Exam 13: Critical Thinking in Clinical Reasoning and Diagnosis

The acronym "M-A-D" can help you remember three fundamental, preliminary questions that can help you decide whether someone has a severe psychological problem. These letters stand for:

Jerry believes that the terrorist group Al Qaeda is monitoring his every thought, seeking to divide his personality into units that it can control. Jerry further believes that God has ordered him to go on a secret mission to prevent the terrorists from listening to his or other people's thoughts. For a preliminary hypothesis of how Jerry should be diagnosed, which disorder description BEST fits his symptoms?

Preconceptions, stereotypes, and expectations are MOST closely associated with:

Freud proposed that through the defense mechanism of repression, the ego pushes unpleasant, threatening experiences outside of conscious awareness so that they cannot be later accessed from memory. Not only did some people come to accept this psychological misconception as true, but they also began to speak of the ego and the unconscious as if they were actual parts of the mind. This is like the thinking error of _____, which people make when they assume that a psychological disorder such as generalized anxiety disorder is objectively real.

When a person questions whether someone has a severe psychological problem-especially when deciding whether the person's behavior is abnormal-it is important to:

Imagine that a clinical psychologist tries to follow good practices in clinical assessment. Which is probably the BEST series of steps to follow if interviews with a client suggest that he may be experiencing depression?

If someone argues that sadness differs from minor depression and from major depression to some degree along a quantitative dimension, then that person is most likely viewing these differences:

According to your textbook, which question is one of the fundamental, preliminary questions that helps to decide whether a person has a severe psychological problem?

Similar to the general descriptions of traits found in horoscopes, clinicians sometimes write case descriptions that could apply to anyone. When people endorse these as good descriptions of a person, this is referred to as:

When a clinician makes a differential diagnosis, the clinician has:

When the media provide extensive coverage of horrific murder cases and vividly describe multiple homicides by people with severe psychological problems, this may contribute to:

Clinicians (psychologists and psychiatrists) are more likely to make diagnoses that are unreliable when they have:

According to the textbook, a diagnosis of a mental disorder BEST means that a clinician has:

Extensive and vivid coverage by media of homicides committed by people with severe psychological problems may contribute to the misconception that people with mental disorders are more violent than those without the disorders. The thinking error of _____ MOST likely contributes to this biased view.

The DSM basically takes a _____ approach to the diagnosis of mental disorders.

Matt, the creative writer described in this chapter, reported in a clinical interview that sometimes swarms of ideas came into his head and that his girlfriend was listening to him from behind the walls and making them ring by hitting them. Based on information provided in the text, the BEST preliminary diagnosis is that Matt has:

Suppose a clinician has done a differential diagnosis of a mental disorder for a client. This means that the clinician has:

Examining the concept of abnormal behavior from a broad perspective reveals it is:

When clinicians pay too little attention to client data and too much attention to their theoretical conceptions and preconceptions of clients' problems, they are depending too much on:

Self-reports of symptoms, behavioral observations, results of psychological tests, and psychological interviews are used: