In this episode, Dr. Daryl B. Marchant discusses the rich complexity of projective techniques like the Athlete Apperception Technique (AAT), contrasting them with traditional objective personality assessments such as the NEO or CPI. While objective tests are structured and psychometrically robust, they are confined to predetermined questions—leaving out a world of unasked, potentially revealing themes. The AAT, on the other hand, invites open-ended narrative responses to ambiguous images, allowing athletes to project their inner world freely. This subjectivity, often seen as a flaw, becomes its strength: the athlete cannot “hide” behind right or wrong answers. Defense mechanisms like projection and rationalization naturally emerge in storytelling, offering both manifest and latent insights for the practitioner. Dr. Marchant emphasizes the AAT's utility in applied sport psychology, highlighting its non-threatening and athlete-led nature, which fosters deeper rapport and more authentic dialogue. Especially useful in one-on-one consultations, the test creates space for creativity and self-expression while subtly exposing underlying psychological patterns. Despite critiques around rigor, the AAT’s development followed robust procedures—expert input, iterative refinement, and empirical testing with large athlete samples. In Marchant’s view, projective and objective tests represent complementary tools—two sides of the same coin—each offering unique advantages for understanding and supporting athletes. Dr. Daryl Marchant is a highly experienced psychologist based in Australia in the Melbourne area, academic at the Victoria University, and supervisor with a remarkable career spanning over 25 years. Dr. Marchant has mentored over 40 postgraduate research projects across diverse domains, as for the AAT — developed by Dr. Petah Gibbs under his supervision, along with Professor Mark B. Andersen.
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Mathias Alberton (00:03)
Hello everyone, this is Mathias Alberton. I am the creator of Martial Attitude. This is Martial Attitude Voice, where we explore deeper layers of performance, discipline and psychology that connects them. I remind you that I am working with visually impaired and blind people here in London. I'm trying to implement this system of training, bespoke for them to enhance their confidence, posture overall in social settings throughout the movements which are derived by Kung Fu Wing Chun and they put them together with the sighted people actually to create more Touch Exchange. What I started to theorize to be a measure that could be interesting to add to the enormous amount of measures out there but specifically for people affected by sight loss might be interesting to see how confident they are in touching and being touched by people in social context. Today, I'm really honoured and thrilled to be joined by Dr. Daryl Marchant, a highly experienced psychologist based in Australia, the Melbourne area, academic at the Victoria University and supervisor with a remarkable career spanning over 25 years. Dr. Marchant brings, of course, deep expertise in applied psychology, narrative approaches, and supervision of early career psychologists, having mentored over 40 post-graduate research projects And in this episode, we will talk about the Athletes Apperception Technique, the AAT. As you come to know through the last episodes, you can browse and you will discover we already touched upon the AAT, is a qualitative projective assessment tool developed by Dr. Petah Gibbs under his supervision, along with Professor Mark B. Andersen. The AAT brings, let's say, a unique lens to sports psychology. It was not attempted before by let's say, inviting athletes to... project meanings onto ambiguous social performance imaginary and so that they can reveal deeply personal themes related to identity, conflict and coping in sport. Dr. Marchant, really, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast. How do you do?
Daryl Marchant (02:48)
I am great. Thank you for the introduction, Tais. It's going to be nice to share with your audience today. Looking forward to it.
Mathias Alberton (02:56)
Yep. I just to start off, I was thinking, you know, let's go back to basics. So as a supervisor of Dr. Petah Gibbs, the doctoral project, the PhD, what was your initial reaction to the idea of adapting a projective technique like the TAT? But for athletes, did you anticipate the potential of the AAT eventually?
Daryl Marchant (03:17)
Yeah, that's a good question. mean, it was a while ago now. I'd already supervised Petah for an honours project. So he'd done a honours research on, he was really developing a measure to detect social desirability embedded into other psychology scales. Anyway, I digress. But when Petah first mentioned this, I was excited about it because it was definitely something new.
