Szondi test

The Szondi test is a psychological exam named after its Hungarian creator, Léopold Szondi in the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest Hungary. It is a projective personality test, similar to the well-known Rorschach test. The test consists of a series of 48 different photographs of the faces of mental patients. The subject is instructed to choose the two most appealing and unappealing photos. The photos the subject chooses will supposedly reflect his or her own pathology.

Szondi further broke down the results into four different vectors: a homosexual/sadistic, epileptic/hysterical, catatonic/paranoid and depressive/manic.

Szondi believed that people are inherently attracted to people similar to them . His theory of genotropism states that there are specific genes that regulate mate selection, and that similarly-gened individuals would seek each other out.

Szondi test is not widely used in the modern clinical psychology, because its psychometric properties are weak. However, it remains in the history of psychology as one of the well-know psychological instruments, although its use today is marginal, being replaced by modern psychological instruments, with good psychometric properties.

External links

• Faces of Madness: Seeing abnormality through photography (Explanation of test with photographs)
• Homepage of Szondi-Institute (in German)
• Homepage of CEP (Centre d’Etudes Pathoanalytiques)
• Scoring-spreadsheet in Excel and Openoffice Calc format. Can be set to English, French, German, Dutch
• A minor online version of the test (in French)
• Computer implementation (in Japan)