The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

potential for psychiatric populations, and have the advantage of being easier to define and
rate 242 .
The next stage, the development of a test takes on the problems of reliability,
content validity and ambiguity of definition of the objective phenomena for the purpose
of testing these findings. It dismissed, as far as possible, interpretation by the rater of
the intention of the artist, used simple terms relative to the work which were widely
distinct from each other and the minimum number of categories to describe the work. The
Descriptive Assessment for Psychiatric Art (DAPA), uses a method which fragments the
art object into a collection of mostly formal variables. This research tries to answer one
important question which unfolded, but has not been fully answered from the review; is
psychopathological evidence from artwork sensitive?
242 For example, Wadlington and McWhinnie (1973) revised their unreliable 18 variable scale which relied
on aesthetic (and therefore content based) terms, to 4 formal dimensions which indicated reliable and
distinguishable categories.
184