It was going to be intellectually stimulating. I could see that. It's very psychodynamically based. That appealed to me as well. Certainly appealed to Mark Andersen, who you've mentioned. So yeah, excitement, a bit of trepidation because I'm thinking this is a big project. This is not rolling out. This is really not building on too many other bricks in the wall, you know, like, there was someone, I forget the name, but maybe 20 years ago who started to do a projective test, but it never reached fruition. It never was finished. So it was, yeah, I was excited because I do do a lot of work in assessment. I still do. And that's kind of my main one word as people like to say, assessment is my thing. I was, yeah, I was really excited about it. I just wasn't sure how we were gonna do it, but, you know, Petah had enough ideas, Mark had enough ideas that I went along with it. And it took a while, but I loved it. I loved every minute of it, to be honest.
Mathias Alberton (04:55)
And so, as you mentioned, you're experiencing supervising qualitative research. What stood out instead about the kinds of stories told using the AAT imagery? Were the patterns that surprised you or something?
Daryl Marchant (05:17)
Yeah, It did surprise me. mean, I have to backtrack a little bit and talk about the development. Petah probably hasn't covered this. So a lot of the images were, I mean, like any test, you start off with a lot of material. If you're developing a test, whether it's an objective test or a projective test, you're starting with a lot of raw material and you're using various forms of validity and reliability to reduce the number of items or, in this case, images down to a workable number. So in the early days, it was really just putting the idea forward and getting their research background and thinking, hey, this is great. People have done a lot of work in projective testing. Petah got onto the TAT, the Thematic Apperception Test by Morgan and Murray from the 1930s, super famous test. And he basically said, yeah, well, let's do a sport version of that. That's in short.
Then I must say, Mathias, I can't remember the exact number of items or images that were tested through the whole process before the final number was settled upon. But it was well in excess of 50 or 60 images that we worked on. So the first few stages were reducing images, trying to make them, I guess the main criteria that excluded a lot of images was that they weren't sufficiently ambiguous that there's a rich type of narrative that will come out of it. if you start to, like any kind of test, you start developing a test and you have items that keep getting the same exact same response, you don't have any, you don't have any bandwidth. So, and this is the same, once you start, there's a lot of different reasons why the images might not have been acceptable. This is just one of them. But if people keep saying the same story about the image, it's far too concrete. It's not sufficiently ambiguous to get into that rich source of information.
So that's one thing it does share with objective tests in the sense that the processes of reliability and validity for a projective test are very different, but they are still relevant and important and not necessary to make a great test, but sufficient to and important because if you don't follow and you aren't able to have an audit trial of how you used, reliability and various types of validity, then you don't have a useful test. So yeah, I found a lot of the images at the start intriguing and certainly the final version of the images and it's obviously your listeners won't be able to see them, but they are fascinating. They're all sports images. They are involving male and female. They're in a whole different range of sports. They are open to lots of interpretations. They have multiple characters in them.
They're very rich, rich is the word I would use for it. And you hit gold. You basically hit gold when you start working with athletes with these images because the type of information that falls out of it and it sort of falls out of it very quickly is not accessible with many of the objective tests. And don't get me wrong, I use a lot of objective tests as much as projective, probably more over my career, because there's so many more available and I work in clinical psychology as well with mainstream assessments as well. So I have a good range, but I still find the AAT the most fascinating of all the tests that I've been involved in developing or that I use, which is a lot.
Mathias Alberton (09:15)
And just reframing a tiny bit my question before, because it's interesting what you just responded. let's say the objectivity of a picture, meaning that here for the people listening, I give you a picture which is clear enough, and then I administer, I show it to a large number of people, and everyone pretty much say the same thing, which might be useful because, okay, I can come from the same prospective as well. Are people actually seeing the same thing that I, the researcher, the practitioner is seeing in the picture? And then maybe you have a night liar that is saying something completely different, but that's much more of, let's say, trying to identify flows over a large number of people, which is not the purpose here. The purpose here is vertical opposite. Everyone should have a slightly different approach to the image. So I, the practitioner, I am the one who actually discovered different shades of grey into the picture as proposed by the subject, which is the opposite of an objective test as you were framing it before. So my question before was about if you were surprised or impressed, something actually along the process stood out, something like, actually, was not really expecting this. This is actually different. So among the stories, the ginormous amount of stories that you and your colleagues and Dr. Gibbs collected, created the AATs. Do you remember something that actually stood out for you?
