The Thematic Apperception Test and Alzheimer's disease

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1938, 1943) is widely used in personality description and psychological assessment. Similar narrative tasks are also frequently used as part of neuropsychological assessment. Little is empirically known, however, concerning performances of cognitively impaired individuals on thematic tasks when compared with other diagnostic groups. It was predicted that hospitalized patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) would demonstrate impaired performances on the TAT when compared with a group of nondemented psychiatric inpatients. This prediction was supported, with the DAT group performing significantly worse on TAT dependent measures than the nondemented group. Results indicate total number of words and mean number of words used, loss of instructional set, and tendencies to describe the pictures to be significantly different between groups. These findings are discussed in terms of neuropsychological theory on verbal expression and in terms of use of the TAT as a screening device for clinicians in determining need for neuropsychological evaluation.