Psychopathology: Week 5

What are the four sources commonly used in psychosocial assessments?

• interview

• clincial observation

• clinical history

• other psychological tests

What are the different types of interviews in diagnostic assessments?

Structured: questions are pre-ordered and pre-established (this is better)

Semi-structured: pre-established questions, can ask follow-up

Unstructured: assessor chooses/adapts questions (this is common)

What are the types of clinical observation?

• observation in natural environmanets

  • ex: exposure therapy in public

• observations in medical settings

  • ex: how they act in the office

    • physcial hygiene and appearnace

    • affect

    • speech

    • behavnior approporiate to the setting

• Role playing, event reenactment, think-aloud procedures

What are the two types of psychological tests we learned about? What are examples of each?

• neuropsychological cognitive abilities

  • IQ testing

• psychopathology and personality tests

  • projective

    • rorschach inkblot

    • thematic appercaption

    • sentence completion

  • objective

    • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

What are the 4 scales of IQ testing?

1. verbal ability

2. spatial ability

3. working memory

4. processing speed

What is IQ correlated with? What is it modestly correlated with?

• ocupational success and income

• health and longevity

• general quality of life

Modestly correlated with: 

• long-term memory

• executive function (planning, multi-tasking, switching)

• naming

• perception

• motor control

• understanding and producing language (but the quality of language is correlated with IQ)

What are the two types of psychpathology and personality tests?

1. Projective: items presented, participants are allowed open-ended responses

   1. Items are typically ambiguous (but they do not need to be)

2. Objective: items presented, participants allowed closed-ended responses

   1. items are typically concrete (but they do not need to be)

What are examples of projective psychopathology and personality tests?

1. Rorschach inkblot test

2. thematic apperception test

3. sentence completion test

What is an example of an objective psychopathology and personality test?

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

What is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)? What is its history?

• Most widely used objective personality test (used in many settings: clinical, IO, forensic, employment…)

• Meant to be a screening tool to assist with diagnosis and treatment, developed in the 1930s

• Has undergone 3 major revisions

What are some features of the MMPI-3?

• MMPI-3 has ~350 true/false items

• simple wording, individual items are scored and summed together to create scales

• decent reliability and validity 

What were some problems with the MMPI?

• didn’t discriminate cases from normals in new samples

• heterogeneity of content (each scale measures distress)

• high scale intercorrelations

• items overlap

What were solutions to the MMPI problems?

• Stop using MMPI for screening patients; instead, use it to “interpret” the profile in terms of the empirical correlates of elevated scores (interpret them in terms of what each scale tends to predict)

• generation of many additional content scales for other outcomes (e.g., self-harm, addiction)

What were parts of the most recent MMPI revision? 

• removed problems with the original clinical scales

  • measured general distress once, instead of measuring repeatedly in each clinical scale

• remaining scales measure largely independent construct

What are the higher order scales on the MMPI currently?

• emotional/internalizing dysfunction

• thought dysfunction

• behavioral/externalizing dysfunction