American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN) Practice Exam

Projection is a defense mechanism where individuals unconsciously assign their own undesirable or unacceptable feelings, thoughts, or impulses to someone else. This is done as a way to cope with anxiety or guilt associated with these feelings. For example, someone who is feeling angry might assume that others are angry with them instead, thus projecting their own emotions onto external sources. This mechanism serves to protect the individual from facing their own uncomfortable truths, as recognizing these feelings within themselves could lead to distress.

In contrast, displacement involves redirecting emotional responses from a threatening target to a safer one, rationalization is the cognitive distortion of “the facts” to make an event or an impulse less threatening, and denial is the refusal to accept reality or fact, thereby blocking external events from awareness. Each of these defense mechanisms operates differently, but projection specifically focuses on attributing one's internal experiences to others, making it the correct answer in this context.