Daryl Marchant (11:12)
well, what I mean, not so much specific stories, but themes, know, like you mentioned before, if you have an outlier and you will have outliers, and when you start using these images and you start to get a feel for the kind of typical responses you get, some of the themes that people start to use to describe the images is surprising. Their narrative is completely different to the way I would look at it, the way you would look at it. And indeed you're right in saying that everyone has a slightly different spin, but sometimes you're with an outlier, you're struggling to see why they are attributing the story they have to the image. And that becomes very interesting. And again, it does share that same thing with objective tests that you get a lot more. I mean, this is essentially a personality assessment. So if you compare it with the California Personality Inventory or NEO or one of the mainstream personality assessments, it's the outliers, the high scores, the low scores that tell you a lot about the person. The scores in the middle are not, they're interesting in their own right and they certainly tell you that a lot about the person, it's rich, but you start with the highs and lows. And so when someone has an unusual story, it's, you know, it's grist for the mill as the saying goes, the grist for the mill. And you you might be doing a, you might be doing a consultation with an athlete and you're using one of the images and they're describing their story associated with the images, they're projecting, they're using all the ego defence mechanisms that we're comfortable talking about here and that certainly students would be quite familiar with. We're seeing these ego defence mechanisms fall out. But I think as Petah mentioned in the previous podcast, it's great dialogue, it's great rapport building with athletes. It's non-threatening. It's not like a test, know, they're not going, is that the right answer? Is that the wrong answer? Do I want to be completely honest about this because, you know, I don't want to share this. Well. The beauty of the AAT, and this is becoming more and more important, Mathias, in modern assessment techniques, the beauty of this is that you cannot hide. You cannot hide. Soon as you start telling a story, if you use your imagination, you will start to use all those defence mechanisms that I talked about. There'll be projection, there'll be denial, there'll be repression, displacement, all the typical things that we see, rationalisation.
All these, these come with the story. So when we sit down and analyze it, it's great. And when you're really familiar with the stories, you can let the client go, you can let them tell their story or they can sometimes write the story if they prefer to do that. And then you can pick up the bits of their story that you want to. You can push it in a different direction. And I mean, the probably the other thing that I should mention that I love about projective techniques and the AAT is certainly fits into this very well is that the client takes the lead. The client can tell the story. They have control. They tell the story that they want to tell. You're just providing stimulus. You're just providing material for them to sort of play off or react to.
So it's a very creative experience for the athlete and they will tell you a lot about themselves, both on a manifest and a latent level. when I say manifest, this is the words we use, this is the way we're trying to describe ourselves. The latent content is the, it's the iceberg, it's the below the surface kind of part of the iceberg, which is usually much more than the part above the water, right? So they tell you so much more, but it's not a forced.
It's not a forced process. And also the one thing I will also say about objective tests, if you do the, let's say the Neo, I talked about that before you do the fill out a Neo, it's very well used instrument, Costa and McCray, it's very well known. It's very, very good. It's got 240 items. It loads onto 30 different subscales and the big five, right? So it's great. It's super reliable, but the athlete or the client who's filling it out, will only be responding to the questions that are in there. They're not responding to the questions that are not there. And there's so many other questions that could be there and so many other themes that you might want to explore. So it's a very rigid process. And for people that love psychometrics, psychometrics of course is the process, is the word we use to describe the process of assessing tests and the techniques in looking at the reliability and validity and ⁓ confirmatory factor analysis and all these different techniques we use with objective tests. But that's psychometrics, that's the science of looking at tests. But it's great, this is not forced. This is very open and the athlete will generally find it far more interesting and far less threatening.
Mathias Alberton (16:42)
This is actually leading very nicely to the following question, if you wish. So because the criticism of any projective techniques, regardless being the TAT or being the Rorschach or whatever else might be out there, is their subjectivity. So... The question is kind of referring to your supervision ⁓ to PETA. So how did you guide PETA in navigating questions of rigor, credibility, ethical use in the development of the AAT?
