Picture Story Exercise (PSE)

What the Picture Story Exercise measures

Some of what moves people is easy to put into words, and some of it is not. Ask someone what they value and they will tell you how they see themselves. Ask them to make up a story about an ambiguous picture and they often reveal something else: the concerns that come to mind on their own, without being asked for. The Picture Story Exercise (PSE) is built on that difference.

The exercise looks at three of those concerns, which researchers call implicit motives. The achievement motive is a concern with doing something well against a standard of excellence. The power motive is a concern with having impact on other people or the world. The affiliation motive is a concern with establishing and keeping warm, close relationships. Everyone has some of each, and the question the exercise asks is which of them comes through most strongly in the stories you write.

On this site, your stories are scored automatically with fixed word rules, and the report shows how your three motives compare with each other. It does not rank you against other people.

What taking it is like

You see four pictures, one at a time, each with a few guiding questions about who the people are, what is happening and what will happen next. You write a short imaginative story for each one. There are no right or wrong answers, and a vivid paragraph tells the scorer more than a single line. The pictures are deliberately open to more than one reading, so the story you tell is your own.

History and theory

The method descends from the Thematic Apperception Test, which Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray introduced in the 1930s on the idea that people project their own concerns into the stories they invent about pictures (Morgan & Murray, 1935). In the 1950s David McClelland, John Atkinson and their colleagues turned that idea into a research method, writing explicit rules for coding the achievement motive in stories and showing that the coding responded when the motive was deliberately aroused (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell, 1953). Similar coding systems followed for power and affiliation, and David Winter later brought the three together in a single manual for scoring motive imagery in running text (Winter, 1994).

A central finding of this research is that motives measured through stories and motives people report about themselves are largely separate. McClelland, Koestner and Weinberger (1989) argued that the two reflect different systems: story-based motives tend to predict what people do spontaneously over time, while self-reported motives tend to predict what they choose when asked directly. Later work confirmed that the two kinds of measure correlate only weakly (Köllner & Schultheiss, 2014). A result that differs from how you see yourself is therefore common and is not a sign that anything went wrong.

How this version was built

This version keeps the structure of the exercise, four pictures and a written story for each, and automates the scoring. Each story is read against fixed word categories rather than by a trained scorer applying a manual, and the scorer is a fixed set of rules rather than an artificial intelligence (AI) model, so the same stories always produce the same result.

How it has been checked, and what has not been checked yet

No study has yet compared this scorer with trained scorers coding the same stories, so there is no figure for how closely the two agree. The pictures and the unsupervised online setting also differ from laboratory studies. For these reasons the report treats your profile as an estimate of the themes in four stories written on one occasion, best read as a starting point for reflection or for a conversation with a clinician.