chapter 4 abnormal psych
25. What is meant by the concept of a "syndrome"?
a. A cluster of symptoms that usually occur together pg 98
What does it mean when it is said about ta test that it has high "Face Validity"?
a. A given assessment tool may appear to be valid simply because it makes sense and seems reasonable; b. A test with high face validity does not by itself mean that the instrument is trustworthy p. 84
20. How are a person's responses to a polygraph used? What are their responses compared to? What is meant by a psychophysiological test? What can be said, generally, about the reliability of polygraph tests? How often are they used? What can you say about the legality of their use? In what types of contexts are they sued most frequently?
a. A person's responses to a polygraph are used and compared to control questions they are asked such as 'are you parents alive' to compare their reactions to a question like 'did you commit this robbery'. It monitors their breathing, perspiration, heart rate suddenly increasing and if all those happen they are suspected of lying. Pg 93 b. A psychophysiolgocial test is a test that measure physical responses as possible indicators of psychological problems. Pg 92 c. The equipment is expensive and hard to maintain, on top of it the lab equipment itself may arouse a participants' nervous system and thus change his or her physical responses. They may also change when measure repeatedly in a single session. Pg 93 d. Even though it is said that the inaccuracy is 8 out of 100 in the results, the FBI still uses it and many probation offices still use them. It is legal to use them, however I do think that there should be consent in some cases, maybe not in all though. Pg 94 e. It doesn't really say where they would be sued most frequently, but I would assume if the polygraph was wrong that possibly in a jail setting, court, or under investigation by the FBI?
22. What is a functional MRI?
a. A procedure that uses the magnetic property of certain hydrogen atoms in the brain to create a detailed picture of the brain's structure. Pg 95
15. What is the purpose of assessment using projective tests? What are the theoretical assumptions underlying the use of such techniques? When using the Rorschach, what is the difference between focusing on the "theme" versus the "style" of the patient's response?
a. A projective test is a test consisting of ambiguous material that people interpret or respond to. pg 88 b. They are used primarily by psychodynamic clinicians to help asses the unconscious drives and conflicts they believe to be at the root of abnormal functioning. Pg 88 c. They refer to theme they are referring to the picture as a whole and what the clients see in the image all together. When they talk about style now, clinicians are looking for what the client sees in specific detail, perhaps just part of the picture, or if they see it as a whole. Pg 88
What are the parts of a mental status exam? What does this type of exam attempt to establish?
a. A set of questions and observations that systematically evaluate the client's awareness, orientation with regard to time and place, attention span, memory, judgment and insight, thought content and processes, mood and appearance. b. It is used by behavioral and cognitive clinicians who need to pinpoint behaviors, attitudes, or thinking processes that may underlie abnormal behavior. Pg 86
What is the preferred assessment technique of most practitioners? What are some of its principal strengths? What are some its limitations? What are the differences between structured and unstructured interviews?
a. Clinical interviews has the advantage of letting the clinician see body language and facial expressions to help the assessment; its limitations can be because interviewers may make mistakes in judgment; individuals may not accurately describe themselves and their symptoms; different clinicians can obtain different answers and draw different conclusions b. In structured interviews, interviewers have prepared questions and sometimes use a published interview schedule, a standard set of questions designed for all interviews c. An unstructured interview is when the clinician asks open-ended questions p. 86-87
When are different tests assumed to have high "concurrent validity"?
a. Concurrent validity is the degree to which the measures gathered from one tool agree with the measures gathered for other assessment techniques. Participants' scores on a new test designed to measure anxiety for example, should correlate highly with their scores on other anxiety tests or with their behavior during clinical interviews b. Different tests have a high concurrent validity if the the measures gathere fro one tool agree with the measures gather for other assessment techniques p. 85
What is meant by the "idiographic" approach to abnormal psychology?
a. It means an individual approach to get information about them. P. 83
24. What is meant by a "naturalistic observation"? How is it used in therapy? In this context, what is meant by the idea of "reactivity", and how does it affect the validity of naturalistic observations?
a. Naturalistic observation takes place in homes, schools, institutions such as hospitals, prisons or community settings. Most focus on parent-child, sibling-child, or teacher-child interactions. b. The observations are often made by a participant observer, a key person in the client's environment, and reported to the clinician. c. Reactivity is when the clients behavior may be affected by the very presence of the observer. This affects the validity of the observations because their actions and behavior may change drastically. Pg 98
16. Why is it that the use of projective tests has declined in recent decades?
a. Nowadays they are used to gain supplementary insights. One reason for the shift is that practitioners who follow the newer models have less use for the tests than psychodynamic clinicians do. Even more importantly the tests have not consistently shown much reliability or validity. Pg 90
13. In clinical interviews, what do patients tend to over-emphasize? In contrast, what do clinicians tend to over-emphasize
a. Patients may intentionally mislead in order to present themselves in a positive light or to avoid discussing embarrassing topics. Or in the case of a depressed patient they may think they are a poor worker or inadequate when that is not the case at all. Pg 86-87 b. Clinicians can be bias in regards to gender, race, age. They can also misinterpret what the client says and make a judgment based on that misinterpretation. Pg 87
When does a test have high "predictive validity"?
a. Predictive validity is a tool's ability to predict future characteristics or behavior. b. A test with high predictive validity predicts the future characteristics or behavior, for example, of a child's likeliness to take up cigarette smoking in high school p. 84
18. How do projective tests and personality inventories compare in terms of reliability and validity?
a. Projective tests - different clinicians have scored the same person's projective test quite differently. When the clinicians describe the client's personality and feelings it is often different than what the client self reports. Pg 90 b. Personality inventory - when clinicians have used these tests alone, they have not regularly been able to judge a respondents personality accurately. This is because the personality traits the test seeks to measure cannot be examined directly. This along with the projective tests can have cultural limitations as well. Pg 92
19. Which personality test has the highest validity?
a. The MMPI-2. Pg 90
23. What type of psychological test has been found to have the highest level of standardization, reliability and validity? What has been the most telling criticism of intelligence tests?
a. The intelligence test has the highest level of standardization reliability and validity. b. Performance can be influenced by nonintelligence factors (motivation, anxiety, test-taking experience). Test may contain cultural biases in language or tasks.
17. What is the personality inventory most frequently used by clinicians at this time? What are some of the reasons that today's edition is considered to be significantly superior to its predecessors?
a. The most widely used is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 - the MMPI-2 consists of more than 567 self-statements to be labeled 'true' 'false' or 'cannot say'. The statements cover issues ranging from phsycial concersn to mood, sexual behaviors, and social activities. Then add up the scores. When people score above 70 on the scale (out of 120) their functioning on that scale is considered deviant. A profile can then be determined from the 10 different scales in the MMPI. Pg 90 b. They are paper-and-pencil tests, they do not take much time to administer, and they are objectively scored. Most of them are standardized so no one person's scores can be compared to those of many others. They portray good test-retest reliability than projective tests. They also have greater validity or accuracy, however they still cannot be considered highly valid. Pg 92
What is going to be the type of information a clinician is going to focus on when he first meets a new client?
a. Their main focus when faced with a new client is to gather idiographic information p. 83
21. What are neuropsychological tests designed to measure
a. They are designed to measure cognitive, perceptual, and motor performances on certain tasks and interpret abnormal performances as an indicator of underlying brain problems pg 96.
14. What has research established about the validity of negative, first impressions?
a. They say that interviews rely to heavily on first impressions and give too much weight to unfavorable information about a client. This may be where the bias' start and make an impact on the interviewer because of what the client says. Pg 87
Give examples of how the theoretical orientation the following clinicians have would affect the types of questions they would ask; humanistic, behavioral, sociocultural, and biological.
a. Unstructured interviews typically appeal to psychodynamic and humanistic clinicians, (sociocultural?) b. Structured formats are widely used by behavioral, biological, and cognitive clinicians, who need to pinpoint behaviors, attitudes, or thinking processes that may underlie abnormal behavior.
How do diagnostic decisions made by computer models and actuarial tables compare with those made by clinical judgments?
A meta-analysis of 136 studies compared the clinical judgments made by clinicians to those made by computer algoriths and by actuarial tables similar to those used by insurance companies. Overall, applying the same clinical assessment data, the computer and actuarial judgments were 10 percent more accurate than the clinicians.
What do psycho-pharmacologists focus on in their work?
A psychiatrist who primarily prescribes medications, so pretty much drug therapy.
What percentage of the population is expected to qualify for one of the DSM 5 categories at least once in their lifetime? What is meant by the concept of comorbidity?
About half, 46.4% according to some surveys. Some of them even experience two or more different disorders, an occurrence known as comorbidity.
What is meant by the concept of standardization when it comes to developing an assessment tool? What roles does standardization play in it? Give examples of "inadequate standardization"?
