Picture Story Exercise (PSE)

This section reports how the three implicit motives balance against one another across the respondent's narratives. Figures describe emphasis within this set of stories; the Picture Story Exercise is administered here without a matched normative sample, so no population percentile or standardized score is reported.

The motive coefficients above are derived from these raw lexical content rates — the proportion of words in each story matching validated achievement, affiliation, and affect dictionaries.

Word-list approximation of Winter’s (1994) content-analysis categories. Verb and adjective hits are counted across all stories; density is hits as a percentage of total story words. These are lexical proxies — not clause-level manual coding — and are reported without a normative comparison.

Full 10-dimension NRC Word Emotion Lexicon profile (Mohammad & Turney 2013). Each emotion’s count is the number of NRC-matched story tokens that carry that emotion; rate is relative to the total number of NRC-matched tokens (not total words). No population norm is applied.

Top WordNet supersenses found in the stories. Each supersense is a broad semantic category from the WordNet lexical database; counts are story tokens matched to that category, and percentages are of all WordNet-matched tokens.

All Levin (1993) verb classes found across the stories, sorted by frequency. The motive signal column indicates theoretical alignment where established (Power, Achievement, Affiliation, or Ach+Aff for mixed classes); — indicates no signal mapping for that class.

Concreteness and imageability ratings from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart 1981; Wilson 1988). Scores range from 100–700 (higher = more concrete / more imageable). Means are computed over story tokens with MRC coverage; abstract narrative prose typically scores 300–450.

A second, theory-grounded read computed independently of the lexical hit-rate profile above. The dimensional ANEW motive indices below are the primary v1 read; the Levin verb-class Dominance Index sits on the same agentic–communal axis and corroborates the orientation.

Dimensional motive profile (ANEW)

Computed from the 87 ANEW-rated word(s) found in these stories, under both the female- and male-referenced norm columns. nAch is the positive valence pole; nPow combines high dominance with negative valence; nAff combines low dominance with positive valence.

Verb-class dominance (Levin 31.1 / 31.2)

Across the stories, 8 experiencer-subject verbs (active-dominant: the writer feels toward something — e.g. love, fear, admire) and 4 experiencer-object verbs (passive-receptive: something acts on the writer — e.g. delight, frighten, comfort) were detected. The resulting Dominance Index of +0.333 points toward an active-dominant, power orientation.

Taken together, these 4 stories are organized most strongly around closeness and belonging. These stories lean toward concern with warm, close relationships and belonging. Implicit motives like this are expressed spontaneously in imaginative storytelling rather than through self-report, and research links them to self-sustained behavior over time. The profile above describes how this respondent's motives balance against one another, not how they compare to a population.