Daryl Marchant (17:20)
Yeah, it's a great question. mean, there was always gonna be a lot of, I guess, about the psychometrics and the, you know, how can you prove this is reliable? How can you show that it's got external validity? How can you show that it shows, you know, discrimination and convergence and all those types of things that we normally look at? The way that we did it, we were very lucky in that there's such a rich history of projection tests, particularly with the TAT, you know, the thematic out perception test.
Morgan and Murray developed this, know, Murray, Henry Murray was sort of the chief at the time. And he, but you know, I think in reflection, we see them as 50-50 partners, but this was in the 1930s. And they used a lot of really interesting techniques. let's say a simple technique is that you, whether it's an objective or a projective test, you develop all the items. So in this case, maybe Petah starts with 50, 60, 70 images and you start, you start, you maybe send these 70 images out to let's say 15 known experts in projective assessment or in sports psychology assessment. And you ask for their response and they can scale it if they like, or they can do a narrative response, what items did they like, why did they like them, which ones were sufficiently ambiguous, which one were hitting on, likely to hit on the themes that you think that are predominant in sports psychology. So there's external validity there for you right there. which ones are too concrete, which ones are limited, which ones are, like I could give you an example, there was one of a sprinter and it was, the original version of it just made people think of Usain Bolt. that was because Usain Bolt was really big around the time when this was being put together. And everyone started to project Usain Bolt onto it and all the stories. So it had a very limiting effect. And Petah was fortunate, I know if he said this, but his sister's an artist. So she actually redrew a lot of images. So, he would start with images that were out of newspapers, magazines, things like that. And then she would redraw them in a much more ambiguous fashion and sometimes add in different characters that Petah would want. So they mostly started with a real image of some sort, but then they were changed into something much more fluid and organic that could be used for the purposes we want.
You know, that's a tip of getting back to your question. One typical process, whether it's objective or subjective tests is to get expert opinion. You know, people, people that have published people that have done this type of work start with their opinion before you even going to start looking at sample pools for items and starting to administer it to, you know, Petah may have mentioned this, but all the images were administered to, you know, hundreds of undergraduate sports students, human movement exercise, science students, these types of people, master students, and then out into the field with athletes in the field. And each of these different mini tests was part of the PhD, but they helped us discriminate and get it down to a final version of, you know, I believe it's about 12 items we generally use if it's a full battery of tests. So yeah, good, very good question. But we knew from the get go that some people are very focused on objective tests, don't understand projective tests, come with a very skeptical mindset and are looking for faults rather than looking at virtues. And, you know, as I've said before, it's sort of, it's two sides of the coin. So yin and the yang of assessment for me. One is not better than the other. I mean, like I said, I've worked extensively in both areas and I could give you a list of pros and cons with both types of tests. So I kind of scoff at people in my mind, not verbally, people that just come in with maybe a negative mindset about psychodynamics and what it can show us. And I think, well, really have you actually read the, you have you read the original material? So the other thing just before I let you go on is the, actually use a lot of previous studies that have been published back from the 30s and 40s and 50s about all the variations of the thematic ad perception tests and how each version was developed. You there was a version for children and there was a version for this and that. And also there were lots of different ways of assessing reliability and validity and psychometric concepts. So, he pretty much replicated a lot of those, but from a sport context and in the context of what we needed for his PhD.
Mathias Alberton (22:46)
You mentioned, of course, your background, actual work in clinical settings. But there is, of course, gargantuan amount of experience as both performance psychology and in education. So how do you see the AAT fitting into applied practice?
Daryl Marchant (22:50)
Yes.
Mathias Alberton (23:11)
So, for example, working with developing athletes or in supervision with trainee practitioners.
Daryl Marchant (23:11)
Yeah. Okay, there's a lot of ways to answer that. It's a brilliant question. How do we see it being used? Well, you know, it can be used for athletes, say you're doing therapy with a client or you're starting to see a client and they present with a theme. You might want more information. Maybe they lack insight. Maybe they're not, you know, trusting, maybe they're resistant. There's always this resistance, you know, that we sometimes see when people first see a therapist. Maybe they're unsure about using, you know, tests and they don't see the purpose of it. I mean, the beauty of this is that you can sell this to an athlete pretty easily by saying, this will help me understand you really quickly.
