Sport psychology meets psychoanalysis in this deep dive into the Athlete Apperception Technique (AAT) — a powerful, yet underused projective tool developed from the legacy of the Rorschach and TAT. With the birth of the AAT, we open up the conversation on what truly lies beneath performance. Discover what happens when athletes narrate ambiguous images, and how this "Blade Runner" test for the soul might reveal more than expected.
In this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Professor Mark B. Andersen about the AAT and to explore its implication for sport psychology and how it could help athletes beyond their performance issues.
Mark B. Andersen, PhD, is an adjunct professor at Halmstad University in Sweden. He lives in Australia and collaborates intercontinentally with his Swedish colleagues in the areas of research, training, and supervision in applied sport and exercise psychology. Andersen is a registered psychologist in Australia and is licensed to practice psychology in the United States. He is the former editor of the Professional Practice section of the international journal The Sport Psychologist. He has published 9 books, and more than 190 refereed journal articles and book chapters. He has made more than 100 national and international conference presentations, including 17 invited keynote addresses on four continents.
As a Supervisor, he contributed to Dr. Petah Gibbs' PhD research study: Gibbs, P. M., Marchant, D. B., & Andersen, M. B. (2016). Development of a clinical sport projective assessment method: The Athlete Apperception Technique (AAT). Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 9(1), 33–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676x.2016.1180637
Abstract
Within the field of applied sport psychology, there is an increasing appreciation for diversity of training models, research methodologies, and therapeutic approaches. For example, psychodynamic formulations and interpretations have begun to appear more frequently in the sport psychology literature. In keeping with emerging psychodynamic viewpoints, we believe the time is right to introduce a qualitative sport-specific projective instrument: the Athlete Apperception Technique (AAT). The AAT represents a new technique based on psychodynamic theory and established projective test construction principles. It was designed primarily as a clinical tool for practitioners and not as an instrument for quantitative research into personality. It does, however, have potential research applications, especially in clinical sport case study research and narrative analysis investigations. The AAT produces an idiographic understanding of athletes’ characteristics, anxieties, and motivations (both conscious and unconscious). We briefly review the literature on the development of projective techniques, explain the rationale underlying the development of the AAT, and present three sequential studies to explain the AAT image selection procedures that led to the final product.
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Hello everyone, this is Mathias Alberton. This is Martial Attitude Voice Podcast. As you know, I'm a trainees' pop psychologist based in London, and I'm working on implementing a system of training for visually impaired and blind people based on technique of Kung Fu Wing Chun and trying to expand on this idea of touch exchange. Therefore, the idea of creating, enhancing, making blind people more confident because they are actually in touch with others. So they receive pressure, they react to pressure that is applied to them through training. And in the series of podcasts that we are creating, we are exploring different approaches of, to sports psychology. So there are of course sports psychology is a vast territory and is approached from different people in different ways. One year ago, almost, I was attending an important conference in Tallinn, Estonia, and it was a conference with many keynote speakers, and I did have the fortune to come across a workshop with Professor Mark B. Andersen, who is a registered psychologist in Australia and has a license to practice psychology in the United States too, has been an editor for professional practice section in the international journal The Sport Psychologist and has published an enormous amount of papers, I mean, more than 170 referred journal articles and chapters, seven books, two monographs, and has attended more than 100 national international conference presentations. So across four continents. He's of course, he's a joint professor at Hamster University in Sweden and he lives in Australia, although he keeps on working collaborating with his Swedish colleagues in research, training, supervision, applied sport and exercise psychology. Mark, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for joining me. We are in connection with Australia. How do you hear me clearly? Well, thank you very much for inviting me to have a talk with you today. And I'm looking forward to the topics that you were interested in. And I'm going to follow your lead on what you would like me to talk about. So just fire away when you're ready.
Well, that's quite easy because you were, I mean, you kindled the spark of interest in me during the workshop showcasing these, let's say, let's call it a new technique. And then I will ask you about how new this is and why is it new.
Actually, it's a perception technique, AAT for sure. Yeah, well actually I need to emphasize that this is not my major work. This is Petah Gibbs' work. This was his doctoral dissertation. Okay. He is the one and I was his primary supervisor. So I worked a lot on this, but this is his baby and he was interested in the thematic apperception test Morgan and Murray done in the nineteen thirties it is the after the Rorschach test it's probably the most common well-known and used projected test in the world and what he did was he wanted to have something like the cinematic a perception test except design for primarily sports people and so he did massive amounts of work and even went to the United States to visit experts in the TAT and both in the development and in the history. And so this is his baby, this is his PhD. And I was one who sort of helped him along. So we need to put credit where credit's due here. Yeah, you mentioned two very famous tests for people who are a bit in the know in psychology. the Rorschach, and then the TAT. For the people listening here who might be not so apt to the test, what they are in a kernel this kind of projective tests?
Well, I think the key word there is projected. And what these tests are designed to do is to present people with relatively ambiguous stimulus. Well, in terms of the Rorschach, it's usually quite ambiguous because it's just ink lots. It's not actual images of people or places or things. It's lots of ink that had been folded in half and are bilaterally symmetrical, but present images in the TAT, it's images of people and interactions and those sorts of things. And then you're asked to say, what do you see here? Especially in the Rorschach, what do you see? What does this look like? What does remind you of? And then on this ambiguous stimulus, you the theory is that you project onto that stimulus stuff from your own ontogenetic history you know and so if you see let's say in the t.a.t. an image of what looks like a father and son well what may come up for you in the story you tell about what's happening in that image may have probably not necessarily but probably has something to do with your history with your father, whether there was conflict, whether there was deep love, whether there was deep loss at his early death, or whatever it was. that so that these images pull stuff up from the subconscious, the conscious, the subconscious, the unconscious, pull material up. And so we can use these tests to sort of explore some of the features of the personality that may not be so easy to get at in terms of doing regular clinical interview or something like that because what the the the individual who's taking the the the doing the Rorschach technique or the thematic apperception or the athlete apperception technique they may not even be conscious of what the material that they're bringing up and telling about actually has relevance to maybe their past or their experiences or their trauma or relationship history. And so it's a tool to help people dive a little deeper into their clients psychological makeup. And this thing I understand is something that has not been attempted successfully before the finalized AAT athlete's a perception technique. Is that correct?
Yeah, there was one back in the 70s by French guy named Bouet. But it never went anywhere and it never really got to a major publishing state. think it was discussed at different conferences and things, but it never made its way into the psychology literature in any, sports psychology literature in any meaningful way. when you started the podcast here, you said a new technique. Well, it's it's you're right. It's it's new in terms of being a technique for athletes, sports people. But it's really quite ancient in terms of you know, like Rorschach. I think the Rorschach was published in 28 or something. So the Rorschach is now almost 100 years old. And the TAT was published about 1935 or 1937 so it's you know close to ninety years old so these are these are old techniques but this one has been tweaked in to to work with to use in the work with sports like sport and exercise psychology it is interesting this idea of apologies it is interesting this idea of old and new meaning that in a way we can say that spoke psychology itself is kind of a new thing. Meaning before the eighties, allegedly, know, spoke psychology was not really a thing. It started to be a thing, bit by bit from the eighties, primarily in US, primarily in Australia, where are you working from.
Well, the International Society of Sports Psychology actually was probably very, very small, it was founded in 1965. But it was very, very small. And I think you're right. I don't think sports psychology got a lot of momentum until the 80s. And then it grew quite a bit from there. But one of the reasons why we don't see projective methods in sports psychology is one. Sports psychology grew up in the heyday, in the time of essentially quantitative methods, paper and pencil tests, sport anxiety scales, sport leadership scales, all these sort of quantitative methods to assess in research ways and sometimes in practical applied ways. Individuals, know, anxiety or self-image or whatever it is. most of the, almost everything in sports psychology in terms of psychological assessment is quantitative. There's very little qualitative stuff around. Also, projective tests come out of essentially come out of psychoanalytic theory. And there is very little psychodynamic sort of sports psychology around. were, back in the 70s and 80s, there were few publications by psychiatrists who took sort of psychoanalytic sort of case studies of athletes, but they were, those case studies were always really quite fringe. And so the athlete apperception technique is a fringe technique. It's something that most people in sports psychology don't get much exposure to psychodynamic psychotherapy or psychoanalytic theory for that matter. so it is old and it's new and it's in an area of psychology that just is not well represented within sports psychology anyway.
What do you think are, in what ways, let's say the athletes perception technique has revealed aspects of athletes in internal understanding of their realities that might be missed by more, let's say, as you said, structured quantitative, if you like, behavioral assessments?
