The wartegg drawing completion test. Inter-rater agreement and criterion validity of three new scoring categories

Three new scoring categories for the Wartegg Drawing Completion Test (WDCT) were introduced. Each of them permits to assess specific personality characteristics: the Evocative Character (EC) that is related to social adjustment; Form Quality (FQ) that is connected to reality testing ability and Affective Quality, (AQ) that is linked to general mood state. Inter-rater agreement and criterion validity of the new categories were investigated on a sample composed by healthy, anxious and psychotic individuals. For EC, FQ and AQ, results showed an adequate level of inter-rater agreement and a satisfactory capacity to discriminate among subjects, supporting their reliability and criterion validity. In particular, as expected, significant differences were found for each category among all groups, with higher mean scores for healthy subjects, medium for anxious and lower for psychotics (except for AQ category that showed significant differences only in the comparison between healthy and pathological subjects but not between anxious and psychotic ones). Possible approches to assess WDCT validity in future researches were discussed.