And not exclusively in the sense that you might also sell to an athlete that you want them to do a personality assessment too, because it speeds up the process of you getting to know them. If you're gonna start doing therapy with a client and you're doing some initial kind of intake kind of work to find out what the themes are, an assessment like this, some of the images.
And you might choose the images depending on the kind of dialogue and the kind of themes that are coming up specifically for a different kind of athlete because they can be used with different populations quite easily. So they're really great for, I know Petah was definitely talking about using them as a conversation starter and just to build up rapport and trust. There's definitely that, but the beauty of this, I really believe that if you know the images well and you start to use them more frequently. So if we're talking here to a practitioner and they've got, you know, there's, we've published a book of course that you've probably talked about with the others. They have a hold of the book as a manual. You will get better and better use of the images the more you use it. You'll, you know, the first time you'll probably like any assessment device, you might just do it with a friend or an athlete that you've worked with for a long time, or someone else just to sort of get your head around how to actually do it logistically. But each time you deliver the images and start to talk about the themes with a client, it just has a multiplying effect because you have all this reference material there in the background too. You're laying it on top of that. So it's really good for that. It can be used for pure assessments, like I said.
I mean, here's the irony Mathias that we have a world that is very much built around objective testing. It's built around CBT and ACT and all the kind of standard techniques because they're, you know, they're more defensible for one of a better word, but they're very narrow as well. And they also are very transparent. Now here's the problem with assessing athletes.
And I'll tell you, my experience with assessment has been with probably about, I don't know the exact number, but I'd estimate about a thousand AFL footballers, Australian Football League. So I worked for four different AFL clubs and only just finished up doing that kind of work only a couple of years ago after doing it for 25 years. And this is interviewing athletes prior to them being drafted or selected to join one of the 18 AFL teams, the Premier League here for the Australian football. Here's the problem. We weren't allowed to use our own assessments because with 18 teams and 18 different teams of scouts and psychologists and things, you can see it would get messy and time consuming for these kids that are largely 17 or 18 years of age.
So the AFL then consulted with us as a group of psychologists and we recommended three or four tests that we thought would be quite useful. And one is an objective personality assessment. There's two personality assessments. There's an emotional intelligence scale and a kind of a values kind of scale as well. And these athletes, they are, you know, ticking off to say that it's okay, they're prepared to do that. It will be shared confidentially with the psychologist from the AFL teams. It doesn't go to the scouts, it goes straight to the psychologist and then we assess them. We also interview these athletes. So we have all that. But here's the point I wanna make is that say the NIO, that's one of the tests I talked about before. And this is one of the tests that is used with the AFL players. What's to stop a kid going on to chat GPT?
Or Googling in the past, but it's even more specific now. And finding out what the Neo is all about, finding out what the themes are, finding out what the interpretations might be, and finding out as much as they can about the test. And then really they're coming in with all this information and we're not seeing the real them. We're seeing a sort of the shadow version of what they wanna portray themselves as, social desirability.
And I know that happened because I had a couple of graduate students do studies that looked at the trend in scores on these objective tests over a period of time. And there's scores on the so-called, let's say there's a measure of the conscientiousness scales, right? So it might be one of the six conscientiousness scales. We're seeing those rise because the athletes can't, I wanna show these people that I'm a hard worker. And I'm driven and you know, all these sorts of things and I'm disciplined and so forth. But then on the other end, we have the NEO looking at neuroticism or emotional stability. I don't want to admit that I'm anxious. I don't want to admit that I'm vulnerable. I don't want to admit that I show aggression toward people and all these other things, which if there was nothing riding on it, you'd get probably get a very different response. So my point is that I saw this trend.
