THE PICTURE DESCRIPTION TEST: A PRELIMINARY REPORT

Abstract

In the development of a technique for measuring deviations in the perceptual-affective response to pictures of people (Picture Description Test) (PDT) a wide variety of pictures of people ex pressing varying degrees of positive and negative affect were presented to a large number of subjects or judges with the request that they supply verbal descriptions of the pictures. These free responses obtained in written or oral form were studied for common denominators. In this way three, four, or five terms were derived which would be very frequently chosen as descriptive of a given picture and an equal number that would be very infrequently considered as descriptive. A parallel step was to present a large number of pictures to Ss and with each picture a set of eight or ten words selected by a few judges. Ss were asked to pick the most descriptive word, the second most descriptive, the third most de scriptive, and then to pick the word that was not descriptive at all. From these two sources of data a set of six words were derived for each of 56 pictures, three of which seemed to be rather highly descriptive of the picture and three of which seemed to be characteristically non-descriptive.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 01, 1963
Accession Number
AD0407084

Entities

People

  • Carroll E. Izard
  • Don H. Randall
  • Eugene S. Cherry

Organizations

  • Vanderbilt University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Contracts
  • Frequency
  • Government Procurement
  • Governments
  • Judgment
  • New York
  • Personality
  • Personality Assessment
  • Photographs
  • Procurement
  • Psychology
  • Schools
  • Students
  • Universities

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Regression Analysis.