Rorschach Signs of Brain Damage in Cerebral Thrombosis

Abstract

A study was made of 275 atherosclerotic patients between 40 and 80 yr. of age, 139 with brain damage (cerebral thrombosis) and 136 without known brain damage (myocardial infarction). The brain-damaged patients were found to have higher scores on a checklist of 46 Rorschach signs associated with disrupted cerebral functioning. The checklist was refined to include only 10 relatively independent items which had singly differentiated the two groups. The revised checklist discriminated the groups at approximately the same level of significance, and with the scores divided at the optimum point, 71% of the patients were correctly classified. Among the cerebral thrombosis patients only, an association was noted between race and Rorschach impairment scores (Negroes higher than whites); but with scores adjused for race, the checklist still significantly discriminated the brain-damaged from the non-damaged. The 139 cerebral patients had significantly higher scores than 20 patients without known atherosclerosis or neurological involvement, but they did not differ from 12 patients with transient cerebral symptoms. Conversely, the 136 cardiac patients had significantly lower scores than patients with transient cerebral symptons, but they did not differ from patients without known atherosclerosis or neurological defect. The perfection of psychological test signs of brain damage continues to be limited by the absence of an infallible criterion for selecting Ss for study. Despite that limitation, certain aspects of Rorschach responses were shown to distinguish between patients with presumed brain damage and those without known damage.