390 Iv. COGNITI vE AND M OTIvATIONAL P ROCESSES
in a control condition under motivationally 
neutral circumstances. Winter (1973) con -
trasted the effects of charismatic speeches 
versus motivationally neutral travel reports 
to study effects of power motivation arousal 
on picture story content. McAdams (1980) 
collected stories written by individuals in 
various intimacy-  arousal conditions, such as 
being initiated to a sorority or fraternity or 
attending a party, and stories written under 
neutral conditions, in a classroom. In each of 
these studies, picture stories were later scru -
tinized for identifiable and recurring narra -
tive imagery that could be coded with high 
interrater reliability and that differentiated 
between arousal and control conditions. 
For each motive, rules for the reliable cod -
ing of valid imagery were defined in coding 
manuals that could then be applied in other 
studies, to picture stories collected from par -
ticipants whose motivational state had not 
been experimentally manipulated. If a par -
ticipant’s stories featured a high amount of 
imagery, this was interpreted as an indicator 
for the person’s high dispositional motiva -
tional need; if the stories were low on imag -
ery, then this was interpreted as a sign of a 
low dispositional motive.
McClelland (1958; see also McClelland, 
1987) termed the covariation between an 
experimentally manipulated attribute and its 
measure sensitivity  and accorded it central 
importance for a measure’s validity. Modern 
validity theory now takes a similar position. 
Borsboom, Mellenbergh, and van Heerden 
(2004) propose as a necessary criterion for validity that there be a causal relationship  
between an attribute and its measure, such 
that the attribute must exist and that experi -
mental manipulations in the attribute lead 
to corresponding changes in its measure. In 
that sense, motive measures derived in the 
McClelland tradition fulfilled a key criteri -
on of validity—  that of a causal relationship 
between motives and their measures—  from 
the very beginning.
In principle, the experimental-  arousal ap -
proach for validating motive measures can 
be applied to any kind of outcome measure 
susceptible to motivational arousal effects, 
such as perceptual thresholds (McClelland 
& Atkinson, 1948) or implicit association 
tests (Slabbinck, de Houwer, & Van Ken -
hove, 2011). Over the past six decades, 
however, story-  writing measures such as the 
Picture Story Exercise (PSE; McClelland et 
al., 1989), a descendant of the Thematic Ap -
perception Test (Morgan & Murray, 1935), 
have been the method of choice for assessing 
implicit motives. The PSE requires research 
participants to write short imaginative sto -
ries about four to eight pictures showing 
people in various social situations (e.g., a 
captain talking to a passenger, two women 
working in a laboratory). These stories are 
then scored with content-  coding systems 
derived from the experimental-  arousal ap -
proach described earlier (see Schult  heiss & 
Pang, 2007, for further details).
Coding systems for the assessment of n 
Power, n Affiliation, and n Achievement 
from PSE stories have been revised and re -Random 
assignment toArousal group
Motive-arousing
experience
Control group
Neutral experienceWrite 
PSE AROUSAL
stories
Write 
PSE CONTROL
storiesScoring 
system
FIGURE 18.1. The logic of experimental arousal of motivation to derive Picture Story Exercise (PSE) 
coding systems (modified from Winter, 1998).