psychological assessment

• Clinical Psychology focuses on the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of severe abnormal behavior
• Counseling Psychology is concerned with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of abnormal behavior, but more focused on everyday concerns and problems
• Premorbid Functioning refers to the level of psychological and physical performance before the development of a disorder, illness, or disability
• The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is a reference source for making clinical diagnoses for mental disorders
• Biopsychosocial Assessment is a multidisciplinary approach to assessment that explores biological, psychological, social, cultural, and environmental variables to evaluate their contribution to presenting problems
• Stress Interview: places the interviewee in a pressured state for a particular reason
• Therapeutic Contract:

  • An agreement between client and therapist setting goals, expectations, and mutual obligations for therapy
• Seasoned Interviewers create a positive, accepting climate for the interview
• Effective interviewer:

  • Conveys understanding verbally or nonverbally
  • Includes attentive posture and facial expressions
  • Acknowledges or summarizes what the interviewee is trying to communicate
• • Hypnotic Interview: conducted under hypnosis, making the interviewee more suggestible to leading questions and vulnerable to memory distortion
• • Cognitive Interview: establishes rapport and encourages the use of imagery and focused retrieval to recall information
• • Collaborative Interview: allows wide interaction between the interviewee and interviewer, collaborating on discovery, clarification, and enlightenment
• Level-One: bear a little or no relationship to the interviewer's response.
• Level-Two: communicates a superficial awareness of the meaning of a statement.
• Level-Three: interchangeable with the interviewee's statement; minimum level of responding that could help the interviewee.
• Active Listening: power of understanding response; foundation of good interviewing skills for many different types of interviews
• Level-Four and Level-Five: provide accurate empathy but also go beyond the statement.
• Culturally Informed Psychological Assessment - keenly perceptive of an responsive to issues of acculturation, values, identity, worldview, language, and other culture-related variables as they may impact the evaluation process.
• shifting Cultural Lenses - tied to critical thinking and hypothesis testing, which permits the clinician to test another hypothesis that the observed behavior is culture-specific and arises from long-held family beliefs.
• MacAndrew Alcoholism Scale (MAC) and MacAndrew Alcoholism Scale-Revised - personality and attitude variables thought to underlie alcoholism.
• Addiction Potential Scale (APS) - personality traits thought to underlie drug or alcohol abuse.
• Addiction Acknowledgement Scale (AAS) - direct acknowledgement of substance abuse
• Addiction Severity Index (ASI) - rater assess severity of addiction in 7 problem areas: medical condition, employment functioning, drug use, alcohol use, illegal activity, family/social relations, and psychiatric functioning.
• Michigan Alcohol Screening Test (MAST) - lifetime alcohol-related problems.
• Forensic Psychological Assessment theory and application of psychological evaluation and measurement in a legal context
• Competence to stand Trial - defendant's ability to understand the charges against him and assist in his own defense.
• Custody Evaluation - psychological assessment of parents or guardians and their parental capacity and/or of children and their parental needs and preferences-usually undertaken for the purpose of custody.
• Emotional Injury - term sometimes used synonymously with mental suffering, pain and suffering, and emotional harm. Discrimination, harassment, malpractice, stalking, and unlawful termination of employment
• M'Naghten Standard - defendant was responsible if he knew the nature and consequences of his act and was forbidden by law.
• Durnham Rulenot criminally responsible if behavior is product of mental disease.
• ALI Standard"lacks substantial capacity" to appreciate criminality or conform behavior to law.
• Insanity Defense Reform ActShift burden to defendant to prove insanity.
• Abuse - refer to the creation of conditions that give rise to abuse of a child by an adult.
• Elder Abuse - intentional affliction of physical, emotional, financial, or other harm on older individual
• Neglect - failure on the part of adult to be responsible of childcare
• Barnum Effect - people tend to accept vague personality descriptions as accurate descriptions of themselves (a.k.a: Aunt Fanny Effect)
• Barnum effect is also known as?

  (a.k.a: Aunt Fanny Effect)
• Clinical Prediction application of clinician's own training and clinical experience as determining factor in clinical judgment and actions.
• Mechanical Prediction - application of empirically demonstrated statistical rules and probabilities to the computer generation of findings and recommendations.
• Neuropsychology - focus on the relationship between brain functioning and behavior.