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Abstract
Three new scoring categories for the Wartegg Drawing Completion Test (WDCT) were introduced. Each of them permits to assess specific personality characteristics: the Evocative Character (EC) that is related to social adjustment; Form Quality (FQ) that is connected to reality testing ability and Affective Quality, (AQ) that is linked to general mood state. Inter-rater agreement and criterion validity of the new categories were investigated on a sample composed by healthy, anxious and psychotic individuals. For EC, FQ and AQ, results showed an adequate level of inter-rater agreement and a satisfactory capacity to discriminate among subjects, supporting their reliability and criterion validity. In particular, as expected, significant differences were found for each category among all groups, with higher mean scores for healthy subjects, medium for anxious and lower for psychotics (except for AQ category that showed significant differences only in the comparison between healthy and pathological subjects but not between anxious and psychotic ones). Possible approches to assess WDCT validity in future researches were discussed.
Key words: Wartegg Drawing Completion Test, evocative character, affective quality, form quality.
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The Wartegg Drawing Completion Test (WDCT) was created by the German psychologist Ehrig Wartegg (1897-1983), a follower of the School of Gestalt psychology in Leipzig that was the main centre of the psychology of totality. The WDCT derives from the Sander Phantasie Test (Berger, 1939) and, as reported by Roivanen (2009), was published for the first time in 1926, even though a complete handbook saw the light only many years later (Wartegg, 1953). Since the publication of the first manual (Wartegg, 1953), several studies have been conducted using the WDCT in different contexts, such as clinical (e.g. Kinget, 1980; Pfeiffer, 1984), educational (e.g. Avé-Lallemant, 1994), and organizational settings (e.g. Souza, Primi, & Miguel, 2007).
The WDCT is a drawing projective technique whose graphic elements are semistructured signs on winch the individual is prone "to project contents and specific dynamics of his personality which are, then, revealing of his organization" (Rapaport, 1977, p. 31). In accordance with Bomstein's (2007) view, we may define the WDCT as a performance-based personality test that "can be classified as a stimulus-attribution test in winch the examinees give meaning through interpretation" (Bomstein, 2007; p. 203). The WDCT...