The Athlete Apperception Technique

As the field of sport psychology has matured, so a greater appreciation for a diversity of training models, research methodologies, and therapeutic approaches, opposed to the dominant models of objective testing, has developed. The Athlete Apperception Technique (AAT) sets out a sport-specific projective test for practitioners working in sport and exercise service delivery or counselling work with athletes and coaches.

This innovative book includes

a basic primer on projective methods and the psychoanalytic theory behind them;

a history of projective, storytelling instruments in clinical psychology;

the development of the image set for the AAT;

some examples of interpreting AAT image stories;

instructions for the administration of the AAT;

a scoring guide for the stories produced;

and in-depth descriptions of the stimulus properties of each image in the AAT, along with all images presented as full-page illustrations.

The AAT will help sport practitioners identify and assess personality features, relationships, anxieties, achievement, motivation, and perfectionism, and augment the recent shift in orientation for service delivery to athletes and provide a more in-depth understanding of athletes’ characters. The AAT is useful supplementary reading for students of sport psychology and a novel tool for any practicing sport psychologist.