Health and Psychology

There's a huge difference between appraisal and assessment.  An appraisal is essentially a screening technique that may involve some sort of rating scale, self-report or brief test.  A psychological assessment, on the other hand, involves formulating a complex, in-depth understanding of an individual from multiple points of view.

Personality assessment involves evaluating someone's functioning in a wide variety of situations to come to an understanding of how they are likely to react to future situations.  In my class on personality assessment I've infused personality theory so the observations and test results can move into a formal structure for understanding.  So the class isn't just some powerpoint presentation on here are the psychometrics of this test, the characteristics of people taking it, how to score it, and how to look at the resulting profile.  The class is about people.

There are a lot of theories about how someone's personality develops.  I use a lot of different theories in class-psychodynamic, social learning, behavioral, neofreudian, and object-relations.  Then we talk about someone.  A person.  Who are they as people?  So we'll take this little hypothetical child and put them in some family setting.  The child has a temperment, a set of characteristics they came into the world with.  They might be easy going or fussy, warm and cuddly or prickly, happy or serious. 

I have old movies of my oldest brother who is the most serious baby I have ever seen on film.  He is extraordinarily intense.  He studies his rattle.  In the film he's intensely watching his grandfather shave.  Looking back and forth between his grandfather and the reflection of his grandfather in the mirror.  Our mother is flitting around in the foreground on occasion.  It's a black and white film from the 1950's with no sound.  The baby is paying no attention to his mother, only to the grandfather.  The mother isn't seen interacting with the baby at all.  The person operating the camera is watching the baby and the grandfather interact.  That's the focus of the brief clip.  It lasts about 15 minutes. The baby doesn't draw a lot of attention to himself.  He sits quietly and watches what is going on.

Now we move to the adult.  He is a computer expert.  He's quiet and serious minded.  He notices people and pays attention to them but stays a bit reserved. So I can now start to make some predictions about what this person might be like when he's assessed.  He's not likely to be dramatic in his interactions.  He's likely to be a bit standoffish at first.  Slow to warm up.  Not rejecting, just serious minded and intense.  That's part of his temperment.  In the film he's only observed interacting with his grandfather.  Although his mother is seen briefly, she's not observed interacting with the baby at all.  His father is never seen in any of the films I have.  A long haul trucker who died in his late 20's, he wasn't involved in the life of the baby.  I've been told his grandmother is the one behind the camera.  She's not observed in the film but she clearly adores the baby.  So it's not surprising that he feels more comfortable dealing predominantly with men.  That's who he interacted with and who he feels more comfortable being around.  In his life he seems to have a couple of groups of women.  A few he's exceptionally close to who appear to adore him, such as his wife.  And a few he has as associates or colleagues where he seeems more reserved. Again, none of this is a surprise.  You can see it in the film from when he's eight months old. We were raised apart.  I met him when I was in my 40's.  We communicate by letter.  He's kind and warm, but tempermentally we are very different.

We can look at personality characteristics like introversion and extroversion, dependence and independence, self focus or other focus and look at those characteristics in a variety of psychological tests and measurements.  Once the tests are learned by the students we can then ask what we expect to find for this person with this set of circumstances.  It's a complex process.  If a sophisticated test such as the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory is used we can derive nuance and shading to temperment and characterological patterns, and look at things that might be driving areas of psychopathology if he were to show up in an outpatient treatment setting.  In contrast, if we look at a test to determine how he will get along with others for something like a team assignment at work, we can use something more like a Myer's Briggs test so show what personality and temperment aspects he would bring to a team.  We can look at how he views the world and himself in less of a self-report fashion with more projective techniques such as the Rorschach or TAT.

Even though we might only spend a couple of hours in an assessment we can get a well rounded picture of who someone is and how they are likely to function in a variety of settings and circumstances.  We can derive assessment based treatments for better outcomes in psychotherapy.  We can assist someone in learning about themselves and help them to improve areas they want to improve and minimize setbacks.