Chapter 13 - Clinical and Counseling Assessment

• clinical psychology is the branch of psychology that has as its primary focus on the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of abnormal behavior.
• Like clinical psychology, counseling psychology is a branch of psychology that is concerned with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of abnormal behavior. 
• Case history data will provide some way to estimate the patient’s level of premorbid functioning (or level of psychological and physical performance prior to the development of a disorder, an illness, or a disability)
• A common diagnostic system affords researchers the ability to compile statistics on the incidence and prevalence of specific disorders. 
• Incidence in this context may be defined as the rate (annual, monthly, weekly, daily, or other) of new occurrences of a particular disorder or condition in a particular population.
• Prevalence may be defined as the approximate proportion of individuals in a given population at a given point (or range) in time who have been diagnosed or otherwise labeled with a particular disorder or condition.
• Wakefield’s position is an evolutionary view of mental disorder because the internal mechanisms that break down or fail are viewed as having been acquired through the Darwinian process of natural selection. 
• Biopsychosocial assessment is a multidisciplinary approach to assessment that includes exploration of relevant biological, psychological, social, cultural, and environmental variables for the purpose of evaluating how such variables may have contributed to the development and maintenance of a presenting problem.
• fatalism (the belief that what happens in life is largely beyond a person’s control
• self-efficacy (confidence in one’s own ability to accomplish a task),
• social support (expressions of understanding, acceptance, empathy, love, advice, guidance, care, concern,
• Interviews are frequently used early on in independent practice settings to solidify a therapeutic contract, an agreement between client and therapist setting forth goals, expectations, and mutual obligations with regard to a course of therapy.
• Stress interview is the general name applied to any interview where one objective is to place the interviewee in a pressured state for some particular reason
• A hypnotic interview is one conducted while the interviewee is under hypnosis.
• Hypnotic interviews may be conducted as part of a therapeutic assessment or intervention when the interviewee has been an eyewitness to a crime or related situations.
• In the cognitive interview, rapport is established and the interviewee is encouraged to use imagery and focused retrieval to recall information.
• The collaborative interview allows the interviewee wide latitude to interact with the interviewer. It is almost as if the boundary between professional assessor and lay assessee has been diminished and both are participants working closely together—collaborating—on a common mission of discovery, clarification, and enlightenment.
• A parallel to the general physical examination conducted by a physician is a special clinical interview conducted by a clinician called a mental status examination. This examination, used to screen for intellectual, emotional, and neurological deficits, typically includes questioning or observation with respect to each area discussed in the following list.
• Orientation is assessed by straightforward questions such as “What is your name?” “Where are you now?” and “What is today’s date?” If the patient is indeed oriented to person, place, and time, the assessor may note in the record of the assessment “Oriented × 3” (read “oriented times 3”).
• When psychological assessors speak of a test battery, they are referring to a group of tests administered together to gather information about an individual from a variety of instruments.
• In shoptalk among clinicians, if the type of battery referred to is left unspecified, or if the clinician refers to a battery of tests as a standard battery, what is usually being referred to is a group of tests including one intelligence test, at least one personality test, and a test designed to screen for neurological deficit.
• We may define culturally informed psychological assessment as an approach to evaluation that is keenly perceptive of and responsive to issues of acculturation, values, identity, worldview, language, and other culture-related variables as they may impact the evaluation process or the interpretation of resulting data.
• As you will see in the website presentation of the model curriculum, a subcomponent of both the “foundation in cultural issues in assessment” and the “supervised training and experience” components of the curriculum is shifting cultural lenses.
• The misspelled ADRESSING is an easy-to-remember acronym that may help the assessor recall various sources of cultural influence when assessing clients.
• Recovery from drug addiction has itself been conceptualized as a socially mediated process of reacculturation that can result in a new sense of identity.
• The word forensic means “pertaining to or employed in legal proceedings,” and the term forensic psychological assessment can be defined broadly as the theory and application of psychological evaluation and measurement in a legal context. 
• If the assessor determines that a homicide is imminent, the assessor has a legal duty to warn the endangered third party—a duty that overrides the privileged communication between psychologist and client.
• Competence to stand trial has to do largely with a defendant’s ability to understand the charges against them and assist in their own defense.
• A person with a diagnosis of psychopathy (a psychopath) is four times more likely than a nonpsychopath to fail on release from prison,
• Emotional injury, or psychological harm or damage, is a term sometimes used synonymously with mental suffering, pain and suffering, and emotional harm
• profiling may be defined as a crime-solving process that draws upon psychological and criminological expertise applied to the study of crime scene evidence.
• Psychological assessors can assist the court in making such decisions through the use of a custody evaluation—a psychological assessment of parents or guardians and their parental capacity and/or of children and their parental needs and preferences.
• Typically, definitions of abuse refer to the creation of conditions that may give rise to abuse of a child (a person under the state-defined age of majority) by an adult responsible for the care of that person. The abuse may be in the form of 
• Typical definitions of neglect refer to a failure on the part of an adult responsible for the care of a child to exercise a minimum degree of care in providing the child with food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, and supervision.
• One technique involves observing children while they play with anatomically detailed dolls (ADDs), which are dolls with accurately represented genitalia. Sexually abused children may, on average, engage ADDs in more sexually oriented activities than other children, but differences between groups of abused and nonabused children tend not to be significant.
• elder abuse may be defined as the intentional affliction of physical, emotional, financial, or other harm on an older individual who meets the statutory age requirement for an elder. 
• Elder neglect refers to a failure on the part of a caregiver or service provider to provide for the elder (as defined by statute) what was reasonably needed to prevent physical, emotional, financial, or other harm. Our brief discussion here will focus on elder abuse.
• If these tools have anything at all in common, it is that their use by a professional will at some time or another culminate in a written report. In clinical and counseling settings, that report is referred to simply as the psychological report.
• The finding that people tend to accept vague personality descriptions as accurate descriptions of themselves came to be known as the Barnum effect after psychologist Paul Meehl’s (1956) condemnation of “personality description after the manner of P. T. Barnum.
• In the context of clinical decision-making, actuarial assessment and actuarial prediction have been used synonymously to refer to the application of empirically demonstrated statistical rules and probabilities as a determining factor in clinical judgment and actions.