We proved it with a couple of graduate students that it was a significant trend that had increased over a period of time in simultaneously with the growth in the amount of available information to people. And this is even before AI. So I can't imagine what AI is like. Of course you can find anything in AI. But even if there was information about the AAT on AI on chat GPT, even if there was, it wouldn't help someone. It wouldn't actually really help them respond because they tell a story about it. They're asked to create an imaginative, creative story. And the ego defence mechanisms, like I said before, they all come through, but the athlete's not consciously controlling that. So it's in a world where it's very, you know, where things are very controllable. We run this risk of having too much available information for people who are being assessed, whether that's in any context, clinical, vocational assessments, for instance, of course, it's a big problem too, potentially. But the AAT and projective tests really, they back that trend to a certain degree at least.
Mathias Alberton (31:02)
It is absolutely illuminating because as you were speaking through, I was thinking, yeah, you know, this resonates in physics as well, which is a completely different domain. It is a hard science, but physics teaches us that an unstable system is more controllable than a stable one. To oversimplify, a motorbike is more controllable than a car. So the technology, the needs of control over what the car can do and how stable it is on the road when you lose control of it, the effort to control it is extremely more than what actually is needed with a motorbike, which translates in numbers. As you see proportionally, the accidents in motorbike are a minimal part in respect to the one with cars is because paradoxically, all the stability, the supposed to be security of a car pose a dreadful threat to control. It is counterintuitive, but it is exactly what is shown in physics, let's say. And then I was thinking about how this idea links very nicely to what you have mentioned a few minutes ago. So the idea that practitioners and of course, generally talking about sports, association leagues and, you know, bodies, government bodies, they do prefer or tend to prefer objective tests. But focusing on the practitioners, how a test like this, technique, sorry, a technique like this is actually asking the practitioner to take on some responsibility. Instead, the objective test, you delegate the responsibility to the test. So there is a word which is expanding, as you just mentioned, which is, of course, a word of data, of information, of accessibility to information, but also of body of law, of guidelines, of departments.
Daryl Marchant (33:33)
Yes, correct. Yeah.
Mathias Alberton (33:57)
So you can do this, but not in this way, not in that way. And this translates somehow, there are ripple effects on how in any profession I see this detachment from responsibility. Because you use the guideline and the guideline is, so the responsibility is within the guidelines, not within the practitioner who applies the guidelines. If you use an objective test, said, well, look, these are the results of the test. This is what the test says. It's not my responsibility. It's the responsibility of the understanding of the test by the rules, which are embedded into the tests. Instead, a technique like the AAT puts, you know, a big focus on how the practitioner is happy to expand his own knowledge, their own knowledge and to apply and to level up, let's say their presence in terms of responsibility on what they are doing in the moment with the person, the athletes in this case. Would you agree on this?
Daryl Marchant (35:07)
Yeah, I totally agree with that. Yeah, I totally agree with it. And there's really no reason I don't think that governing bodies should be concerned about people using this with athletes if they're sufficiently trained and they have sufficient experience with the technique, ⁓ any more than with objective tests. And I don't think that there's... I don't think we actually even tested the waters. mean, there's 18 AFL teams, for instance, like I was talking about before, and they have objective tests and we all got our say in that. Petah does assessments for one of the teams and I do assessments for another team or did assessments for another team. But we never tested the waters. I guess the response could have been from the other psychologists that, hey, you're trying to introduce a test that you develop, you know it inside out, you're going to have a huge advantage over us there would be potentially a conflict of interest there. But let's say it's in a completely different sport or in a different country or something like that. You know, it can supplement. It doesn't need to be either or, know, it's yin and yang. Let's look at the other side of the coin here. The two can work together. I mean, you mentioned when people fill out tests and that's sort of a closed system and you're getting scores and things, but even in that, it's not good enough to just cut and paste scores into some sort of report, you have to interpret. If you're an expert or you purport to be an expert in a field, you have to interpret. So you have to, even if it's the NEO, like I talked about before, 30 scales, you have to look at interrelationships between scales and start to look much more deeply than a very brief narrative that says this will mean this and that means that.
The other thing I find is people tend to over interpret them, you particularly when they start doing it and maybe when they don't know enough about it, they over interpret. So you need training with both. It's not that hard to, you know, if someone bought the book for instance, or read our articles from the development in the assessment and journal articles, they could get to know the test pretty well and then start sampling it with, you know, with a small sort of development project you talked earlier about maybe another way that we can do that. But it's rich, it's really rich in material. It'll throw up all sorts of stuff. I mean, just on its own, it will tell you about attributional style. Attributional style is this whole process that we use to explain events and sport is full of events. know, I mucked up this, I got this right, I got that wrong, I won the game, I lost the game. Why did that happen?
