Miscellaneous Documents Relating to Psychological Tests

This folder contains multiple miscellaneous tests, manual of directions, and correspondence.

Included among them are a manual of directions and order sheet for the "World Test," an examination developed and edited by Charlotte Buhler of Los Angeles. According to the manual, the test consisted of handmade wooden items - miniature houses, cars, fences, men, women, children, soldiers, wild and domestic animals, bridges, airplanes, cannon, tanks and the like (one form of the test included 160 items, the other 300). A child was asked to make whatever he wished from the material - grouping things into a town, a zoo, a farm; or depicting scenes of accidents, fires, or friendly groups. After thirty minutes, the examiner filled out a scoring sheet indicating the sex, age, school, and any psychological problems of the chide, as well as the name of the examiner. Recorded were the number and types of elements used. The examiner also recorded signs of aggressive worlds, empty worlds, and distorted worlds as indicated by the use and arrangement of the objects. Symbolic drawings indicated the categories of objects used (e.g. a circle with a dot in the center for a man, a circle for a woman, a larger dot for a child, and an X for a tree). Examiners then interpreted these arrangements as signs of aggressive worlds, distorted worlds, closed worlds, disarranged worlds, rigid words, and symbolic arrangements. These, in turn, were linked to emitional disturbances or to mental or emotional retardation.

Charlotte Buhler (1893-1974), who devised the test and wrote the manual, was born and educated in Gemany and taught from 1923 until 1938 at the University of Vienna where she worked closely with her husband and fellow psychologist Karl Buhler. Charlotte was of Jewish descent and Karl a fierce anti-Nazi. After the German occupation of Austria, they fled the country, first to Oslo and then to the United States. By 1949, when the version of The World Test Manual in the collections was published, they had moved to Los Angeles.

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