What is the purpose of Word Association Test ?
In order to reach the unconscious before the word association tests, the researchers used the methods of word association tests, some of which were later known as Freudian techniques such as hypnosis and dream analysis. But the first person to introduce the word association test as a psychological research method is Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin. According to Galton, there is a possibility that there may be a link between individuals’ IQ values and word matching performances. To investigate this possibility, Galton prepares the first known word connotation test in the 19th century and prepares a set of 75 stimulus words and measures the participants’ responses to the words in this set. But at that time Galton fails to find a significant relationship between the responses to words and IQ values . Shortly after Galton’s work, Carl Gustav Jung begins to work on whether he can use word associations as a clinical psychology method to expose patients’ personality problems. Accordingly, the word association test, which it developed as a diagnostic and therapy tool, and which is still in use today, is also
He was instrumental in meeting Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the 20th century, where he was very much influenced, and is known as one of the first psychoanalysts raised by Freud . Jung, who has made an intense progress in word connotation tests in a short time, works with many different researchers in the psychiatry clinic of the university, where he is working in Zurich and will also be included in the psychiatry literature, and will soon become the director of research on word connotation tests in the clinic. word connotation tests begin to be used in other sectors and starts building its reputation until today.
