C4 Flashcards
Psychological assessment
procedure by which clinicians, using psychological tests, observations, and interviews, develop a summary of a client’s symptoms and problems
Clinical diagnosis
process through which a clinician arrives at a general “summary classification” of the patient’s symptoms by following a clearly defined system such as DSM-5 or ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases)
Reliability
A term describing the degree to which an assessment measure produces the same result each time it is used to evaluate the same thing
Test-retest reliability
Test-retest reliability is whether a test result gives us a similar value today as it did a few days earlier
Validity
The extent to which a measuring instrument actually measures what it is supposed to measure
Standardization
The process by which a psychological test is administered, scored, and interpreted in a consistent (“standard”) manner
Subject’s responses to the standardized stimuli are compared with those of others with comparable demographic characteristics
T score distribution is an example of how users can evaluate whether the individual’s core is low, average, or high
Psychodynamic or psychoanalytically oriented clinicians may choose unstructured personality assessment techniques
Behaviorally oriented clinicians determine the functional relationships between environmental events or reinforcements and the abnormal behavior
Cognitively oriented therapists focus on dysfunctional thoughts
Clinical Interviews
clinical interview usually involves a face-to-face interaction in which a clinician obtains information about a client’s situation, behavior, and personality
Structured Interviews
Follow a predetermined format
Each question is structured in a manner so as to allow responses to be quantified or clearly determined
Research data show that a structured format yields far more reliable results than unstructured or flexible format
Semi-Structured Interviews
Interviewer is required to ask questions in a specific order and in a specific way, but is free to ask follow-up questions to better determine if the interviewee actually has the symptom being assessed
A benefit is that the resulting diagnoses tend to have greater validity
A drawback is that they require much more interviewer training and take longer to complete
Chain analysis
vulnerability, sadness, shame, guilt
Rating scales can help both to organize information and to encourage reliability and objectivity
Self-monitoring is a client’s objective reporting of behavior, thoughts, and feelings as they occur in various natural settings
Self-monitoring is a client’s objective reporting of behavior, thoughts, and feelings as they occur in various natural settings
Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS): one of the most widely used instruments for assessing the presence of psychiatric symptoms
Rorschach Inkblot Test: uses 10 inkblot pictures, to which a subject responds to “what you see, what it makes you think of” and “what it means to you”
Thematic Apperception Test: uses a series of simple pictures about which a subject is instructed to make up stories
Sentence Completion Test: designed for children, adolescents, and young adults; consists of the beginnings of sentences that clients are asked to complete
Objective Personality Tests
Structured; typically use questionnaires, self-report inventories, or rating scales
MMPI?:
Prototype and standard for personality assessment; widely used in clinical and forensic (court-related) assessment
Introduced in 1943; revised in 1989 (MMPI-2)
Includes 10 clinical scales measuring tendencies to respond in psychologically deviant ways, as well as validity scales detecting honesty/straightforwardness of responses
Electroencephalogram (EEG):
assesses brain wave patterns; changes in the brain can be recorded almost immediately after they occur
Computed Tomography (CT):
scan that can reveal images of parts of the brain that might be diseased
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI
: another technique used to provide images of the brain
Functional MRI tells us about neuronal
Pet scans: a metabolic portrait
Position Emission Tomography (PET): radioactive agents are injected into a person to show how an organ is functioning
THE CATEGORICAL APPROACH
Categorical approach: seeks to classify behavior into distinct categories; approach used in the DSM
Assumes that human behavior can be sorted into the categories of “healthy” and “disordered”
A major concern in this approach is comorbidity, the concurrent presence of 2 or more disorders in the same person
Dimensional approach
assumes that a person’s typical behavior is the product of differing strengths or intensities of definable dimensions (mood, emotional stability, etc.)
Prototypal approach
linician decides if their patient fits the pattern of a “perfect” or “theoretically ideal” case
Provides a standard against which individuals can be compared in order to assign them to a particular category
There are two major psychiatric classification systems used today: the DSM-5 and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11)
A symptom is a patient’s subjective description of what’s wrong
Signs are objective and visual indicators of a problem