Was it controllable? Who are we blaming here? There's so many attributions going on in sport and there's lots of really good research on attributional style, but the images will immediately tell you about someone's attributional style. Just, you know, without even looking at that. They will also like objective tests. They will actually start to see, you'll start to see links between images. So when Murray first developed the thematic gap perception test, he was apparently a bit of a depressive and he had a sort of a, I don't know whether this was deliberate or not, but he had some fairly dark images in the thematic at perception test. And that was a sort of a theme that he, that was sort of imbued into the assessments are very gloomy. Some of the pictures and you can imagine that when someone's interpreting them, they might pick up on that and you might see some style, but you know, if someone's anxious, they will project their anxiety onto all sorts of images. Even some of the images that you wouldn't expect that to be on if they're super anxious, if they're fearful, if they have problems with relationships that will come out very readily. If they have problems with teammates that will come out quite readily. If they have problems with self-confidence, it's gonna come out very readily with the AAT. So it'll throw up all the mainstream sports psychology themes that we work with athletes on and that are predominant. But it does it in a really useful way and a very, a non-controlling way, but also with a guide that we can use that material to really start working with the athlete on how to work on those kind of themes that are coming through. It'll get to information that many objective tests just won't get to. It'll get there. And it does get there for a practitioner.
Mathias Alberton (39:57)
More broadly speaking, let's see if this could be a way to wrap it up this fantastic conversation with you. What does the AAT represent to you in terms of how we listen to athletes, not just as performers, but as people?
Daryl Marchant (40:28)
Yeah, yeah, really good, really good. Yeah, it tells us, will, once we start getting clients telling their stories, they, of course, the projection will involve people and it will involve people they know, it'll involve, they might sort of semi-disguise it sometimes, they might even tell a story that's kind of, it's more comfortable for them to talk about a teammate or a person they've seen and... you know, they're projecting, of course, or it might involve family. I mean, I'll give you an example. There's one beautiful image of a pole vaulter. So there's a girl, it appears to be like a teenager, but you know, it can be interpreted in many ways. And the person is practicing their pole vault and they're up sort of against the bag, ready to take off. And the coach is standing behind them, but is it the coach? Maybe it's not the coach. Maybe it's the father. Maybe it's someone else. It's a male figure.
He has got the hand on the athlete. Now, what is that person doing? Are they a coach? Are they a father figure? Are they pushing? Are they pushing? Because that might represent something very different to supporting. You can interpret it two different ways or more that opens the door for that athlete to walk into a whole room full of different interpretations based on that. And it just provides so much useful information for me as an, I'm an assessment psychologist. So I do have a bias that when I first meet with athletes, I don't necessarily say I'm assessing them, but I'm doing an intake. mean, we all, every time we do an intake, we're assessing people, right? Whether people wanna believe that they're doing it or not. You're trying to find out enough about the client, their background, their family, their experiences, their aims, their goals, their values, all the things that we do in a, but a lot of these things will get, a lot of them will come out from the stories that they tell from the images. So it's a different spin on it. It's, yeah, it's non-traditional, but it's also, you know, I find it, really super interesting. I mean, I love assessments anyway, whether they're objective assessments or projective assessments. I love the process. But you know, if you're just using them from a pure rapport building or a different angle, yeah, there's so many different ways that this can go. look, I think now, the one thing I will say, if we were doing these images again now in 2025, there are some... There are a couple of images where you can see anguish and you can see some torment with athletes. I would like a couple now that are probably more specifically loading on mental health themes. You know, because in the time when I first worked in sports psychology, performance psychology with AFL footballers, was 90 % of my work was performance psychology or maybe 80%, 10 % was working with coaches and 10 % was with mental health. But now it's about 50-50, know, most of the psychologists that I'm talking to that we train are spending as much time on mental health work as they are on performance psychology. I mean, just this last week in Australia, I will say to you in the AFL, which is a big sport here, I've talked about it fair bit here already.