Yeah, I think when you think about psychodynamic psychotherapy, that's probably not something that one does a lot in sports psychology. Athletes usually come to sports psychologists not to explore their lives in really major depth. They're coming with sort of specific problems. Like say, they perform brilliantly in practice and then they fall apart in competition. What's going on there? There's major anxiety is probably one of the issues that's going on. Stimulation of core shame issues is more maybe a more dynamic issue that may be going on, but they're not there for the, you know, what psychoanalysis is about. And that's really an in-depth examination of the life. And so there's not this tradition of psychoanalytic type of therapy in sports ecology and justly so because that's not what the athletes are there for. When I worked a lot with athletes, I didn't do a whole lot of psychodynamic therapy with them. I did a lot of stuff that was straight out of cognitive behavioral therapy because that's what they wanted.
Nowadays when I in my clinical practice, I do plenty of psychodynamic psychotherapy and if I if I take on a performer or You know or an athlete I usually ask him what they're interested in and if it's not in those areas, which is those are my main interest I have a couple sports psychologists here and I refer them to them because I've done all the cognitive behavioral act and all that sort of stuff in sports psychology and it's fine, but it's not what floats my boat. And I'm much more interested in more in-depth examination of lives. And so I've used this occasionally. I don't have many sports sites. I don't have many athletes these days. But I do have performing artists. And the nice thing with working with performing artists is a lot of overlap with athletes because of performance. But the performing arts, especially in dance and music and acting, they have a long tradition with psychoanalysis. And so the performing artists often take to a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic kind of therapy. And these sorts of instruments can be very useful in those settings, especially the TAT, I think.
As you mentioned, different, let's say in a way, these are different skill set across a whole career like yours, but since let's say the creation of the AAT, do you think athletes and even fellow psychologists has actually responded to this open-ended interpretative nature of the test? Not at all. It was a labor of love by PETA and by me and by Darrell Marchand. It was a labor of love. We loved doing it. We loved doing the workshops that you were part of and we like to expose it to people. going to ISSP and I'm going to run a similar workshop at ISSP that we did at Innisfilm. And we love the work. But as for it being, and it would be a great research instrument if you wanted to do a case study on an athlete. It would be a tremendous research instrument. would possibly help have another layer of depth to the case study and give the case study a little more body, because a lot of case studies are really, really quite superficial in sports psychology. But no, it hasn't been used. A couple of my other graduate students who have used it and have published about it, but it's this small circle. It's not, a, it's what I think is a really good piece of work in research and development of assessment tools that nobody uses.
And creating it, of course, I not only undertaken the workshop, which impressed me greatly, as you might remember. Yes, very dramatic. Yeah, it was interesting. It was really interesting. And unfortunately, it didn't last long enough. You know, it was kind of crush on. You know, was a bit, we were a bit on pressing time, but it was really interesting. And it was really interesting without giving away too much. It's not because it's secret or because I'm secretive about what happened specifically, but just because the listener, the casual listener couldn't really picture what happened, even if I described it. But roughly, there is this sequence of images which are shown to the person undertaking the test. You are asking to create a narrative upon each one of those. And one by one, we went through one, two, three, four, and if I don't remember wrong, picture five, image five or six. Then I, you know, I started to, you know, I did have difficulties verbalizing what I was, let's say, seeing in the picture, given the occasion, given that were many, many people around us looking at me or if it was convenient or not convenient to speak my mind. So then I did, but it was really interesting. and of course, if we only had video recorded the thing, you know, the changes in my behavior as well in the pitch of my voice, the mannerism, in the, you know, in the pupil dilation. I I don't want to be too cinematographic, but it's kind of a Blade Runner test to the replicant at the beginning. You know, that kind of thing. So the turtle, know, why don't you, Leroy, why don't you turn up the turtle? Kind of. So that was interesting. And because it was extremely compelling for me, I thought, well, we are onto something. Maybe I am really onto something. So I I really took it hard and I read what you send me. I also bought the physical copy of the book because I really like to have it physically with me. And I started to use it a bit on my own. I tried to experiment a bit on my own. And that's why I am asking about this, when I read how it's been created, so you have supervised Dr. Gibbs, and you have gone through hundreds of pictures and of course hundreds of surveys answered in different ways to understand what was elicit, which pictures were eliciting the most interesting responses and so forth. And one question that I thought to ask you is, have there been any responses to the AAT images that actually surprised you or challenged you your own clinical assumption as a practitioner or as a researcher?
