House Tree Person

The House-Tree-Person Test

Carolyn R. Fallahi, Ph. D.

Groundline

The relationship of the drawn house, tree, person to the groundline reflects the patient’s degree of contact with reality.

Whether the contact with the ground is either firm or tenuous is of major diagnostic interest.

Walls

The strength and accuracy of the depicted walls of the house are directly related to the degree of ego-strength in the personality.

Crumbling walls

Reinforced boundary of walls

The outline of the walls of the house drawn with a faint and inadequate line quality

Inadequate wall periphery

Transparent walls

Background

• HTP: Draw a house, tree, person, & opposite sex person.
• Inner view of himself/herself
• the environment
• the things considered important

Other examples of person drawings

Aggressive, devil like person

Toppling person losing equilibrium

Mannequin-like clothes dummy

Adolescent’s drawn person carrying a baseball bat in one hand, a tennis racket in the other, and wearing a mustache on his lip.

What do the drawings tell us?

Administration

The Tree & the person

House

Roof

What does the drawing of a house tell us?

Roof: fantasy area of their lives.

Bats in the belfry

Fantasy distorts one’s mental functioning is spoken of in terms of an impairment in the individual’s roof.

Patients who do not draw a roof or when there is no height to the roof

Reinforced by heavy line pressure

The inclusion or exclusion of the various details of the HTP s left wholly to the patient.

Hammer (1955) looked at the drawings of normals versus sex offenders.

Paul Schilder (1935): the tree & the person touch the core of the personality = body image and self-concept.

Associations concerning home-life

Intrafamilial relationships

Attitude toward their home situation (children)

Relationships to parents and siblings

Married adults

Pencil & white paper.

Patient asked to draw a good house (as good as possible), take as much time as needed, erase anything you need to.

Then the pencil is taken away & you can use crayons in anyway to shade in or draw.

Overly large roof, overhanging & dwarfing the rest of the house

Schizophrenic patients or schizoid p.d.

Door

Windows

Chimney Smoke

House Perspective

In the drawing of the house, windows represent a secondary medium of interaction with the environment.

Emphasis upon window locks.

The door is the detail of the house that allows direct contact with the environment.

A door that is tiny in relation to the size of the windows and the house

The door placed high above the house’s baseline and not made more approachable by steps

Smoke emphasized.

Smoke veering sharply to one side, as if indicating a strong wind.

The house drawn as if the viewer is above and looking down upon it (the birds-eye view).

Worm’s eye view - in which the house is presented as if the viewer is below and looking up at it.

Shutters or curtains added to the window and presented as closed.

Shutters, shades, or curtains put on the windows but presented as open or partially open.

Windows completely bare, without curtains or shades nor crosshatching.

The overly large door.

The drawing of the door as open

If the house is said to be vacant, the open door connotes ?

Emphasis upon locks and/or hinges

Groundline

Accessories

Tree

Buck (1948)

Details of the Tree

difficulty presenting the drawing as a whole

For example, choppy or sporadically-up-rooted (in the tree) from the ground and toppling.

The tree has been the symbol for life and growth.

What if the patient neglects the branches?

Sometimes patients will draw a tree that is tossed by the wind and broken by storms.

Trunk

Index of the basic strength of the personality

Reinforced peripheral lines in this area of the tree.

Faint, sketchy, or perforated lines employed for the tree trunk, and not elsewhere in the drawing.

Holes placed in the trunk and animals shown peeping out of them.

Some patients directly reveal their feelings of insecurity by having to surround and buttress their house with many bushes, trees, and other details unrelated to the instruction.

A walkway, easily drawn and well proportioned, leading to the door.

The trunk = a patient’s feeling of basic power and inner strength (ego strength)

The branch = patient’s feelings of ability to derive satisfaction from the environment (a more unconscious level of the same area tapped by the arms and hands on the person)

A long and winding walkway.

A walkway excessively wide at the end toward the viewer and leading in a direct line to the door, but with the width of the walkway narrowing too sharply.

Fences placed around the drawn house are a defensiveness maneuver.

The adult mind is capable of voluntarily assuming different attitudes in its perception and experience of the environment.

The person can be at one moment the detached observer; the next moment be open receptively to all the impressions from the environment and the feelings and pleasures aroused by them; and in the next project himself or herself in emphatic experience with some object of the environment.

Branches

Tree

Person

In a general way, the overall impression conveyed by the branches correlates with the broad personality dimensions of the subject.

Self-portraits depict what patients feel themselves to be.

