PSY 121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Solitude, Thalamus, Grey Matter
Document Summary
Important to distinguish disorders precisely in order to treat them properly: critics of new categories, new categories are needed for economic reasons. Insurance companies require specific diagnoses to ensure that clinicians are properly compensated. Problems with the dsm: danger of over-diagnosis, power of diagnostic labels, confusion of mental disorders with everyday problems, illusion of objectivity and universality. Benefits of the dsm: improves the reliability and agreement among clinicians, includes culture-bound syndromes. Projective tests: present ambiguous stimuli to interpret, transfer unconscious conflicts and motives onto ambiguous stimuli, e. g. Advantages and disadvantages: help clients open up about anxieties and conflicts, unreliable in diagnosing mental disorders, low validity- fail to measure what they intend to measure. Objective tests: standardized questionnaires, ask about the test taker s behavior and feelings, true and false, multiple-choice, rating scale. Advantages and disadvantages: reliably assess emotional problems, more valid than projective tests or subjective clinical observations and interviews, high rate of false positives.
