Review of The expression of personality

Abstract

Reviews the book, The expression of personality by Werner Wolff (1943). This book is primarily a report of the experimental depth studies carried out by its author since 1925. Part I introduces the experimental methods. Part II reports studies in self-confrontation concerned chiefly with the individual subject's reactions to his unrecognized forms of expression, i.e., recordings of his voice, photographs of head and hands, cinema records of gait and movement, and handwriting. Part III reports studies of the influence of emotional factors on memory and presents some experimental diagnoses of personality based on expressive behavior (voice, gait, profile, hands, narrative style). Other techniques of diagnosis are given in the author's discussion of his "crossroads" tests, through which the subject's reactions (recall, perception, and decision) to a series of stories are studied. The consistent purpose of the whole program of research is to combine psychoanalysis with experimentation and to produce eventually an experimental depth psychology. Undoubtedly many will agree with the reviewer that, considered as a report of an extensive exploration in the field of personality in which many original and ingenious methods were employed, this is an important book. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)