Assessing Complexity of Representations of People and Understanding of Social Causality: A Comparison of Natural Science and Clinical Psychology Graduate Students

Social cognition research and object relations theory in psychoanalysis both focus on representational processes underlying interpersonal functioning. The present study was designed to corroborate the validity of two measures of object relations and social cognition as applied to TAT responses complexity of representations of people, and understanding of social causality (the extent to which attributions are logical, accurate, complex, and psychologically-minded). Beginning clinical psychology graduate students scored higher than natural science graduate students on both measures, particularly on complexity and the two measures correlated with independent assessments of psychological-mindedness. Discriminant validity was provided by the absence of similar findings using a measure of a theoretically related affective dimension, affect-tone of relationship paradigms.