Word: psychograph Part of Speech: noun Etymology: From psycho- + -graph. 1. One of various graphical representations of a cognitive or psychological profile. Example: The chaplains' psychograph is notable because of the extreme variation in scores; thus on test 4 (opposites) the chaplains achieve a median score which is much higher than that of any other group, whereas on tests 2 (arithmetic) and 6 (number series completion) they fall considerably below the median for all officers. Example: Psychographs could be used to describe the occupation as well as the person. 2. A photographic image having a supposed supernatural or spiritual origin. Example: In this article he deals with the still more remarkable impressions, known as "psychographs," which they have obtained on photographic plates without exposing them at all, and which Mr. Lethem claims could only be produced by "spirit" agency. Example: A remarkably clear psychograph — a thought-picture — was taken, or impressed, upon a plate in Hope's home without the plate being exposed to light. 3. Any of various devices used for automatic writing. Example: A psychograph or a planchette is an apparatus used in spiritistic circles as an instrument for receiving written messages from the spirits of the dead. Example: ln a very well-known utterance, the novelist said of Effi Briest (with that curious pellucidity which has no grain of vanity in it): "Perhaps I have been so successful with it because l wrote the whole novel in a dream-like state, almost as if with a psychograph" - a psychograph being the pen-like implement used in spiritualistic ghost-writing. 4. Any of various devices that purportedly read a person's thoughts. Example: The psychograph was a novelty device featured in department stores and theater lobbies during the depression of the 1930s. The machine was used to measure the bumps on an individual's head and, according to the principles of the pseudoscience of phrenology, said to reveal the subject's personality and most suitable vocation. Example: A psychograph was a machine that was invented in the early 1900s to read people's thoughts. The first machine, introduced in 1931, contained almost 2,000 parts. 5. psychobiography Example: Thus, any attempt to write a biography of McClellan inevitably "devolves into a psychograph." Example: Small wonder then, with this psychograph, that I project my personal history into its inevitable rationalization as cultural pluralism and value relativism, with a not too orthodox reaction to the American way of life. 6. A piece of prose that describes hallucinations or phantoms. Example: For Jolas, the modern poet's function involved a rediscovery of the vertical elements in creation, establishing through art a "Sense of the miraculous" through new forms such as the "anamyth" (a narrative of what he termed "preconscious relationships") and the "psychograph" (a hallucinatory prose text), both classifications which he might have used to describe Crane's The Bridge. Example: In its final form it might be a phatasmagoric mixture of the poem in prose, the popular tale of folklore, the psychograph, the essay, the myth, the saga, the humoresque. 7. A photograph, film, or other recorded image that evokes the feeling of a person, time, or place. Example: Those eyes seemed to be looking through peepholes forged in the intractable stuff of life itself, and they suggested light, light, light, projected out of the brain pan into a radiance such as one had on a perfect New England summer day. It was the painting beneath the Hopper picture — they came together, not incongruously, as a psychograph of Aline's struggle, and yes, he would use the term, unacknowledged victory. Example: However, the main focus of the film is not on creating a psychograph of an epoch and its people, but on how images can make a statement about the reality of an era.