Fig. 1
The image (Fig. 1) that I used in my investigation is of a male and female. In the background the female is lying in bed with her head facing away from the viewing participant and her right arm is seemingly hanging down the side of the bed. The male is standing in the foreground facing away from the female and has his right arm raised to his forehead. There is also a single chair at the side of the bed. I showed this TAT card to ten men and ten women, asking them each what was their instant reaction to what was happening in the picture. I then proceeded to ask each participant in what other ways did they think the image could be interpreted. I did this to discern whether the gender differences of participants implied a tendency to lean towards either an emotional or sexual situational response. I took this approach with regards to Hess(1965). Hess recorded the eye movements of one male and one female whilst they were both looking at an identical picture within which had a man and a woman. What was found was that the male observer acknowledged the female in the picture first and the female observer acknowledged the male in the picture first. This is another indication that gender plays a part when differences in observation occur.
Before carrying out my investigation I had predicted that the women would go for the emotional response and the men the sexual response therefore stereotyping the responses to each gender.
I will first look at the male responses of 16-25 year olds. I found that an initial generalisation occurred with most men, this was where the interpretation was of regret. The regret was of the male in the image who had had sexual relations with the
female and was now regretting his actions of the previous night. I would like to point out that whilst it is a normality to assign a bedroom situation to a night time activity there are no references in the image as to what time of day the scenario occurred. Although this is an obvious assumption to make it does indicate that our interpretations of everyday life affect our judgement towards our situational perceptions. Another intriguing male response was that of a murder scene. The male participant in question envisaged a struggle between the characters taking place leaving the female dead at the hands of the male. He said that this was indicated by both the limp looking arm of the female dangling over the side of the bed and by the males’ hand to his forehead indicating remorse of his actions. When I asked why they interpreted it this way the reasons were due to the shirt of the man not being neatly tucked in and the fact that he still had his shoes on (implying that the male had simply killed her without a sexual act taking place). I believe that the young male grouping is showing a stereotypical response that signifies a domineering and sexual interpretation.
The females of the 16-25 year old age group that I interviewed had a different interpretation of the image. Their main consensus was that the man was grieving for the loss of his dead or dying spouse. One female interpretation was that the man had been keeping a bedside vigil over the dying woman by sitting in the chair and now that she had passed away, indicated by the posture of her arm, he was feeling distraught by her death and this was indicated by the position of his hand to his head. It was also noted that because of the way the characters are both facing away from
each other a none violent verbal argument had happened between them and that he had said something that he now regretted. Another female response, continuing on the theme of an emotional bedside vigil, was the attire of the man. She had deduced this due to the man having wearing his pyjamas and slippers. Her assumption was that the characters were in their home in this situation. This singular female response was not repeated by any of the other nineteen participants and I found this to be an interesting note as to how differently people can interpret any given situation. Although one female response was akin to the men (a sexual act had occurred), I found that the main female interpretation was that of an emotional situation.
Another interesting observation I found was with the male and female groupings of between 25-40 year olds. Here I found that almost none of the responses were sexual in nature. One woman interpreted the image as of both the man and woman being a couple but nothing sexual or violent had occurred; her assumption was that the man had arisen from bed in the morning and felt ill, hence the hand to his forehead. Although I personally believe this not to be the case this was a valid response and again signifies a link with the participants background and emotional standing. All of the other interpretations were of a painful emotional situation where the male had both argued with his partner and regretted it or she had died and he was feeling the pain of her loss. I would like to point out that in the image there are no indications that the characters are a couple of any kind. When I inquired about the assumption of the characters’ marital status I was informed that it was due to the apparent nakedness of the female as the bed sheets are only covering half of her breasts.
The results of the older groups’ responses indicate that no gender stereotyping is occurring which means that it is the factor of age that deduces a conclusive interpretation.
I believe that it is possible that the observation of apparent nakedness is also the reason behind the younger males’ interpretations of a sexual act but when I asked if this was the case I was informed that they hadn’t noticed this fact. This is interesting, as I believe this to be a response reflecting situations from their own attitudes, values and cultural beliefs. These differences of interpretation ‘can include the person’s current mental ‘set’, mood, emotional state, goals, intentions, situational motivation and contextual expectancies’. (Chandler, 1998: )
Conclusion
I have discovered that all of the participants relied on their own life experiences, values and attitudes to assist in their interpretation of the ambiguous picture presented to them this is because the ‘ambiguous stimuli can evoke responses that have the origin in the personality of the observer’ (Leibowtz 1965: 38). From the results of this Thematic Apperception Test it is clear that ‘special value resides in its power to expose the underlying inhibited tendencies which the subject (or inquirer) is not
willing to admit, or can not admit because he is unconscious of them’ (Murray, )
Although I was unable to carry out a similar eye movement test, as did Hess (1965), in my investigation I did find that the different participant genders would mention the opposite gender of the image. Unfortunately I found this too inconclusive to properly record, as the difference was insignificantly minor.
I have found there to be numerous possibilities of interpretation of regarding the gender, age and personal history of the participants. There were similarities in the interpretations by both male and female observers but this only seemed to occur within the older age group as opposed to the younger men and women where there were many differences. This shows that my earlier prediction of gender stereotyping was correct but also showed that the age of each participant was a deciding factor. My study has found that age combined with gender shows that men and women can perceive things very differently as noted by Vernon, ‘object identification differs between men and women’ (Vernon 1971: 633).
References
Chandler, Daniel (1998): ‘Visual Perception 4’ [WWW document] URL
Leibowtz, Herschel (1965): Visual perception. New York: Macmillan
Murray, Henry A.: Individual Differences: Thematic Apperception Test* MANUAL
Vernon, M.D. (1971): The Psychology of Perception, 2nd Edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin
