Professional Documents
Culture Documents
– No other mental health profession incorporates assessment into their work as clinical
psychologists do
Convergent validity correlates with other techniques that measure the same thing.
Discriminant validity does not correlate with techniques that measure something else.
Test-retest reliability yields similar results across multiple administrations at different times.
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Internal reliability consists of items that are consistent with one another.
Feedback
The Interviewer
• General skills
– Quieting yourself
– Being self-aware
• Know how you tend to affect others interpersonally, and how others tend to relate to
you
• Specific behaviors
• Eye contact
• Body language
• Vocal qualities
• Verbal tracking
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• Referring to client by proper name
• Rapport
• Technique
– Open-ended questions
• Elicit long answers that may or may not provide necessary info
– Closed-ended questions
• Clarification
– Question to make sure the interviewer accurately understands the client’s comments
• Confrontation
• Paraphrasing
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• Reflection of feeling
• Summarizing
– Tie together various topics, connect statements that may have been made at different
points, and identify themes
• Note-taking
– Provide a reliable written record, but can be distracting to client and interviewer
• Confidentiality
– Explain confidentiality and its limits to clients (e.g., child abuse, intention to harm)
Types of Interviews
• Intake interviews
– To determine whether to “intake” the client into the agency or refer elsewhere
• Diagnostic interviews
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– Structured interviews often used
• Crisis interviews
Cultural Components
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Chapter 9 Intellectual and Neuropsychological Assessment
Assessment Overview
• Tests described in this chapter are related to cognitive functioning in some way
– Neuropsychological tests focus on cognitive dysfunction, often from brain injury or illness
Intelligence Testing
• Theories of intelligence
• Louis Thurstone—intelligence is plural abilities that may not relate to each other
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– Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence— Third Edition (WPPSI-III) –
age 2-7
• Vocabulary • Similarities
• Information • Comprehension
• Symbol Search
– Mean of 100 for full scale and index scores, and 10 for subtests
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– Mean score is 100
– Subtests include extensions at high and low end (useful for assessing giftedness or
mental retardation)
– Has become less commonly used than Wechsler tests, but still highly regarded and
used
• Some subtests may place people from minority cultural groups at a disadvantage
– Both Wechsler tests and Stanford-Binet have made improvements in recent editions
– Some drawbacks: only for kids age 5-17, limited psychometric data, more limited
range
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Achievement Testing
• Achievement is what a person has accomplished, especially reading, spelling, writing, or math
• Achievement tests typically produce standard scores that can be easily compared to scores
from intelligence tests (e.g., mean = 100)
Neuropsychological Testing
• Measure cognitive functioning or impairment of the brain and its specific components or
structures
• Additional purposes: to make prognosis, plan rehab, determine eligibility for accommodations,
etc.
• Often used after a head injury, a brain illness, or prolonged alcohol or drug use
• Some neuropsychological tests are lengthy and comprehensive; others are brief and targeted
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Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Battery (HRB)
• Primary purpose is to identify people with brain damage and, to the extent possible, provide
detailed information or hypotheses about any brain damage identified
• Some of 8 tests involve sight, hearing, touch, motor skills, and pencil & paper tasks
– ~6 minutes to administer
– Brief pencil-and-paper drawing task, but unlike Bender-Gestalt, involves just a single,
more complex figure
– Also includes a memory component (recall figure and draw it again from memory)
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– Assesses memory problems due to brain injury, dementia, substance abuse, etc.
