Sex and Personality
- Author:
Terman and
Catherine C. Miles, assisted by others. McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. Ltd. Price 25/-.
This book, admirably printed as usual by McGraw-Hill, is a major contribution to factual psychology and will be regarded in the future as a classic of its kind. It reports the results of some eleven years of research work, undertaken with the assistance of grants from the American National Research Council. Its object is aptly stated as that of doing for the study of masculinity-feminity what Binet did for intelligence testing.
The book describes a Masculinity-Feminity test, disguised under the title “AttitudeInterest Analysis Test”, and a prodigious number of results obtained by its use. The test itself is given in two parallel forms, each with seven exercises which the subject tackles much as he would perform a group intelligence test, except that no time limits are set. A fore-sheet asks the subject to estimate his amount of interest in such pursuits as travel, sport, religion, literature, etc. In Exercise No. I, the subject is required to select one of four words that seems to go best with a given word, e.g., Train?engine; gown; travel; whistle. In this example it is hoped, presumably, that a masculine-minded person would select the word engine, whereas the feminine person might select gown. Similarly, each of the other exercises samples the subject’s knowledge, opinions, interests, emotional and ethical attitudes, etc., and thereby his tendency to a masculine or feminine personality. Scores on the test range from approximately 200 (the most male score) to ?200 (the most female).
Jt can be said at the outset that Terman and his co-workers have placed their test at once in the front rank of all personality schedules. They have validated it, studied the correlational structure of its parts, and have sought for correlation between it and other well-known tests, amongst which may be mentioned mechanical ability tests, athletic ability, introversion-extraversion, scholarship, and tests of marital compatibility (divorced women and unhappily married men, it is shown, tend to rate more masculine than individuals who are blissfully married).
The trend of M-F score at different ages is investigated. At 10 years of age, males have a score of +40 or so on the average; this mounts to +70 for 18-year-olds, and then with increasing age the score declines, until at 60 years, the average mala has a score round about 0.00. Females, on the other hand, apart from a slight flutter masculine-wards during adolescence, maintain a steady average score of approximately ?90 at all ages. Similarly, with commendable labour and completeness, the relation of M-F scores to occupation, and the effects of interests and domestic milieu on the test, are investigated.
So far only some 280 of the book’s 600 pages have been covered, all concerned with what might be called the statistical structure of the M-F test. No personality test has hitherto been given so much attention in this respect.
The second half of the book describes work on homosexuals, delinquents, and studies of sex differences in interests, sentiments, dispositions and temperamental characteristics revealed by the M-F test. The briefest possible summary of this work occupies two pages of closely printed matter. The M-F score for 77 ” passive” homosexuals (males), 17-44 years of age, was ?28 approximately, by far the most femininetesting group of males the investigators ever encountered. A group of 46 ” active ” male homosexuals gave a bi-modal distribution of scores, on the average only slightly more masculine than that for the passives. Much attention is devoted by the authors to a suggested scale for the measurement of sexual inversion in males.
On general psychological matters many of the findings are what we might expect. The male professes to be the more adventurous, aggressive, mechanically-minded, and emotionally “hard”; the female professes to ?e gentle, sympathetic, artistic and humanitarian. But there are many unsuspected findings, or results which supply evidence that has been lacking hitherto. The sexes, for instance, are shown to diverge more for fear than for anger responses. Pages 470 onwards consist of Appendices, giving tables or norms, percentiles, etc., and a complete copy of each form of the test.
Only a few pages are devoted to interpretations and conclusions. The point is well made that the M-F contrast is more obviously and certainly rooted in structural dichotomy than the popular cycloid-schizoid, introversion-extraversion, or similar bi-polar contrasts. The authors ask whether nature or nurture contributes most to the formation of M-F attitudes and temperaments, but they leave it as a problem for future workers to determine what part is played by parental influences upon the sex temperaments of their children.
What, then, are we to say in a critical way about this study? It is not in place, here, to attend to minor details but this, however, can be said at once. The study is typically American. The prodigious search for facts, and insistence upon them, dominates the whole work, something that we can admire and envy, for it represents an achievement that makes other testing and rating studies of personality seem mere child’s play?mere pin-pricks at their subject matter. On this side of the Atlantic, however, we miss certain theoretical formulations. Insistence on facts is a first essential, but one feels that Terman, having done so much, could justifiably develop his interpretations much more completely and adequately. There is surely little excuse in a work of this major kind, for complete disregard of psycho-analytical work on homosexuality. Freud is not even mentioned, nor is Havelock Ellis, nor any other analyst as far as I can now remember. This is an unreasonable austerity, and as a consequence the concluding interpretations seem almost amateurish compared with the factual construction, which is eminent and important. The book, of course, is essentially one for research workers, and for clinical use in the fields of delinquency study, medical psychology and the like.
Wm. Stephenson, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Oxford
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