Chapter 5 - Assessment and Classification Flashcards
Mental Status Exam
Clinical interview organized into major categories designed to determine a person’s cognitive processes.
Assessment
The process of gathering information about a person so that you can make a clinical decision about that person’s symptoms.
Flight of Ideas
Responses that are not related to the question asked or that tell a narrative in which each sentence is not related to the one that came before it.
Delusional Thinking
An unrealistic pattern of thoughts forming a theme.
Obsessional Thinking
A pattern of repeated thoughts beyond the control of the person.
Structured Interview
An interview that is highly structured in terms of the questions asked, allowing for better consistency across interviewers and clients.
Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders (SCID)
An interview that directly probes for the existence of the criteria for disorders within the current classification manual, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).
Classification
A way to organize the diversity seen in mental disorders.
Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI)
A set of questions developed to help mental health professionals obtain information concerning the person’s culture and its influence on behavior and experience.
Reliability
Consistency of the instrument.
Validity
How accurate something is.
Beck Depression Inventory (BDI)
A questionnaire useful for determining the level of depressive symptoms that a person is reporting.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
A test with 567 items of a true-false nature to help determine if a person endorses more or less of a category of experiences than the general population; used to asses broad mental disorders.
Projective Instruments
Ambiguous stimuli are used to elicit the internal cognitive and emotional organization of a person’s psychological processes.
Rorschach Inkblot
Inkblots developed by Herman Rorschach; they were made by dripping ink on a piece of paper and then folding it in half to create a symmetrical design; it functions as a projective technique.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
A testing instrument composed of 30 black-and-white drawings of various scenes and people; by noting the content and emotionality of the individual’s responses, it is possible to gain insight into his or her thoughts, emotions, and motivations including areas of conflict.
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)
A common intelligence test with a number of subscales designed to measure verbal and performance tasks.
Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST)
A test that requires that an individual sort cards into four piles; each card has a specific shape on it such as a circle or square, and each card has a specific number of these shapes and each card is printed in a specific color; thus, you could sort the cards by shape, by number, or by color.
Continuous Performance Test (CPT)
A test that measures attentional characteristics.
Give the six major categories in the mental status exam.
1) Individual’s appearance and behavior
2) Mood and affect
3) Speech quality
4) Thought processes
5) Perceptions and awareness of the surroundings
6) Intellectual functioning and insight
Give the five domains on which the Cultural Formation Interview focuses.
1) Cultural identity of the individual
2) Cultural conceptualizations of distress
3) Psychosocial stressors and cultural features of vulnerability
4) Culture features of the relationship between the individual and the clinician
5) Overall cultural assessment
Give the four types of reliability.
1) Internal reliability
2) Test-retest reliability
3) Alternative form reliability
4) Inter-rater reliability
Describe internal reliability.
Internal reliability assesses whether or not the questions asked in a test relate to each other (in other words, they all measure the same or similar things).
Describe test-retest reliability.
Test-retest reliability is the idea that if a test is given multiple times, similar scores will be achieved (especially important if the construct being measured is expected to be relatively stable).
Describe alternative form reliability.
Alternative form reliability is the idea that different forms of a test (for instance, an IQ test) give the same or similar results.
Describe inter-rater reliability.
Inter-rater reliability asks how similarly two or more individuals will answer when they observe and rate specific behaviors.
Give the five different types of validity.
1) Content validity
2) Predictive validity
3) Concurrent validity
4) Construct validity
5) Ecological validity
Describe content validity.
Content validity is the degree to which an instrument measures all aspects of the phenomenon.
Describe predictive validity.
Predictive validity is the degree to which an instrument can predict cognitions, emotions, or actions that a person will experience in the future.
Describe concurrent validity.
Concurrent validity is the ability of an instrument to show similar results to other established measures of the construct.
Describe construct validity.
Construct validity is the extent to which an instrument measures what it was designed to measure.
Describe ecological validity.
Ecological validity refers to the manner in which data collected has been considered beyond the local context. What other factors could be influencing the information obtained?
Give the five different purposes of classification.
1) Nomenclature
2) Basis of information retrieval
3) Descriptive system
4) Predictive system
5) Basis for a theory of psychopathology