Anemone's Research Emporium

Boundaries in the Mind

(The Hartmann Boundary Questionnaire)

Source: Ernest Hartmann, 1991. Boundaries in the mind: A new psychology of personality. BasicBooks, NY.

Boundaries, whether they are between different states of consciousness, different people, or different countries, are imaginary lines we experience in our minds to differentiate between different concepts. Some people have very thick lines - to them categories are clearly separate and distinct; while others have very thin lines - to them categories tend to blur into each other. This affects not only conscious concepts but also behaviour, sensory experiences, and degrees of consciousness.

For some people category boundaries are distinct, black and white - you're either young or old, child or adult, male or female, straight or gay - while others see things more in shades of grey - you can be both at the same time. Some people tend to be decisive while others are more indecisive. Some are more organized than others, and prefer more organized activities than others.

Some people are either awake or asleep while others frequently experience waking dream states. Some rarely have nightmares and remember their dreams rarely, while others have frequent nightmares and remember their dreams easily. Some people are matter-of-fact while others go off on flights of fancy. Some people keep their senses clearly separate, while others experience synesthesia, where their senses blend into each other.

Some people naturally focus on one thing at a time, while others take in a wider range of information all at once. Some live squarely in the present, while others tend to reminisce. Some have strong ego defenses (repression, denial), while others do not.

Some people stay clearly separate from their environments and others while others experience a sense of merging, or have sensory sensitivites. Some people have thick skins, others are more thin-skinned.

At one extreme you get very solid, possibly rigid, conventional people. At the other extreme you get very flexible, possibly unstable, unconventional people. Most people, of course, are somewhere in the middle.

The Hartmann Boundary Questionnaire (145 items), created by Ernest Hartmann and colleagues (Hartmann, 1991), measures boundary thickness in both interpersonal and internal boundaries, and in preferences, habits and opinions.

Interpretation

The Hartmann Boundary Questionnaire is divided into 12 categories:

Category 1 (14 items, score range 0-56): boundaries related to sleep, waking and dreaming.

Category 2 (18 items, score range 0-72): boundaries related to unusual experiences, e.g. deja vu.

Category 3 (16 items, score range 0-64): boundaries related to thoughts, feelings and moods, e.g. merging of thinking and feeling.

Category 4 (6 items, score range 0-24): boundaries related to childhood, adolescence and adulthood, e.g. how connected you feel to your childhood feelings.

Category 5 (12 items, score range 0-48): interpersonal boundaries.

Category 6 (5 items, score range 0-20): sensitivity.

Category 7 (11 items, score range 0-44): neatness, exactness, precision.

Category 8 (17 items, score range 0-68): boundary preferences in areas such as decor, work (e.g. structured or unstructured).

Category 9 (8 items, score range 0-32): opinions about children and others.

Category 10 (10 items, score range 0-40): opinions about organizations and relationships.

Category 11 (14 items, score range 0-56): opinions about peoples, nations, groups.

Category 12 (7 items, score range 0-28): opinions about beauty and truth.

7 items are in the test but are not scored, because factor analysis indicated they didn't measure what they were supposed to.

The Personal Total (categories 1-8) score range is 0-396.

The World Total (categories 9-12) score range is 0-156.

Grand Total score range is 0-552. Total scores average 250-300. Mean 273; SD 51

Higher scores indicate thinner boundaries. Women tend to score thinner than men. Younger people tend to score thinner than older people (this may be aging or cultural change).

Factor analysis indicated 13 factors in the HBQ: I: primary process thinking (blurry boundaries in the mind); II: a preference for explicit boundaries; III: identification with children; IV: fragility; V: percipience/clairvoyance; VI: trustful openness; VII: organized planfulness; VIII: belief in inpenetrable intergroup boundaries (no mixing between demographic groups); IX: flexibility; X: overinvolvement in fantasy; XI: preference for simple geometric forms; XII: isolation of affect (thinking and feeling kept strictly separate); and a final factor with no particular theme. Hartmann does not provide a scoring key for these factors, but factor I (primary process thinking) includes many items from categories 1, 2 and 3; while factor II (preference for explicit boundaries) items are mostly from categories 10 and 11.

Hartmann speculated that the concept of boundaries may be related to Eysenck's P (see the EPQ-R here). I suspect that high HBQ scores correlate with Intuition (N) on the Myers-Briggs. But that's just a hunch.