Abstract ability allows the non-mirror image depiction (e.g. the patient’s right side to be portrayed by the drawn person’s right side).

In addition to the physical self, the patient projects a picture of the psychological self into the drawing of the person. For example:

Patients of adequate or superior height may draw a tiny figure with arms dangling rather helplessly away from the sides and a beseeching facial expression.

Flexibility of the branch structure, with the organization of the branches proceeding form thick to thin in a proximal-distal direction.

Branches that appear club-like or look spear-like with excessively sharpened points at the ends, or appear to have barb-like thorns along their surface.

At times, a subject will emphasize the upward reaching of the branch structure to the point where the top of the tree extends off beyond the page’s top.

Occasionally a patient will abruptly flatten the top of the foliage area or crown of the tree.

One-dimensional branches, that do not form a system and are inadequately joined to a one-dimensional trunk (segmentalization).

Pregnant women often offer fruit trees and depressed patients, shows a propensity for weeping willows.

Young children will frequently draw apple trees; 35% of kindergarten children; 9% at the age of 10; and close to none by 14 years old.

Ask the patient, “is that tree alive?”. If the patient responds that the tree is dead has been associated with significantly maladjusted.

Pencil Pressure

Shading

Placement

Size

Sex of First Drawn Figure

Patient’s energy level.

Heavy pressure = high energy.

Light pressure = low energy

Heavy pressure.

Unusually light.

Excessive shading.

Some shading (& erasure) is an adaptive mechanism – an attempt to give the drawing a sense of 3 – dimensionality.

Most drawn same sex first (85 – 95%). What if they don’t?

Roots

Orientation and concern with the past.

High on the page.

Low on the page.

Upper left-hand corner.

Upper right-hand corner.

Lack of Detail

Typically the size tells about the patient’s self-esteem.

May also be related to self-confidence.

Unusually large drawings indicate aggressive and acting-out tendencies.

May also mean manic or expansive tendencies, anxiety/conflict.

Unusually small.

Transparency

overemphasis upon the roots of the tree as it makes contact with, and takes hold of, the ground.

A talon-like grasps (the roots depicted as if straining to hold onto the ground).

Roots drawn as if transparent.

Indicates withdrawal tendencies with an associated reduction of energy.

Excessive detailing.

Transparency can indicate poor reality ties, except, of course in the drawings of young children who are typically normal.

Ears

Neck

Shoulders

Waistline

Trunk

Ears are often omitted by normal subjects.

What if they are drawn in?

Link between intellectual life and affect.

Unusually short, thick neck.

Unusually long neck.

Neck omitted?

How do children typically draw the trunk?

Large trunk.

Trunk omitted by an adult.

Small trunk.

A heavy line separating the lower body from the rest of the body.

Unusually high or low waistline.

Excessively tight waist.

Elaborate belt.

Well-drawn and neatly rounded shoulders – typically normal.

Broad shoulders.

Absence of shoulders.

Tiny shoulders.

Large or broad shoulders.

Arms, Hands, Fingers

Arms = type and quality of the patient’s contact with environment.

Arms relaxed & flexible.

Arms folded.

Arms behind the back.

Final Study Guide

Evaluation of the HTP

Other advantages

Disadvantages

Hands

• Projective tests are currently referred to as performance-based tests.
• Performance-based measures involve people responding to a task that they are given to do, not what they may say about themselves.
• The Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM) consists of ten inkblot cards.
• On the RIM, clients are asked what they see in the test stimuli, where they see it, and why it looks as it does.
• The RIM yields three sources of data: how the client might structure situations in their lives, clues to attitudes, needs, and concerns, and behavioral information.

Patients with a paucity of inner life, such as the schizoid patient, provide a barren personality profile. These patients need something external to stimulate their mental processes.

Requires little time and is simple to administer.

Culture-free technique – do not need elaborate command of language to get information.

Nonverbal technique = greater applicability to children.

Also good for patients with limited education, limited intellectual ability, low SES, culturally deprived backgrounds, or those who are shy and withdrawn; those who dk speak English, or who are mute.

Verbal patients are less responsive to graphic techniques than to other projectives, like the TAT or Rorschach.

Psychomotor difficulties such as physical handicaps or tremulousness (geriatric patients) impede the analysis. Their personality expression is held back by their motoric handicap.

Hands drawn as mittens suggest repressed or suppressed aggressive tendencies with the aggression expressed indirectly.

Clenched figures = aggression and rebelliousness, or conscious attempts to control anger.

Fingers without hands, or large fingers in adult drawings indicate regression; or infantile aggressive assaultive tendencies.

