PSYC 3140 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Mental Status Examination, Paul E. Meehl, Gordon Allport
1 Dec 2013
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Clinical psychology is about 100 years old. 1949, boulder conference on graduate education in psychology: developed a model of training, clinical psychologists to be trained both as scientists and as practitioners. Clinical psychologist should use their training as scientist researcher to guide their practice: evaluate client progress, apply critical thinking, employ empirically supported techniques, practice is formed by research literature. Statistical (actual) method classify the individual in terms of similar cases (nomothetic) as in testing. Clinical method attempting to understand the individual apart from other cases (idiographic: advocates argue that psychological causation is always personal and never actuarial, gordon allport in the 1940s; We should discard all predictions based on class membership, e. g. , actuarial predictions: example (g. allport, 1942, p. 157): Is 80 percent of delinquents from broken homes are recidivists, it does not follow that a single delinquent from a broken home as an 80% probability of becoming a recidivist. Probability is based on frequencies obtained across repeated trials.