We have twin brothers that played for two different AFL teams. In fact, we have four brothers, but two of them were twins. And really sad story that three months ago, of those twins suicided. And it was in the papers, it was big news. there was, there's an outcry. It's a very sad event. And then here we are three, and we're only three or four months later. You might be able to guess what happened the other brother died this week. And again, yeah, the other brother died and it seems pretty clear that it was suicide. So it's raising all sorts of questions about mental health here, effects of concussion, mental health support by the AFL Players Association and the AFL. people are like, people are not really saying, you know, the athletes aren't supported, they're superbly supported but they're asking questions, can this happen or why is it happening and things like that. mental health is front and centre. you interview, sorry, when you get AFL, it's not just in AFL, most elite sports now, if you talk to athletes about issues that are concerning or where they need support from the organisations, mental health will be front and centre. So I would have liked to see maybe a tweak.
And then if there's a PhD student listening and they're interested in doing a project around this, might say, well, we have some really good images here, but maybe I can develop a subset of images that focus more on the mental health themes. That would be a great project right there for someone to do with a really good basis of the material that's already been presented and investigated already.
Mathias Alberton (46:05)
That's phenomenal suggestion and opening. I the future directions of research. I think it's a beautiful way to wrap this episode because we understand, I do understand, I do have a hunch feeling that for the AAT, which has been developed some 10 years ago, let's say, has been a good moment.
Daryl Marchant (46:11)
Yeah, future directions.
Mathias Alberton (46:33)
But now is the start to change gears, to gear up. Let's say I see it. Yeah, I think it.
Daryl Marchant (46:38)
Yeah, up is a great word. Gear up is a great word. There's never a better time to start promoting the AAT. mean, like you said at the start, I supervised maybe, I think I had about 12 principal PhD students, so was principal supervisor for, I probably had another seven or eight that I was co-supervisor for. So a lot of experience and of all, some of them were great and some were average, you know what it's like, but a couple of these students won awards for their PhDs as they did a brilliant job and they won international awards and national awards. But Petah didn't. Petah didn't. I don't think he applied for any awards. But in my mind, this was the project that I was most proud of, of all those. This is the best potential project. This is one that can give a lot and can make a huge difference.
I still have superbly proud of the work that Petah did and certainly Mark's guidance and contribution was invaluable. And, you know, about some of these other projects which are also good in their own way, but anyway, I digress.
Mathias Alberton (47:51)
Well, will, mean, personally, I take on the, let's say the challenge or the pleasure to be of support in trying to really create not only content, but to create new ways to explore how the AAT can be implemented and used. So, and starting with this series of podcasts, with Mark, with Petah and you. And I invite, of course, whoever is listening now to review them, to go back in the episodes. At you will find Professor Mark Andersen's perspective on the AAT and how it's been developed. And then with Petah, we have explored what was the theory behind how it could have been used and why, or let's say the ripple effects of the relationships on ambiguous images, the value of silences using the AAT when approaching the supplementary set, and then of course the idea of concepts such as sport play and young athletes through the AAT children set. This episode with you, Daryl, it kind of concludes a series which has been super rich of information, of insights. And I think is, I mean, I cannot get enough. So I really would like to have you, Mark and Petah all together and we could actually have a conversation about the future of the AAT. What it was called once upon a time, I have classics, background studies, so what it was called the "fortuna" of the opera. So how it came to fruition for a larger audience and public. So I invite you already for the next one with Petah and Mark.
Daryl Marchant (49:56)
Yeah. This is great. You can be the fourth tenor. So we can have the four tenors if you're speaking operatically.
Mathias Alberton (50:12)
Fantastic. I thank you very much. I'm looking forward to the next conversation. And of course, I thank you everyone who has been listening so far. And I remind you my work on visual impairment, touch exchange, and confidence among visually impaired and blind people and the martial arts training program, which is taking place every Sunday afternoon in central London.
If you are visually impaired or blind or you know someone who is and might be interested in getting involved, as usual, you keep in touch.