Projective Tests tests

This category brings together two very different ways of approaching a drawing. The first test, Expressive Style, works differently from the rest of the site: instead of answering questions, you draw for a few seconds on a canvas using your mouse, trackpad, or finger. We don't analyze what you draw (we don't check whether it's a face, a house, or a shapeless scribble), only how you draw it: your average stroke speed, how much of the canvas you use, and how many separate strokes you make. It isn't a projective test in the clinical sense of the term, it doesn't use artificial intelligence or image recognition, and no study links these particular metrics to stable personality traits: it's a curious self-observation exercise, meant for entertainment.

The other six: real projective techniques

The other six tests in this category are different: each one reproduces a real projective technique, with decades of history in clinical psychology, and next to each indicator it shows, with equal visual weight, what the original author claimed and what current scientific evidence actually says, including the times it contradicts the original claim. They are the Human Figure Drawing test by Karen Machover (1949), the Family Drawing test by Louis Corman (1964), the House-Tree-Person test (HTP) by John Buck (1948), the Draw-A-Person test by Sidney Levy (LADS, 1958), the Tree Drawing test by Karl Koch (1949), and the Wartegg test by Ehrig Wartegg (1939).

An honest limit, across all seven

None of these six tests claims any diagnostic precision, and neither does the original when applied by a trained clinician. Each one honestly explains which part of its system has some real backing (often very little: for several of them, none of their indicators do) and which part doesn't hold up against the data available today. A canvas drawn with a mouse, on top of that, will never capture the nuance of a real pencil stroke: it measures magnitudes (size, placement, chosen thickness), not pressure or fine motor skill.

Sources

• The first test (Expressive Style) isn't based on scientific literature about personality: it's our own playful tool, built on objective stroke metrics.
• Machover, K. (1949). Personality Projection in the Drawing of the Human Figure. Charles C. Thomas.
• Corman, L. (1964). Le dessin de famille en pratique médico-pédagogique. Presses Universitaires de France.
• Buck, J. N. (1948). The H-T-P technique, a qualitative and quantitative scoring manual. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 4, 317-396.
• Levy, S., & Levy, R. B. (1958). Normative data, frequencies, and symbolism in the drawing of an animal.
• Koch, K. (1949). Der Baumtest: Der Baumzeichenversuch als psychodiagnostisches Hilfsmittel. Verlag Hans Huber.
• Wartegg, E. (1939). Der Wartegg-Zeichentest. Leipzig Institute.