PSY7514 - Advanced Assessment Elective

1. General - Development of skills for integrating multiple assessment instruments to produce a meaningful and thoughtful personality analysis. Focus on the clinical inference process. Emphasis on the selection, interpretation and report writing of comprehensive psychological batteries.
2. Children - Emphasis on assessment and formulation of treatment recommendations for learning and emotional disorders in children.
3. Cultural
4. Psychodynamic
5. Forensic
6. Multicultural Couples Therapy - This is an introductory course in exploring and understanding multicultural issues in couples therapy. It is designed to begin to develop skills in conceptualizing couples from an integrative approach in assessment and intervention. This course combines clinical theory and skills development with an appreciation of ethnicity and cultural perspectives. Critical to this course is an emphasis on the clinician’s and the clients’ ethnicity, race, family of origin, values and gender issues that influence the clinical process. The course explores the adaptive challenges in cross-cultural clinical work with couples. It is both didactic and experiential and students participate through (1) group discussion, (2) role playing and (3) reaction papers to the course material and learning process.
7. Child Assessment - Provides an overview of child assessment techniques including developmental history taking, clinical interviewing, administering and interpreting test results, writing reports and providing feedback. Actual assessment experience is part of the course. Students discuss professional and ethical issues involved with child assessment and how to adapt assessments according to cultural diversity and special needs.
8. Couple Assessment and Intervention (3, 3 units) - Applications of psychodynamic, systemic, humanistic and communication-interactional concepts to conceptualizing couples and intervening to promote relationship awareness, communication skills, empathy, intimacy collaboration, empowerment, appreciation of differences, conflict reduction, collusion reduction and mutuality of individual and relationship development. Discussion focuses on the contexts of intergenerational legacies, gender, sex roles, ethnicity and sexual orientation. the teaching methods are case analysis, experiential role playing, assignments with volunteer couples and reaction papers.
9. Cognitive Analysis of Personality and Pathology by the Use of Tests (3, 3 units) - This course is designed as an advanced clinical course for the dynamic understanding of personality and psychopathology through the use of data from psychological assessment tools. The course will require a good basic ability and interest in assessment. Test instruments will be used to understand the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of individuals as well as personality and psychopathology dynamics that will help in treatment planning. The test instruments will include those used in the basic assessment course at CSPP. The student will also be required to learn some neuropsychology tests. This two semester course will help students develop the ability to use tests in their understanding of clients and in developing therapeutic approaches to the intervention process.
10. Clinical Inference