Abnormal Psychology Diagnosis Quiz

Abnormal Psychology

• Instructor: Dr. Rukhsana Kausar
• Topic: 9-14

Diagnosis

• Diagnosis is based on assessment and DSM-5 criteria.
• Clinicians use available information to paint a "clinical picture."
• This picture is influenced by the clinician's theoretical orientation.
• Diagnosis is the determination that a person's problems reflect a particular disorder or syndrome, based on an existing classification system.

Diagnostic Process

• Components of the diagnostic process include clinical interview, subjective rating, baselines, behavioral assessment, formal assessment tests, and prognosis.

Characteristics of Psychological Assessment

• Assessment involves collecting relevant information to reach a conclusion, focusing on individual cases (idiographic) and evaluating treatment progress.
• Clinical assessment tools include clinical interviews, tests, and observations.

Characteristics of Test

• Assessment tools must be standardized and have clear reliability and validity.
• Procedures include administration, scoring, and interpretation.

Clinical Interview

• Used to gather detailed information, especially personal history, about the client.
• Allows the interviewer to focus on crucial topics.
• Can be either unstructured or structured.
• Limitations include potential lack of validity or accuracy, particularly in unstructured interviews, potential for individual misleading responses, and interviewer bias.

Mental Status Examination

• Includes general appearance (e.g., appearance relative to age, body build, clothing, hygiene, odor, facial expression).
• Psychomotor behavior (e.g., gait, handshake, abnormal movements).
• Speech (e.g., rate of speech, intensity of volume, liveliness, quantity).
• Mood and affect (e.g., appropriateness of affect, range of affect, stability of affect, attitude toward the interviewer; specific mood or feelings observed or reported, anxiety level).
• Cognition (e.g., cognition, attention & concentration, memory, abstraction, insight into illness, orientation, judgment).
• Thought pattern (e.g., clarity, relevance/logic, flow, content, level of consciousness)..

Diagnostic Assessment

• Intelligence Tests: Salosson Intelligence Test, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales.
• Personality Testing (Self-report): Big Five Inventory, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Cattell's 16 Personality Factors Tests.
• Personality Testing (Projective): Rorschach test, Thematic Apperception Test, Child Apperception Test, House Tree Person.
• Neuropsychological Assessment: Benton Visual Retention Test, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS), Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological battery, Memory Assessment Scales (MAS), Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Tests, Stroop Test, Tower Test.
• Specific Disorder Related Tests: Beck Depression Inventory, Beck Anxiety Inventory, OCD Inventory, Positive and negative symptoms scale.

Behavior Observation

• Systematic observations of behavior are key, including naturalistic observations and self-monitoring.
• Clinical observation includes subjective ratings of symptoms and baseline charts.

DSM-5 and Assessment

• DSM-5 criteria can serve as an assessment tool, particularly for rating the severity of a disorder.
• A list of assessment tools is provided.

Assessment Report

• Briefly summarizes results via various assessment inventories.
• Includes the history of the problem, behavioral observations, test administration, quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and conclusions.

DSM & Diagnosis

• DSM criteria can be used as an assessment tool
• Severity criteria to rate the severity of the disorder are in DSM-5.

What's New in DSM-5

• Changes to diagnostic structure (non-axial system, unspecified, changed wording of conditions).
• Obsolete categories, new categories (e.g., disruptive mood dysregulation, persistent depressive disorder).

Diagnosis and Treatment

• Clinicians diagnose to treat abnormality.
• Treatment/therapy is a procedure to change abnormal behavior back to normal.

Treatment Team

• Typically includes psychiatrists, psychologists, helping staff, and family/informant.

Modality of Treatment

• Treatment involves using assessment information and diagnostic decisions to determine a treatment plan.
• It typically combines idiographic and nomothetic information and uses various techniques.

Additional Topics (Not a fixed hierarchy)

• Therapy involves sufferer, trained healer and a series of contacts.
• Various theoretical orientations are presented (i.e., sociocultural, psychoanalytic, biological).