All clinicians must follow the same procedures when they use a particular technique of assessment; clinicians must standardize the way they interpret the results of an assessment tool in order to be able to understand what a particular score means. b. Inadequate standardization may not be reliable or valid p. 84
What are the principal components of a clinical assessment?
Clinical interviews, tests, and observations p 84
How does DSM 5 differ most significantly from its predecessors (hint; it has to do with categorical and dimensional information)? How does it differ in terms of inter-rater reliability?
DSM-5 is the first edition of the DSM to consistently seek both categorical and dimensional information as a part of the diagnosis, rather than categorical info alone. Dimensional information: in addition to deciding what disorder a client is displaying, diagnosticians assess the current severity of the client's disorder that is, how much the symptoms impair the client. This includes various rating scales. The framers of the DSM-5 followed certain procedures in their development of the new manual to help ensure that DSM-5 would have greater reliability than the previous DSM's.
How common is it for psychologists to guide their therapy decisions on what they read in recent research journals?
Evidence based practice (EBP) is a huge aspect to understanding knew techniques and applications to help with their patient's therapy, just like any other type of rehabilitation program (PT, OT, ST).
What percentage of patients receiving therapy for psychological problems improves over those not receiving treatment for similar problems?
Greater than 75% patients improve over those not receiving treatment.
What were some of the ways that DSM 5 tried to increase the reliability of its categories?
Here reliability means that different clinicians are likely to agree on the diagnosis when they use the system to diagnose the same client. The framers of the DSM-5 followed certain procedures in their development of the new manual to help ensure that DSM-5 would have greater reliability than the previous DSM's. For example, they conducted extensive reviews of research to pinpoint which categories in past DSM's had been too vague and unreliable. In addition they gathered input from a wide range of experienced clinicians and researchers. They then developed a number or new diagnostic criteria and categories, expecting that the new criteria and categories were in fact reliable.
How much credit does Emile Kraepelin deserve with regard to developing the current diagnostic system? Where in the world is DSM 5 used exclusively? Where is it not? Approximately how many mental disorders does DSM 5 consist of? How does this compare with the original DSM?
IN 1883 Emil Kraepelin developed the first modern classification system for abnormal behavior. His categories formed the foundation for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the classification system currently written by the American Psychiatric Association (APA, 2013). The DSM is the most widely used classification system in the US. Most other countries use a system called the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), developed by the World Health Organization. Current edition, called DSM-5, was published in 2013. DSM has 400 mental disorders. The original DSM was not reliable. DSM-5 is the first edition of the DSM to consistently seek both categorical and dimensional information as a part of the diagnosis, rather than categorical info alone.
What is meant by the procedure called "meta-analysis"?
It involves combining and analyzing the results of many different individual studies devoted to a specific topic. This technique allows researchers to get a better look at overall trends and identify possible relationships that might exist.
What is meant by the idea of a functional analysis? What are its principal assumptions?
It is an analysis of human behaviors and assumes that those behaviors are of how the behaviors are learned and reinforced p. 84
What is meant by the idea of high, inter-rater reliability?
It is when different judges independently agree on how to score and interpret it. Consider a test that requires the person to draw a copy of a picture, which a judge then rates for accuracy p. 84
What is meant by an evidence-based form of therapy and what has been happening in recent years in terms of how much support there has been for these kinds of therapy?
It's a movement in the clinical field that seeks to identify which therapies have received clear research support for each disorder, to develop corresponding treatment guidelines, and to spread such information to clinicians. It has been gaining tremendous support in recent years.
What is meant by a self-fulfilling prophecy in diagnostic decisions? What percentage of Americans believes that they should be able to deal with their psychological problems on their own or would not tell their boss they are receiving psychological help?
Many family social theorists believe that diagnostic labels can become self-fulfilling prophecies. When people are diagnosed as mentally disturbed, they may be viewed and reacted to correspondingly. If others expect them to take on a sick role, they may begin to consider themselves sick as well and act that way. People labeled mentally ill may find it difficult to get a job, especially a position of responsibility, or to be welcomed into social relationships. Once labeled it could stick for a while. Clinicians believe we must simply work to increase what is known about psychological disorders and improve diagnostic techniques. 41% percent of americans believe they should be able to handle psychological problems on their own. 67% of Americans would not tell their employer that they were seeking mental health treatment.
What has been happening in recent year with regard to attention to and respect for assessment techniques? What has been happening at the same it to its use? Why?
Respect for assessment and diagnosis is on the rise again. This has increased research and is helping clinicians work with more consistency and accuracy.