Yeah, I'm constantly amazed every time I do a demonstration. I did a demonstration of it in my clinic for the other psychologists and we have physiotherapists too, for physiotherapists in my clinic. And I'm amazed every time I do it with somebody. Something comes up that I go, whoa. Wow, that's amazing. And the same with you, when we were working along and it's pretty, you know, almost expected kind of things and then all of a sudden boom this big story comes out and it's sort of like with all projected tests but primarily more maybe with the storytelling ones like the TAT and the AAT and the variations of the TAT like TAT for children. One of the things is you as the say psychologist who's delivering the test to a client, you don't know what sort of Pandora's box you may open with an image that to you is maybe relatively innocuous, maybe there's a little conflict in the picture or something, but you don't know what somebody's psychological history is you can open a wound.
And, so you answered me before that actually, know, the fellow psychologist didn't really actually use it too much. as these hundreds of tests have been undertaken to create the test itself, how were athletes responding to it? Yeah, well, that was Petah's main job is to trial all these different images over and over again to reduce this hundreds and hundreds of images that we all looked at and reduce it down. So there was variations of different image sets that were delivered over and over again. And one of the things that Peter found is that the athletes who took part in it were actually really quite engaged in the process they they they they'd like to tell me the stories and it was something very different from anything any other sports psychologist that ever done with them and and so that was it with it is a different kind of interaction rather than giving somebody a paper and pencil test for a competitive state anxiety scale this is a very different sort of psychological type of assessment and he got lots of positive feedback from the, not only, was a bunch of athletes he tested, but it was also a of psychology students too.
I really find... interesting that it has not picked up more. I mean, I'm kind of amazed by this idea that it has not been picked up more, but again... I started to study sports psychology as a mature student just by anagraphic. And I found that a lot of sports psychology is made by student for student for young athletes and so forth. It's a very young environment with the young minds working around young lives with younger. I don't want to say young problems, but the same problems lived experienced by young people. And I'm not trying to create a ranking in how good or bad or better or worse, more important and less important is to be young versus being older. But the idea is that it's interesting to read the research and to understand that a lot of it is really coming from speaking with young people with, let's say, quite objectively, a more limited experience of life than older people. And not because they are just having had less time.
But because maybe they didn't get married, they didn't get divorced, they didn't have three children on their own, they didn't travel enough, they didn't make two other jobs, you know, these kind of things. So it is a kind of a decorated, kind of clean cut. Sport is what I do now, and it is what it is, it means what it means. Just in a kind of, is a kind of, I don't want to say that he's in the void, but he's a bit outside of, in brackets, the real world. So, pop psychology is a bit outside of the real world. And I find that something like this instead, and when I say this, I'm talking about at least a perception technique, he drags the real world into the sport, regardless the age of the person that is actually undertaking the test. And for both practitioners and athletes, it is actually, okay, now we're talking something real. According to the life that you lived, according to the experience that you have experienced. So not making it worse or better because of age, but just because we're talking about everything else rather than the computational performance and the way to assess performance that we normally are focused on. Would you agree on something like this? I think I agree with you that definitely on the AAT has the potential to better encompass the larger maybe more holistic picture of the athlete and not just athlete as athlete, but athlete as person with a history with their joys and sorrows and all of that.
I guess I think that what projective tests can do for whether they're children or adolescents or adults is get at stuff that may not be quite surfacing to the conscious level. And one of the things I find that is most valuable and we didn't get a chance to do that in the workshop with you because it was so limited is that doing the athlete apperception test with the technique with the client there's also two things that happen after you've gone through all the images and after you've gotten all the stories is that now between the psychologist and the client now we have lots of places to go to discuss in depth what this story might mean it's not just me making an interpretation for my own edification it's me and the athlete in collaboration for on no hey how about today we talk about your responses to this image right here because this is what you said and I want to I'd like to talk to you now about what more does this image evoke in you what what what comes to mind what other associations do you have with and really you use the AAT itself and the process of doing it and discussing it later as part of the therapy and so it has the potential to be a massive contributor, one, to the therapeutic relationship between me and my client and to deepen our understanding, his understanding or her understanding of themselves, my understanding of them and our sort of collaborative effort. So I think it's also, it's not just an assessment tool, it's also a therapeutic tool. And I think that's where I see a whole lot of value that people don't even recognize that potential. Although, I mean, I've written about it and Peter Gibson and I have written about it, about that potential to have it be part of the therapeutic process. it seems like, of course, I'm prejudiced because I think it's very good piece of work and I think it's very valuable and I would love to see it used more both in practice and in research. Like I said, what a great tool to have additional source of information for a case study.
