Clinical Psychology Flashcards
Practitioners of motivational interviewing who are familiar with Miller and Rollnick’s (2013) current view of decisional balance (DB) are most likely to say that DB is most useful for:
A) reducing a client’s risk for relapse.
B) reducing a client’s ambivalence about change.
C) assessing a client’s readiness to change.
D) supporting a client’s preparation for change.
DB involves having a client identify the pros and cons of changing an undesirable behavior. Miller and Rollnick’s (2013) current view of DB is that it is useful when a clinician’s goal is to maintain a neutral position while assessing a client’s readiness for change. However, they consider it to be contraindicated when the clinician’s goal is to promote the client’s motivation to change because, by identifying the negative consequences of change, the client may actually become less willing to change.
C) assessing a client’s readiness to change.
At the end of the initial therapy session with a married couple who say they constantly argue, a practitioner of __________ therapy will assign them a task to complete before the next session that requires them to identify things in their relationship that they want to continue.
A) solution-focused
B) interpersonal
C) reality
D) acceptance and commitment
A) solution-focused
Each session of solution-focused therapy is structured and involves asking questions, providing feedback, and assigning a task to complete before the next session. For example, the formula first session task is assigned at the end of the first session and requires clients to identify something in their lives that they want to continue.
The initial session of strategic family therapy consists of four stages, the first of which involves:
A) describing the nature of strategic family therapy to family members.
B) welcoming family members and helping members feel comfortable.
C) joining with the family and accommodating to its style.
D) eliciting each family member’s view of the family’s problems.
B) welcoming family members and helping members feel comfortable.
Answers B and D describe the first (social stage) and second stages (problem stage), respectively, of strategic family therapy and are referred to as the social stage and problem stage. The third and fourth stages are the interactional stage (during which the therapist has family members discuss the family’s problem to determine how they interact when doing so) and the goal-setting stage (during which the therapist helps family members agree on a definition of the family’s problem and on concrete therapy goals that target the problem). Describing the nature of strategic family therapy to family members (answer A) is not part of the social stage of strategic family therapy. The three main phases of structural family therapy are joining the family and accommodating to its style (answer C), evaluating the family’s structure to make a structural diagnosis, and intervening to transform the family’s structure.
For practitioners of acceptance and commitment therapy, “dirty discomfort” is the result of:
A) disapprobation.
B) unwillingness.
C) cognitive errors.
D) emotional dysregulation.
B) unwillingness.
An assumption of acceptance and commitment therapy is that a natural level of physical or psychological discomfort (clean discomfort) combined with unwillingness results in suffering (dirty discomfort). Unwillingness is the opposite of willingness, which refers to the ability to accept and be in contact with clean discomfort.
A recently hired employee gets his first performance review and notices that, while the review is very positive and his supervisor has said many nice things about him, the supervisor has included a minor criticism of his written reports. This single criticism causes the employee to conclude that he’s worthless and will never get promoted out of his entry-level job. Aaron Beck would consider the employee’s conclusion to be an example of which of the following?
A) personalization
B) selective abstraction
C) dichotomous thinking
D) arbitrary inference
B) selective abstraction
Selective abstraction is a type of cognitive distortion that involves drawing a conclusion based on one detail while ignoring the “bigger picture.” In the situation described in this question, the employee has decided that he’s worthless and not likely to be promoted based on a single criticism while ignoring the fact that he received a very positive performance review. Selective abstraction is sometimes confused with arbitrary inference (answer D). However, selective abstraction involves drawing a conclusion based on a detail that’s taken out of context, while arbitrary inference involves drawing a conclusion without any corroborating evidence.
A barrier to using cost benefit analysis is that:
A) it’s often difficult to express the outcomes of mental health programs in monetary terms.
B) it doesn’t permit comparisons of programs that have different types of costs.
C) it’s often difficult to obtain the information needed to calculate quality of adjusted life-years (QALYs).
D) it cannot be used when the outcomes of the programs being compared are not directly comparable.
A) it’s often difficult to express the outcomes of mental health programs in monetary terms.
When using cost benefit analysis to compare two or more programs, a cost/benefit ratio is calculated for each program and the ratios are compared. This means that the costs and benefits (outcomes) of the programs must be expressed in monetary terms, which is often difficult to do. For example, it would be difficult to assign a dollar value to life satisfaction.
Answer B can be eliminated because cost benefit analysis can be used when programs have different types of costs because the total monetary (dollar) cost – not the types of costs – is used to calculate a cost-benefit ratio for each program being evaluated.
Answer C can be eliminated because cost benefit analysis does not require the calculation of QALYs. Therefore, the inability to calculate QALYs is not a barrier to its use. (Cost utility analysis is useful for comparing the effects of two or more interventions on QALYs).
Answer D can be eliminated because the outcomes of the programs being compared are converted to monetary (dollar) values, which are directly comparable.
The best conclusion that can be drawn from research on the impact of age and gender on psychotherapy outcomes is that:
A) age and gender both have a significant impact on psychotherapy outcomes with older women having the best outcomes.
B) gender has little or no impact on psychotherapy outcomes but age has a significant impact with older men and women having better outcomes than younger men and women.