– Ages 16-90
Multimethod Assessment
– Tests – Interviews
Evidence-Based Assessment
• Similar to movement regarding “what works” in therapy, but data is not quite as abundant yet
• Culturally competent clinical psychologists are aware of this, and of the influence of their own
cultural perspective
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Objective Personality Tests
• Include unambiguous test items, offer clients a limited range of responses, and are objectively
scored
– Better norms
– 1—Hypochondriasis
– 2—Depression
– 3—Hysteria
– 4—Psychopathic Deviate
– 5—Masculinity/femininity
– 6—Paranoia
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– 7—Psychasthenia
– 8—Schizophrenia
– 9—Mania
– 0—Social Introversion
• Also feature supplemental scales and content scales for additional clinical information
– Can identify clients who “fake good” or “fake bad,” or clients who respond randomly
• Therapeutic Assessment
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• Main difference: MCMI-III emphasizes personality disorders
– Its clinical scales are based on DSM personality disorders (e.g., antisocial, borderline,
narcissistic, paranoid)
• Not a comprehensive test of personality, but a brief, targeted measure of one characteristic
(depression symptoms)
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• Pencil & paper, self-report format
• Lacks validity scales, and much more limited scope than other tests discussed to this point
• Based on the assumption that clients will “project” their personalities when presented with
unstructured, ambiguous stimuli and an unrestricted opportunity to respond
• Clients say what they see in each blot (in “response” phase)
• Later (in “inquiry” phase), explain what features of the blot caused them to make their
responses
• Scoring emphasizes how the client perceives the blot as well as what the client sees
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• Reliability and validity are questionable and hotly debated
Tell-Me-a-Story (TEMAS)
• The ambiguous stimuli are not inkblots or interpersonal scenes, but beginnings of sentences
Behavioral Assessment
• Assumes that client behaviors are not signs of underlying issues or problems; instead, those
behaviors are the problems
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• The behavior a client demonstrates is a sample of the problem itself, not a sign of some
deeper, underlying problem
– Requires operationally defining target behavior and measuring its frequency, duration,
or intensity across specified time periods
• Often more accurate than asking client to report on their own behaviors
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Chapter 11 General Issues in Psychotherapy
Overview
Upcoming chapters will focus on specific approaches; this chapter focuses on general
psychotherapy issues
Through the mid-1900s, most answers to this question came in subjective, non-empirical
forms (few empirical studies)
His finding has since been overturned, but his study inspired decades of research on therapy
outcome
Who?
◼ Ratings by any of these three parties can be informative, but also biased
When?
◼ Follow-up?
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◼ At certain points, or at every session?
How?
◼ Questionnaires?
◼ Interviews?
◼ Behavioral observation?
Who, when, and how researchers ask about psychotherapy can influence results
◼ Average person receiving therapy is better off than 80% of comparable others who
don’t
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◼ Not as many studies as efficacy studies, but similar results: psychotherapy works
◼ Sampling bias
◼ No control group
However, comparative outcome studies have consistently reached the same finding: a virtual
tie
◼ This finding was nicknamed the “dodo bird verdict” (from Alice in Wonderland)
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◼ Common factors—shared, fundamental elements of therapy (rather than specific
techniques) are “active ingredients”
◼ Therapeutic relationship/alliance
◼ Hope
◼ Attention
◼ Some researchers (e.g., Dianne Chambless) argue that for specific disorders, some
therapies are demonstrably better
◼ Outcome studies using manualized treatments for specific disorders can lead to a
prescriptive approach to psychotherapy
◼ Cognitive is now #1
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Individual therapy is most common by far
◼ Eclectic/integrative therapy
◼ Evidence-based therapy
Eclectic therapy involves selecting the best treatment for a given client based on empirical
data from studies of the treatment of similar clients
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Chapter 12 Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
This textbook uses the term “psychodynamic psychotherapy” to refer broadly to Sigmund
Freud’s approach to therapy and all subsequent efforts to revise and expand upon it
◼ “Insight” into thoughts, feelings, and other mental activity previously outside of
awareness
◼ The very presence of the unconscious was a fundamental idea of Sigmund Freud
Free Association
◼ Clients simply say whatever comes into mind without any self-censorship or self-
editing
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◼ Allows the unconscious to be expressed
Freudian “slips”
Dreams
Resistance
◼ Clients “resist” certain topics in therapy because they touch on certain unconscious
feelings or thoughts
Defense Mechanisms
◼ Displacement—redirect impulse
Transference
◼ Help clients become aware of their own transference tendencies and the ways in
which these unrealistic perceptions of others affect their relationships and their lives
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◼ “Blank screen” role of therapist facilitates transference
◼ Of course, blatantly oral behaviors can occur as well (e.g., smoking, overeating)
◼ Parents impose control on child (toilet training, and other forms of self-control)
Ego psychology
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◼ Emphasizes social relationships over psychosexual stages
Object relations
Self-psychology
◼ Emphasizes parental roles in the development of the self, with special attention to
narcissism
◼ Narrow problems, quick alliance, focus on present as well as past, therapists are more
active, pathology is less severe
◼ Focus on transference and a therapy relationship that doesn’t follow the same
unhealthy, unconscious “script” as previous relationships
Outcome Issues
◼ Regardless, large-scale reviews support its benefits with some disorders, but remains
unproven with others
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Allegiance effects may influence outcome studies, particularly for psychodynamic therapy
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