In your experience exploring with the tool, how long does it take to make the test? To do the test? Yes. That varies highly because if you have a client or subject of its research who's really loquacious and a really good storyteller and maybe an overachiever because you get people and a lot of athletes are overachievers, they made tell really long and elaborate stories or you may get a a subject or a client we tell very brief you know very sort of almost telegraphic stories they answer each of the questions what happened before what's happening now who are the main characters what are the relationships and what are they thinking and feeling and what's going to happen next they'll answer all those questions in very short order and they're done. But even those which are somewhat impoverished data, even those usually have something in there that you can get a hold of and then talk to them later about. So this is actually a procedure question, of. Is the test something that you can... I guess the question is, is something that you can split apart? yeah, yeah. I have used it with some of my clients, we may spend one session or part of a session on going through the protocol. I will usually then, I record it so I have verbatim and say what we'll do.
I'll ask him how was for them and sort of do a little debrief and then I say what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and get this transcribed and I'm going send you the transcription of your voice and my voice and then the next time we meet we can go through it together and talk about it and talk about your experience with it and talk about possible interpretations of your stories. And so that's the way it really needs to be used. It's not just, you know, it's a one-off thing, although in research it would be used probably that way. But to have it be part of the therapeutic process, something that in this really very collaborative effort about something that somebody has produced that at least some of the material has come from someplace, maybe they don't know too much about to the benefit of the audience listening to the podcast now. So the test is composed by 10 images. There are 10 basic ones and there's 5 supplemental ones. There's a set of 5 that are for children too. Exactly. So let's make the case for the 10... let's call them standard ones. Yeah, standard images. Yeah, the standard images are 10. So can you split? I if you you spoken about to someone who could be very, very open and very talkative. So, you know, time passes by and you go through one, two, three, four, five. Time is up. Let's pick this up next week. Is that what you do? I've never done that, but there's no reason why you can't be there.
Right. And when you record, you record just the audio or also the video? I usually just record the audio and then what I do is, because I don't have to write, you know, like remember when we were doing it together, I had to furiously write the whole time to get the story down because we didn't have what the standard procedure would be. But what I do is when I'm audio recording it, then I'm taking notes on facial expressions, body language, time it takes to respond to an image, those sorts of sort of non-verbal stuff that so I can take notes for and then I put those into the transcript. I see. So let's say you as a practitioner you do the session with the client. You go through as many of the images as you possibly can in the given time. You record the audio only. You focus on the part of verbal cues that the client gives to you. After the session is finished, you go back and you add your handwritten notes to the verb in transcription in a second moment. So it's a work that you do to combine the things. like, like, Mathias took 15 seconds to respond to this image. And he had a confused look on his face. Right. And then I will write down what you had written. And then any prompts that I make that I made for you is, you know, you know, like, Yeah, and what is going to happen, anything that I say in there, that's also included. But I take my nonverbal behavior and my observations and insert it into to remind my client that this is what I saw. Right, right. Mark, thank you very much for your time. I'm aware of time and I mean, I have many more questions, but maybe there will be another time in the future when to speak about this. I really love this conversation. Thank you very much for your time. enjoyed it. I like it when somebody pays attention to this piece of work because I think it's a very good piece of I will do... I don't believe too much in promises as I age. I tend to believe less and less in promises, but my keen interest in this athlete's perception technique is massive. And I have already spoken with my supervisor and she knows I am trying to put it to work at the best of my capabilities, of course, because this is what I can do. But it is something that I am working with and on in a structured way for months to come. Yeah, well, if you're going to be doing things, any sort of case studies on folks and examining protocols within the AAT, I'm always more than happy to have a look at what you've done if you'd like some feedback from me.
That would be extremely precious and is really thank you very much in advance already for that. Okay. Thank you very much to everyone who has listened to this podcast episode. Of course, you might have questions on the athlete's perception technique. I will do my best to answer them, or to take notes of your questions in order to post them to Professor Anderson next time or in separate ways. So please let me know what you think about the AAT and what could be your thinking about it. And you know, I am conducting my workshops for visually impaired and blind people every Sunday in central London. I am very keen to meet you all. You might be interested in yourself or you might know someone who might benefit from the workshop. you know, as usual, you keep in touch.