DERIVATION AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE FANTASY MEASURE OF N AFFILIATION

Affiliative motivation is defined as a concern over establishing, maintaining, or restoring a positive affective relationship with another person or group of persons (Heyns, Veroff, & Atkinson, 1958). The system for scoring the need for affiliation (n Aff) from imaginative thought content (see chapter 14) was developed by comparing stories written by college men after they had been socially evaluated by their peers with stories written under neutral conditions (Atkinson, Heyns, & Veroff, 1954; Shipley & Veroff, 1952). Similar evaluative conditions were shown to arouse affiliative concerns in stories written by women (Rosenfeld & Franklin, 1966). The same scoring system is used for males and females.

The procedure for eliciting associative thought content that can be coded for n Affiliation is identical to that used for the achievement and power motives. This procedure is sometimes referred to as the Picture-Story Exercise (PSE) and requires subjects to write 5-minute stories to a series of four to six pictures like those of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). It is recommended that the PSE be administered by an experimenter who behaves in a relaxed, friendly, and approving manner (Lundy, 1988). It is also advisable to avoid administering the PSE immediately after an objective test or cognitive task (Lundy, 1988).