Word association and communality of thought.

Abstract

The word association task has been a standard form of assessment and research tool for over a century, used for investigating how concepts are associated with each other and how they are linked to words. In the 1950s, researchers at the Loyola University, Chicago altered the original free word association test instructions in a fundamental way. They asked participants to provide the word that they thought most other people would say. The purpose of this new manipulation was to assess peoples' ability to reflect on intrapersonal knowledge. The ideas of Henry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) and David Rapaport (1911-1960) about the role of interpersonal relations to mental health were used to frame the approach. The concept of "communality of thought" represents the mental process that was being measured. In the mid-20th century, psychologist Vincent V. Herr, SJ (1905-1971) directed a research project exploring the relation between linguistic, cognitive, and emotional resources by testing people having various age, sociocultural, educational, and personality characteristics. The aim was to assess peoples' degree of empathy to "the unknown other." This approach represented an interesting innovation in psychological assessment. It gained little traction in the field because of a variety of contextual circumstances. The development of this assessment and the theorizing around it is revisited here to consider its significance as a means of addressing research questions in psychology, psychiatry, and linguistics on issues of interest regarding a normative notion of shared social linguistic knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).