Case Summary For Psychological Assessment

Case history of John

Write about a Case Summary for Psychological Assessment.

John is 45-year-old man who is living with his family. John was referred to the Monash Medical centre with the history of headache and muscle pain in the legs that he was forced to leave his job as a carpenter. John is an English Carpenter who is has come with the problem of major muscular pain and has problems in sitting and while walking. He is well oriented and well perfuse. There was no abnormality found while looking at him in the first place.

John has a very strong family history, which predisposes him to develop a mood disorder. According to Levinson et al. (2014), a large sample of people diagnosed with non-anxious control and general anxiety disorder showed the family history of the psychological problems. As per the behavioural genetics research, metal disorders are highly attributed to genetic factors.  John’s cousin was suffering from Bipolar Disorder and John’s sibling has posttraumatic stress disorder. However, it is evident that John has a strong genetic history that can influence the psychological condition of John.

It has been seen through several researches that the psychological assessment tests are very much similar to the medical tests. The patients when have their medical symptoms are given certain blood tests or physical examination tests that are helpful to understand the cause of the symptoms of the patient (Zacher, 2014). The results of the tests are the will always help the physician to develop a current plan of the treatment. The various psychological evaluations are done for the mental well being of the patients that more or less serves the same purpose. The psychologist uses the tests and the other form of the assessment tools that are used for observing the behaviour of the client and hence they can come to the proper diagnosis and the guide for the treatment of the patients (Staff, Hogan & Whalley, 2017). The psychologists administer the various forms of tests and the assessments for the wide range of reasons. The children who are facing problems in reading and writing, the workers who are facing several problems in their workplace or any other person who have their problems that are generally and anxiety can be assessed by the various test reports and assessment techniques that are implemented by the psychologists (Bryman, 2015).

The personality tests are the most common form of test or measures that assess the characteristics of the individual that are not influenced by the belief and that are said to be on the independent form of the bias. The objective forms of the tests are actually the measures of the characteristics of the individual through the assessment processes. The personality tests are generally reflective and the assessment results reports their true personality

Predisposing factors

there are three types of tool that was implemented on the patient to know their true personality report. The three forms of tools that were used for this study was NEO PI R, Life story interview and Thematic Apperception Test.

Firstly, life story report is the interviews that are done on the client where he/she have to tell the psychologists about their life story. The social scientists have always interested to hear about the stories of the past of the individuals and about the plans that they want to accomplish in their future. The client is asked to focus on the key questions that are asked by the psychologists about their past. They needs only focus on the scenes, characters and the ideas that are asked by the psychologists to them (Zacher, 2014).  There are no right or wrong to the answers to the questions. Their task is to tell about the past incidents and to imagine their future. They have to cover the areas such as high point, low point, turning point, positive form of the childhood memory, negative childhood memory and vivid form of adult memory in their life history (Bryman, 2015). They also need to focus on the several challenges of their life and they need to overcome those challenges in a day-to-day basis.

The NEO PI R, is the second tool that are use for the assessment of the personality of the client. It is a standardized form of questionnaire and it provides a systematic form of emotional, experimental, motivational and the attitude styles with a detailed way of the description of the of the personality. The Neo PI R is the concise form that consists of the five main domains of personality that have the six major form that defines each type of the traits of the personality. The shortened version of the Neo Five factor inventory is comprised of 60 items that have 12 items per domain. Both the inventory Neo PI R and Neo FFI are been updated from a longer period and it has been finally updated in the year of 2010. The Neo PI R assesses the big five form of the personality traits that includes the Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Neuroticism. However, the inventory assesses the six form of the subordinate form of the dimensions that have the factors that are related to the factors of the main personality. Paul Costa Jr and Robert MaCrae have developed the test that can be used by the adult men and the women without the overt form of the psychopathology.

Biography of Psychological Assessment

The third type of assessment that are used for the study is the Thematic Apperception Test  apperception test or TAT is one of the projective technique, which measures and evaluate the patterns of the person’s attitudes, the patterns in which they think, emotional responses to the test materials that are ambiguous. TAT is the example of the instrument of projection that helps the person to project their thought process and emotional responses. The TAT measures the three forms of the defence mechanisms that include the denial, identification and projection. The individual’s thoughts and history of the defense mechanisms used are analyzed in the stories that are told by them by seeing the cards. The discrete dimension of the scale analyzes the social cognition and the object relationship of the observation of the patient. The complexities of the representation of the people are affected by the tone of the relationship, the moral standards and the understanding of the casualty of the society.

