley.
(2005). Cross-modal visuo-tactile matching in a patient with a semantic disorder. Neuropsychologia, 43, 1568–1579.
(2005). Assessment of Rorschach dependency measures in female inpatients diagnosed with borderline disorder. Journal of Personality Assessment, 85, 147–153.
(1997). Adult attachment and the suppression of unwanted thoughts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 1080–1091.
(2012). Categorizing natural objects: A comparison of the visual and the haptic modalities. Experimental Brain Research, 216, 123–134.
(2010). The feeling of movement: EEG evidence for mirroring activity during the observations of static, ambiguous stimuli in the Rorschach cards. Biological Psychology, 85, 233–241.
(2005). The nature of imagery processes underlying food cravings. British Journal of Health Psychology, 10, 49–56.
(2011). Some mechanisms responsible for the vividness of mental imagery: Suppressor, closer, and other functions. Journal of Mental Imagery, 35, 5–32.
(2008). Mental imagery as an emotional amplifier: Application to bipolar disorder. Behavior Research and Therapy, 46, 1251–1258.
(2008). The causal effect of mental imagery on emotion assessed using picture-word cues. Emotion, 8, 395–409.
(2010). Mental imagery in emotion and emotional disorders. Clinical Psychology Review, 30, 349–362.
(2010). The relationship between texture responses on the Rorschach and adult attachment. Rorschachiana, 31, 4–21.
(2011). Development of the vividness of tactile imagery questionnaire [in Japanese]. Tsukuba Psychological Research, 41, 61–67.
(2010), Multisensory texture perception. In , Multisensory object perception in the primate brain (pp. 211–230). Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.
(1997). Dissociativity, imagery vividness, and reality monitoring. Dissociation, 10, 21–28.
(1994). Image and brain: The resolution of the imagery debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
(2009). What is it that color determinants determine? The relation between the Rorschach inkblot method and cognitive object-recognition processes. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91, 137–142.
(2003). Mental imagery and creativity: A meta-analytic review study. British Journal of Psychology, 94, 29–44.
(2005). Attachment, social competencies, social support, and psychological distress. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52, 358–367.
(1973). Visual imagery differences in the recall of pictures. British Journal of Psychology, 64, 17–24.
(1992). A conceptual validation study of the texture response on the Rorschach. Journal of Personality Assessment, 58, 571–579.
(1995). Attachment styles and repressive defensiveness: The accessibility and architecture of affective memories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 917–925.
(2003). The attachment behavioral system in adulthood: Activation, psychodynamics, and interpersonal process. In , Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 35, pp. 53–152). New York: Academic Press.
(2008). Adult attachment and emotion regulation. In , Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (2nd ed., pp. 503–531). New York: Guilford.
(2005). Visual scanning deficits in schizophrenia and their relationship to executive functioning impairment. Schizophrenia Research, 74, 69–79.
(2007). Standardization of imagery and emotional value for Japanese nouns [in Japanese]. Japanese Journal of Mental Imagery, 5, 35–52.
(2004). Examining reliability and validity of adult attachment scales for “the generalized other” [in Japanese]. Kyushu University Psychological Research, 5, 19–27.
(2005). Imagining material versus geometric properties of objects: An fMRI study. Cognitive Brain Research, 23, 235–246.
(2009). Mental imagery vividness as a trait marker across the schizophrenia spectrum. Psychiatry Research, 167, 1–11.
(1969). Mental imagery in associative learning and memory. Psychological Review, 76, 241–263.
(1999). Implicit and explicit memory for visual and haptic objects: Cross-modal priming depends on structural descriptions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 644–663.
(1992). Short-term memory as a function of personality and imagery. Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 175–180.
(2009). Individual differences in object and spatial imagery: Personality correlates. Personality and Individual Differences, 46, 402–405.
(2012). The influence of adult attachment style on the perception of social and nonsocial emotional scenes. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 29, 530–544.
(2005). Adult attachment, affect regulation, psychological distress, and interpersonal problems: The mediating role of emotional reactivity and emotional cutoff. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52, 14–24.
(2003). Neural substrates of tactile imagery: A functional MRI study. Neuro Report, 14, 581–585.
(2007). Adult attachment orientations and the processing of emotional pictures – ERP correlates. Personality and Individual Differences, 43, 1898–1907.
