Psychological Assessment Flashcards
resilience vs. risk
resilience: successful adaptation in children who experience adversity
- different factors are thought to increase resilience or vulnerability
Differential susceptibility to environment: analogy
- Idea: there is probably an individual difference in how affected you are by your environmental conditions
- Some people aren’t affected at all by being in difficult situations, and others may be very affected by small changes in the environment
- Analogy: a dandelion can grow in all sorts of places (middle of road, little soil), but an orchid is difficult to grow and is sensitive to changes in the environment. The orchid, however, actually has a lot of potential so if the environment is set up right then the thriving can be quite impressive the growth can be impressive
can children benefit from exposure to stress?
Yes.
- if you never fail/ feel stressed, you may never learn
- you must undergo stress to develop, but knowing how much is the right amount is important
What is an example of a disorder where a resilience factor is actually a risk factor?
OCD
- they have high average intelligence and creativity - can cause the obsessions and compulsions
what are approaches to conceptualizing child and adolescent psychopathology?
- Individual child “symptoms”
- Dimensional (symptom clusters)
- Categorical (presence-absence of predetermined criteria)
- Developmental psychopathology
Individual child “symptoms”
- behaviours
- occur in almost all children at some point
- symptoms in the DSM category can occur very commonly among all people and depends on the age too
- little correspondence to overall adjustment or later outcomes
Dimensional
- symptom clusters or syndromes
- externalizing - directed at others (ex: ODD and CD)
- internalizing - inner-directed (ex: anxiety/fear)
- similar structure in adult psyhcopathology
Categorical (presence-absence of predetermined criteria)
pre-set criteria and if you meet enough of those criteria then you’re a member of that group (diagnostic category)
Developmental psychopathology
- framework for understanding both normal development and its maladaptive deviations
- endogenous (inside the individual, e.g., genetic) and exogenous (outside the individual, e.g., family, social, culture) and interaction of the two in predicting and understanding developmental changes
- looking at how does the child change the environment, how does the environment change the child, its taking into account all of these complex elements (developmental psychopathologists)
what are DSM-5-TR categories?
they group disorders that have similar symptoms or are suspected to have similar causes
how are DSM categories similar to the diagnostic criteria of let’s say… a dog?
Can’t use the criteria to build the disorder pretty much
If we were to look up the criteria for OCD the main criteria are the presence of obsessions, the presence of compulsions, and taking up a lot of time, these are helpful criteria but yet in practice, OCD looks like 4500 different things because you can have an insane amount of different obsessional thoughts that are not captured in the DSM very well
what is the difference between a DSM category being like catching a flu or having diabetes?
- OCD is like catching a cold, as soon as you don’t meet the symptoms for OCD anymore you don’t have OCD
- Often chronic if untreated but if treated it’s likely to stop
- Being on the autism spectrum is more like having diabetes (a learning disorder for reading can be like diabetes too)
What creates a problem in diagnosis for people who are going through identity development (children + ados)
“if these things are present you have it, if they aren’t present then you don’t”
- we’re all changing humans, this may not be true
What are the pros and cons of diagnosing a child with a psychological disorder?
Pro: sometimes people get great relief by being able to explain something in diagnostic terms
Con: later ADHD diagnoses for people who are almost done school can lead to people developing negative beliefs about themselves so having a diagnostic way of framing it can help them feel better about their inability to focus etc.…
What are two views on diagnosing?
- diagnosis matters, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise
- never diagnose unless you are forced to do so
Psychologists: use a combination of these ways of thinking at the same time, any given psychological assessment will often end in a diagnosis but we’re also framing it in more of a dimensional way, giving a better understanding of how these pieces fit together
Clinical Interviews (using KSADS)
it is a structured interview you may use when assessing a child/adolescent, and possibly their parent(s)
- paper psychologist is holding to guide the questions for him and his mom
- structured around criteria and gives you prompts to help you guide interview questions
RCADS (standardized questionnaire)
- standardized self questionnaire to compare to norms
- child fills it out themselves
- answers are associated with a numerical and a raw score is derived
There is also a parent version
- both parents can fill it out from a different perspective - we have norms to compare this to as well
what are raw scores often translated into?
T-scores (mean = 50, SD=10)
-middle of distribution is a T-score of 50, 10 points away is 1SD away - gives an idea of what this person’s individual score means related to the norm group
