Resumen de Personality and perceptions of situations from the Thematic Apperception Test

David G. Serfass, Ryne A. Sherman

• Participants (N = 186) viewed three pictures from the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1938) and rated the situations contained therein using a new measure of situations, the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). Results support a two-component view of situation perception: an objective component attributable to the situation being perceived and a subjective component attributable to the person doing the perceiving ( , , and ). Further, distinctive perceptions of situations were consistent across pictures and were associated with the Big Five personality traits, particularly Neuroticism and Openness, in a theoretically meaningful manner. These results provide support for perception as a core process for how personality traits work.