C) age has little or no impact on psychotherapy outcomes, but gender has a significant impact with men having the best outcomes.
D) age and gender have little or no consistent impact on psychotherapy outcomes.
D) age and gender have little or no consistent impact on psychotherapy outcomes.
Studies investigating the effects of age and gender on psychotherapy outcomes have not produced entirely consistent results, but the best overall conclusion is that age and gender have little or no impact on outcomes and that apparent differences are actually due to other factors. For example, one study found that, when the initial severity of symptoms was controlled, the age of clients explained essentially none of the variance in psychotherapy outcomes.
The best conclusion that can be drawn from research on the effects of routine outcome monitoring (ROM) is that it:
A) improves symptom reduction but has little or no effect on premature termination or deterioration during therapy.
B) has little or no effect on symptom reduction but decreases premature termination and deterioration during therapy.
C) improves symptom reduction and decreases premature termination and deterioration during therapy, especially for “not-on-track” clients.
D) improves symptom reduction and decreases premature termination and deterioration during therapy but only for “on-track” clients.
D) improves symptom reduction and decreases premature termination and deterioration during therapy but only for “on-track” clients.
The research has not produced entirely consistent results, but most studies have found that ROM is more effective than less frequent feedback and is associated with several benefits including increased rates of clinically significant improvement in symptoms and significant reductions in client deterioration during therapy and premature termination, especially for ‘not-on-track” clients who are at risk for treatment failure.
For members of cultural groups that emphasize high-context communication:
A) knowledge is transferable and nonverbal messages are most important.
B) knowledge is transferable and verbal messages are most important.
C) knowledge is situational and nonverbal messages are most important.
D) knowledge is situational and verbal messages are most important.
C) knowledge is situational and nonverbal messages are most important.
To identify the correct answer to this question, you need to know that, for members of cultural groups that emphasize high-context communication, knowledge depends largely on the nature of the situation and communication relies primarily on nonverbal messages. In contrast, for members of cultural groups that emphasize low-context communication, knowledge depends less on the situation and, instead, is viewed as something that is easily transferred from one person to another. In addition, communication relies primarily on verbal messages.
Even if the statements about knowledge are unfamiliar or confusing, a good “guess” would have been to choose answer C because “situational” seems compatible with the importance of the context for high-context communications
Research has found that higher-status immigrants (i.e., those with higher levels of education and economic success) are more likely than lower-status immigrants to report experiencing discrimination and having a low sense of belonging to the host society. This is referred to as the:
A) immigrant paradox.
B) integration paradox.
C) alienation paradox.
D) acculturation paradox.
B) integration paradox.
The question accurately describes the integration paradox. The immigrant paradox (answer A) refers to the observation that, for some immigrant groups, recent immigrants often have better health and educational outcomes than more established immigrants and nonimmigrants do. Alienation paradox and acculturation paradox (answers C and D) are made-up terms and are not used to describe differences between high- and low-status immigrants in terms of experiencing discrimination.
A psychotherapist who has an emic perspective:
A) focuses on changing characteristics of the client to better fit environmental demands.
B) focuses on changing the client’s environment to better fit the client’s needs.
C) recognizes the differences between cultural groups.
D) tends to overlook important cultural differences.
C) recognizes the differences between cultural groups.
A psychologist who has an emic perspective believes that behavior is affected by culture and, as a result, views the causes and manifestations of and optimal interventions for psychological disorders as being affected by a person’s cultural background.
In contrast, a psychologist who has an etic perspective does not consider the impact of culture and views the causes and manifestations of and optimal interventions for psychological disorders as being essentially the same for members of all cultures. Answers D describes an etic perspective. Answers A and B refer to autoplastic and alloplastic interventions, respectively.
Cultural fit refers to which of the following?
A) how well the culture of an immigrant’s home country matches the culture of the host country
B) how well an immigrant’s personality and other personal attributes match the cultural values and norms of the host country
C) the degree to which mental health professionals are sensitive to the cultural differences of their clients
D) the strength of a culture’s social norms and tolerance for deviant behaviors
B) how well an immigrant’s personality and other personal attributes match the cultural values and norms of the host country
Cultural fit refers to the degree to which an immigrant’s personality and other personal attributes are similar to the cultural values and norms of the host country. A good cultural fit makes it easier for an immigrant to adapt to the host country.
Answer A describes cultural distance, which also affects how easily an immigrant can adapt to the host country.
Answer C is similar to the definition of cultural encapsulation.
Answer D refers to cultural tightness-looseness.
As described by Sue et al. (2007), assigning a level of intelligence to a person of color on the basis of the person’s race is which type of microaggression?
A) microinsult
B) microinvalidation
C) microassault
D) microaspersion
A) microinsult
Sue and his colleagues distinguish between three types of microaggression: microinvalidation, microassault, and microinsult. Microinsults are verbal and nonverbal messages that are insensitive to or demean a person’s racial or ethnic background. Assigning a level of intelligence to a person of color on the basis of the person’s race is a type of microinsult and is referred to as “ascription of intelligence.”
