Picture Story Exercise

Background

The Picture Story Exercise (PSE) is a psychological assessment tool used to measure a person's implicit motives and underlying needs. It serves as a modern, experimentally validated research successor to the classic Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) developed in the 1930s by psychologists Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan.

In a classic PSE procedure, participants are shown a series of ambiguous images depicting everyday social situations (e.g. people sitting outside on a bench next to each other). After about 10seconds, the image is removed and participants are given 5 minutes to write a story about the scene, addressing the feelings of the depicted actors, what possible reasons preceded the scene and how the story could end.

Trained experts or increasingly modern text-analysis tools like the publicly accessible and multilingual Automated Motive Coder by Max Brede and colleagues (2025) analyze the written stories using standardized, empirical scoring systems to look for content related to three primary social motives:

1. Achievement: A preference for excellence, standard-setting, and overcoming challenging tasks.
2. Power: A desire to exert influence, impact, control, or have prestige over others.
3. Affiliation: A drive for establishing, maintaining, or restoring friendly and close relationships.

Because the needs and motives that guide one's behaviors may operate outside of conscious awareness, traditional self-report surveys and questionnaires tend to fail to capture them. The PSE functions as an indirect measurement tool where participants project their own subconscious priorities onto the ambiguous characters in the scene. This makes the test highly resistant to socially desirable responding (faking answers) and a powerful predictor of long-term career success, entrepreneurial performance, and spontaneous behavioral choices.

The Millisecond implementation of the PSE is based on the original PSE script shared by Dr. Oliver Schultheiss, who was instrumental in turning the PSE into a psychometrically sound, and experimentally validated research tool.

Task Procedure

Participants work on 8 stories. Each story starts with the presentation of an image depicting at least one person. After 10s the image is removed and a textbox is provided for participants to provide a story about the image. Participants are instructed to write an entire story with a start, middle and an end, specifically addressing the feelings, thoughts and wishes of the portrayed actors. Participants have 5 minutes to write each story and need not worry about punctuation nor spelling. Several warnings alert them when the time to finish their story is approaching.

What it Measures

The Picture Story Exercise (PSE) is a measure of implicit motives

Psychological domains

• Implicit Cognition: Cognitive Processes not under conscious control
• Social Cognition: People's thoughts and perceptions of themselves and others in the social world

Main Performance Metrics

The script does not provide any performance metrics. Check out the Automated Motive Coder by Max Brede et al (2025) for automatic scoring of PSE essays.

Psychiatric Conditions

While the PSE is frequently employed in behavior and leadership studies, clinical psychologists use it to uncover nonconscious vulnerabilities, measure therapy progress, and understand the psychosomatic pathways of mental illnesses, e.g. with the following patient groups

• Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)
• Eating Disorders (ED)
• Developmental Visuospatial Disorder (DVSD)

References

Search Google Scholar for peer-reviewed, published research using the Inquisit Picture Story Exercise.

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Schultheiss, O. C., & Pang, J. S. (2007). Measuring implicit motives. In R. W. Robins, R. C. Fraley, & R. Krueger (Eds.), Handbook of Research Methods in Personality Psychology (pp. 322–344). New York: Guilford.

Schultheiss, O. C., Jones, N. M., Davis, A. Q., & Kley, C. (2008). The role of implicit motivation in hot and cold goal pursuit: Effects on goal progress, goal rumination, and depressive symptoms. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 971-987.

Schultheiss, O. C., Liening, S., & Schad, D. (2008). The reliability of a Picture Story Exercise measure of implicit motives: Estimates of internal consistency, retest reliability, and ipsative stability. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 1560-1571.

Schultheiss, O. C., Yankova, D., Dirlikov, B., & Schad, D. J. (2009). Are implicit and explicit motive measures statistically independent? A fair and balanced test using the Picture Story Exercise and a cue- and response-matched questionnaire measure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91, 72-81.

Brede, M., Schönbrodt, F. D., Hagemeyer, B., & Lerche, V. (2025). Automatically coding implicit motives in picture story exercises: The Automated Motive Coder. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.36190/2025.31