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Addiction Psychological Assessment

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When assessing personality and behaviors within a study the use of psychological assessment is necessary that assists the psychologist to reach a hypothesis. When dealing with substance use/ addiction psychological assessment can test and use many different techniques in order to gage where the client stands within their addiction. Testing severity, drug history, and more are observed in addiction psychological testing. It can help with creating treatment plans and methods during the intake process. Psychological testing can and does create hits, misses, false positive errors, and false negative errors; all four will be discussed as it relates to the psychological assessment chosen. The psychological assessment that I will be explaining is …show more content…

The MAPP has some reliable hits including the fact that it is very resistant to client deception by detecting inconsistency based on the questioning, and defensiveness scales. Based off of the reliability of the MAPP it’s “design also allows the clinician to identify nine patterns of deceptive answering and to complete a visual item-analysis of every answer in less than two minutes.” (www.diagnosticcounselingservices.com). The MAPP has been used on adults as well as juveniles for approximately twenty years and is ranked high in reliability. As for misses even with the high reliability of the MAPP I feel that there is still room for misses. For example within the assessment self image problems are observed. The MAPP requires self reporting but you must ask… what if the client has poor personal awareness? There can be mistruths within the assessment process and self reporting. There can be possible ways to mask manipulation in the assessment even with the measures the MAPP has taken to find deceit. Anxiety will also play apart within the assessment just the thought of a test of sorts can cause an anxious state within a client. The client will perform like an anxious person on such a test; this may cause the psychologists to observe that the person is trying to hide deception or manipulate the test when it’s really that they are anxious. Psychological test are created to limit errors and ensure test accuracy but, false positive errors, and false negative errors can and do still occur. This can occur when clients make errors on the questionnaire by not understanding what is being asked. A false positive error is defined as an error that occurs when the analysis of a trial detects a difference in outcomes statistically. For example once the MAPP is used and scored it then creates a

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