John scored a raw score of (N = 1300 on the Neuroticism scale (N), t= 78 
On the Neuroticism Scale (N), John scored an raw score of N = 130, t= 78 
Andy scored “very high” on the Neuroticism Scale (raw score (N) = 130, t=78)

In case of the TAT test, it has been observed that the client was pulling two cards that shows the card that was pull out was for the defence mechanisms. From different forms of studies, it was clear that the different TAT cards pull for different defences. These findings provide the indication that the cards might be especially likely to pull the particular form of the defences. Results indicate that two cards (3BM, 8BM) are likely to pull for denial. These two cards both include a gun in the picture, which perhaps accounts for the use of the defence to disavow this potential threat (Ispas et al., 2014). Cards 3BM and 8BM also pull for projection, as do 6BM, 15, and 18GF, but these latter three cards are quite different in content and do not provide any clear explanation for their elicitation of projection. Cards 1, 2, 6BM, and 7BM all pull for identification. Cards 1 and 2 both suggest the presence of cerebral activity or work. Cards 6BM and 7BM both include two figures, each dyad representing older and younger people who are avoiding interaction, perhaps indicating both affiliation as well as the need for personal differentiation. These features could be seen as contributing to the defence of identification. The findings also suggest that some TAT cards are relatively neutral in terms of pulling for defence mechanisms.

Description of the tools

The report of the life story report suggests that the client has various forms of insecurity due to his past events. The problem of mood disorders and prevalence of neuroticism are found vehemently in his family history.       

John has a very strong family history, which predisposes him to develop a mood disorder. According to Levinson et al. (2014), a large sample of people diagnosed with non-anxious control and general anxiety disorder showed the family history of the psychological problems. As per the behavioural genetics research, metal disorders are highly attributed to genetic factors.  John’s cousin was suffering from Bipolar Disorder and John’s sibling has posttraumatic stress disorder. However, it is evident that John has a strong genetic history that can influence the psychological condition of John.  John suffered a spider bite developed cellulites, ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament, surgery on anal fistula and diagnosed of osteitis pubis. He has been also suffering from workplace stress factor, workplace bullying, severe loss of functioning, no work capacity, loss of significant support from work and family. He has been also suffering from financial strain is the major perpetuating factor for his depression and anxiety.

The third tool that was used on the client to know about his personality trait was the NEO PIR. From the results of the NEO PI R inventory, it was found that the client is has scored higher in the neurotic facet and introversion facet. This is because the type of environment he is living is bound to give him the problems and make him inclined towards depression and anxiety. It has been observed from the life history analysis of John that he is suffering from huge financial crisis. Therefore, it is very much obvious that he is inclined towards depression. Moreover, his genetic history also portrays that there is a bipolar disorder and mood disorder history in his family. Therefore, the NEP PI R scale shows that he has scored higher in Neuroticism scale.

From the case study, it has been observed that the various forms of the inventory tools helps the psychologists to know about the personality traits of the person.

References

Bryman, A. (2015). Social research methods. Oxford university press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Wong, M. M. H. (2014). Motivation and academic achievement: The effects of personality traits and the quality of experience. In Applications of flow in human development and education (pp. 437-465). Springer Netherlands.

Fountoulakis, K. N., Siamouli, M., Moysidou, S., Pantoula, E., Moutou, K., Panagiotidis, P., ... & Preti, A. (2014). Standardization of the NEO-PI-3 in the Greek general population. Annals of general psychiatry, 13(1), 36.

Ispas, D., Iliescu, D., Ilie, A., & Johnson, R. E. (2014). Exploring the cross-cultural generalizability of the five-factor model of personality: The Romanian NEO PI-R. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45(7), 1074-1088.

Jones, D. N., & Paulhus, D. L. (2014). Introducing the short dark triad (SD3) a brief measure of dark personality traits. Assessment, 21(1), 28-41.

Klotz, A. C., & Neubaum, D. O. (2016). Research on the dark side of personality traits in entrepreneurship: observations from an organizational behavior perspective. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 40(1), 7-17.

Leutner, F., Ahmetoglu, G., Akhtar, R., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2014). The relationship between the entrepreneurial personality and the Big Five personality tr

Lo, M. T., Hinds, D. A., Tung, J. Y., Franz, C., Fan, C. C., Wang, Y., ... & Sanyal, N. (2017). Genome-wide analyses for personality traits identify six genomic loci and show correlations with psychiatric disorders. Nature genetics, 49(1), 152.

Mihura, J. L., & Meyer, G. J. (2015). Thematic Apperception Test. The Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology.

Siefert, C. J., Stein, M. B., Slavin-Mulford, J., Sinclair, S. J., Haggerty, G., & Blais, M. A. (2016). Estimating the effects of Thematic Apperception Test card content on SCORS–G ratings: Replication with a nonclinical sample. Journal of personality assessment, 98(6), 598-607.

Staff, R. T., Hogan, M. J., & Whalley, L. J. (2017). Childhood intelligence and personality traits neuroticism and openness contributes to social mobility: A study in the Aberdeen 1936 Birth Cohort. Personality and Individual Differences, 114, 206-212.

Wetzel, E., Böhnke, J. R., Carstensen, C. H., Ziegler, M., & Ostendorf, F. (2013). Do individual response styles matter? Assessing differential item functioning for men and women in the NEO-PI-R. Journal of Individual Differences, 34(2), 69.

Zacher, H. (2014). Career adaptability predicts subjective career success above and beyond personality traits and core self-evaluations. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 84(1), 21-30.