PSYC 356 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Family Therapy, Headache, Likert Scale
4 Jun 2018
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Psyc356 – Nov. 24, 2017 1
Psyc356 – Nov. 24, 2017
• Martin: Why are we here today? All the assignments are done, and this won’t be on the
exam. He also doesn’t care, since he’s never teaching again (or so he says)
• Next week we don’t have to come. That’s a ‘goodbye’ week, but there’s still a bit of a
lecture if we want to attend.
• Papers:
o Due at 11:59 pm on Friday, December 1st. Friday night.
o Due next week
o Normal margins and APA style
o Title page with basic stuff (title, name, student number, class, TA)
o Begin with the basics
▪ Age, presenting issues, family composition
o Address diagnostic labels
▪ Identify which DSM diagnosis he is meeting criteria for
• Just need to show that we can map behaviours that we see to
symptoms of diagnostic criteria. He won’t fit them all to be
diagnosed, or length or severity, but say “Max shows this and this
behaviour, which is consistent with this behaviour”. You don’t
need to say ‘HE HAS THIS DISORDER’, but we can if we want
to and if we can argue it.
• Wants to see our facility in mapping behaviours to symptoms of
categories
▪ DO NOT take one small instance of something and map it to a symptom.
Ex: don’t’ say that he doesn’t look people in the eye, and say he has
autism.
▪ You probably want 2-3 consistent things that could be mapped to
symptoms
o Now go back in time; start telling the story
▪ The heart of the conceptualization
▪ Create the narrative of how we got here
▪ Things we can assume have occurred in his life, things that have occurred
in his life, and what led him to taking off to the wild things
▪ Discuss how events, reactions to events, and ways of coping with these
events and the world led to the current situation
o You can take things he’s doing as assumptions of what’s going on (fantasy play)
but be clear
▪ “we can see that, given the themes or nature of his fantasy play, that this is
an expression of x”
o Do not go stupidly in depth with your narrative with things like “dad isn’t there,
so he’s likely dead”. We just know he’s not present.
o When we talk about things going on in his life, we need to know latent vs.
manifest (what’s actually happening vs. what’s being presented by max)
▪ Manifest is observable, latent is what’s going on underneath that’s
producing his behaviours.
• Que-ggestions:
o His human family is closely related to his monster family
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Psyc356 – Nov. 24, 2017 2
o Throw around three diagnoses in the paper
o You don’t have to say he HAS ADHD or ODD or CD. We don’t need to say he
meets criteria for that. WE DO have to say which behaviours match onto which
symptoms of disorders
o Don’t give long winded explanations of behaviours. “We see these behaviours
here and here, and that could be symptoms of this because of this and this.”
▪ Don’t describe scenes in detail. That’s just wasting space
o Citations aren’t necessary if you don’t want to. A nice story about linking together
all of things that we see is what the TA and Martin are looking for.
• Kenny is organizing people from tallest to shortest. Let’s see where this goes…
o How did he do this? What’s his operationalized definition?
o Martin: Let’s operationally define height as # of hairs on their head. Now our
definition of height is very different, because while it’s defined as number of
hairs, we would say ‘that’s not height!’
▪ How do we measure height? It’s easy! We cut their hair off and count it
o How do we know what the right way to measure ‘height’ is?
o How do we know we’re measuring height correctly? Well, we can see it; it’s
nonsensical to see height as hairs when we ‘know’ that height is length in cm or
inches
o Martin: Now organize them according to happiness. How are we going to do this?
▪ We can do self-report questionnaires. A 7-point Likert scale on how happy
they are
o Martin: Why do we feel better now that we’ve asked them how happy they are,
rather than Kenny just arrange them according to what he perceived as happy?
▪ We can ‘do research’ with self-report; we feel better because we have a
number. We can do some statistical test
▪ But we also have our apprehensions towards testing this way, because how
are we sure that they understand the scale of ‘happiness’ as we do? We
like to think that it’s more ‘meaningful’, however the operationalized
definition is still lacking. Even though we have a numerical representation,
it might still be horse shit.
o Kenny: If we all agree that one nonsense is better than some other nonsense, then
at least we have agreement within the community
Measurement:
• To quantify something; put a number on it
• We measure all these things in psychology, such as happiness, depression, looking time,
attention, etc. But how do we measure these things?
o We all have the same idea on how to measure height, but when it comes to
happiness, we don’t have a universal measurement
• How do we measure these ‘abstract’ things?
o Self-report measures, like the BDI-II. But what do these numbers mean?
o You have to report how you’ve been feeling within the last two weeks, “because
depression is a two-week thing” (Davidson, 2017)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
All the assignments are done, and this won"t be on the exam. He also doesn"t care, since he"s never teaching again (or so he says: next week we don"t have to come. That"s a goodbye" week, but there"s still a bit of a lecture if we want to attend: papers, due at 11:59 pm on friday, december 1st. Friday night: due next week, normal margins and apa style, title page with basic stuff (title, name, student number, class, ta, begin with the basics, age, presenting issues, family composition, address diagnostic labels. Identify which dsm diagnosis he is meeting criteria for: just need to show that we can map behaviours that we see to symptoms of diagnostic criteria. He won"t fit them all to be diagnosed, or length or severity, but say max shows this and this behaviour, which is consistent with this behaviour .