Branches

Branches represent the patient’s felt resources for seeking satisfaction from the environment.

Overly long arms extending away from the body as if striving manfully, but the tree shows truncated and broken branches.

Branch structures presented as tall and narrow, reaching unduly upward and minimally outward to the sides.

Final Study Guide

Trunk

Body symbolizes basic drives and therefore, attitudes related to the development and integration of these drives in the personality indicated by the manner in which the trunk is drawn.

If body drawn in fragmented fashion?

Facial Features

• The HTP is the fourth most frequently used personality or behavioral assessment measure, following the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM), and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).
• Figure drawing and sentence completion methods yield structural, thematic, and behavioral data, in much the same way as RIM and TAT assessments.
• Scoring the figure drawing measures involves examining the line quality of the drawings, the size of the figures and their placement on the page, and any emphasis on or omission of basic parts. In addition, drawings should be inspected for the gender differentiation of human figures and for the possible role of artistic ability in accounting for this and other noteworthy drawing features.
• Placement, size of features, and emphasis on parts may give clues to how the client feels about what is going on in the world.
• Sentence completion methods consist of words or phrases that are usually referred to as item stems.

• Like the Rorschach, TAT procedures generate structural, thematic, and behavioral data that provide a basis for drawing inferences about an individual’s personality characteristics.
• TAT stories provide clues about the client’s energy level and openness to the tasks (long stories),
• The real scenes in the TAT cards provide more opportunities than the RIM for clients to attribute characteristics to human figures in various circumstances.
• The TAT has four significant aspects of interpretation: descriptions of the people in the cards; their interactions; emotional tone of the story, and plot of the story.
• Unlike the Rorschach, the thematic imagery in the TAT stories almost always provides more extensive and useful data than the structural and behavioral features of a test protocol.

• In order to interpret the TAT, eight Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale (SCORS) dimensions are used, each of which is coded on a 7-point scale for the maturity level reflected in the actions and attitudes of the characters in a story.
• Complexity; affective quality; emotional investment in values and relationships; social causality; aggressive impulses; self esteem, and identity are included in the SCORS dimensions.
• Figure drawing methods are performance-based measures in which persons being examined draw pictures of people or objects.
• The use of figure drawings in personality assessment is based on the assumption that how individuals approach this task and the way they draw the figures reflect some of their basic dispositions and concerns and their attitudes toward themselves and others.
• The most widely used figure drawings in clinical practice are the Draw-A-Person test (DAP), the House-Tree-Person test (HTP), and the Kinetic Family Drawing test (KFD).

• The TAT focuses on how people interpret what they see and the meaning they attach to their interpretations.
• The term “apperception” was chosen to designate this process of measuring interpretations and to distinguish the TAT from other types of tests.
• The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) consists of 31 achromatic cards.
• 14 of the TAT cards show a picture of a single person; 11 depict two or more people engaged in some kind of relationship; 3 are group pictures of three or four people, 2 portray nature scenes, and 1 is totally blank.
• In the TAT, clients are asked to tell a story about each of the cards they are shown.

Omitted?

Over-emphasis of facial features.

Unusually large or strongly reinforced eyes.

Unusually small or closed eyes.

Other Examples

Adolescent boys frequently draw muscular athletes attired in bathing suits, while adolescent girls draw female movie star figures wearing evening gowns

Ego-ideal

Draw ego-ideal … better prognosis.

Drawing of a person slumped into an arm chair rather than standing on feet (statistically norm).

Drawing of a woman with her hands thrust ecstatically in her hair wile dancing alone to music.

Man with rigidly erect body with the absolute side view presenting.

Final Study Guide

Interpretations concerning body parts

• The RIM comprises 3 tasks: perceptual, associational, and behavioral.
• The RIM provides valuable information in clinical, forensic, and organizational settings.
• The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a performance-based measure of personality that helps individuals uncover information that they may not be aware of themselves.
• The TAT is a storytelling technique in which examinees are shown pictures of people or scenes and asked to make up a story about them.
• The TAT differs from the RIM in three respects: more structured and less ambiguous stimuli; more open-ended and less structured instructions, and requires individuals to use their imagination.

Head:

Symbol of intellectual & fantasy activity

Symbol of impulse & emotional control

Symbol of socialization and communication

Unusually large?

Unusually small?

House Perspective

Absolute profile refers to a house drawn with only the side presented to the viewer.

The front of the house, including the door or other entrance, is turned away making it unseen and less accessible.

Mouth

Regressive defenses; oral emphasis in the personality.

What if the mouth was omitted?