The Fairy Tale Test: A personality test for children
Author Carina Coulacoglou
Copy The Fairy Tale Test (FTT) is a personality projective test for children 6–12 years. The FTT is a useful instrument in the study of personality from a developmental, clinical and cross-cultural perspective. Its theoretical background is psychoanalytic and rests on the association between fairy tales and unconscious processes. The FTT has been originally standardized on a non-clinical sample of 800 Greek children. The test consists of 21 pictures that present popular fairy tale characters such as Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf, the Dwarf, the Witch, the Giant and Snow White. The majority of these characters can be found in the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Dwarfs and Cinderella. The reason for choosing these specific stories is that these stories have been analyzed and interpreted more often, have been used in psychotherapy and have been translated to a larger number of languages.

The FTT gives information for 28 personality variables derived from children's responses to test questions. Such variables include Self-Esteem, Desire for Superiority, Ambivalence, Sense of Property, Sense of Privacy, Need for Approval, Morality, Oral Needs, Fear of Aggression, Aggression Type A (hostile aggression, Aggression as Envy, Aggression as Retaliation, Aggression as Defense, Fear of Aggression, Anxiety, Depression, Relationship with Mother/Father and more. The majority of these variables are rated on a 1–3 scale, where 1 is low and 3 is high in intensity. Children's responses can be also interpreted in a qualitative way such as through the study of the thought process, the nature or type of anxiety or the study of defense mechanisms.