Behavioral Assessment

• Reflects behavioral, or cognitive-behavioral, models of human behavior and problems.
• Less inferential.
• More descriptive.
• Situational focus.
• To understand a person you have to understand them in their environment.
• Environments are assumed to have strong effect on people's behavior.
• Pragmatic, treatment orientation.
• Operant Conditioning approaches ("Functional Analyses")
• Behavior problems are shaped & maintained by environmental contingencies
• Problems are construed as excesses, deficits, inappropriate stimulus control
• inappropriate stimulus control- The person isn't appropriately responding to cues in the environment.
• Relations between antecedents, behaviors, & consequences are elucidated
• actions are understood as embedded in sequences of stimuli that come before and after behavior
• cues for behavior and consequences of it are studied
• Assessment relies on interviews, observation, self-observation, frequency ratings
• Self-Report Measures
• Some are behaviorally-oriented versions of logically-keyed problem lists,
• e.g., Fear Survey Schedule, Depression Adjective Checklist. The questions are generally straightforward and based on observable behavior.
• Others attempt to get at underlying cognitions or feelings (expectations, values, fears) e.g., Assertive Behavior Survey Schedule (cf. Table 17-5, p 473), Irrational Beliefs Test.

Computerized Assessment Procedures

• Psychophysiological Assessment
• Make conjectures about mental processes from changes in bodily ones
• Measures include Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, Respiration, Skin Temp, pupillary dilation, visual tracking, penile & vaginal transducers, Skin Conductance (Galvanic Skin Response), EMG (muscle), EEG (brain waves), PET (positron emission tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging)
• For all of these, the real trick is decoding the link between mental & physical processes. "lie detectors" (really, stress detectors) have tried this for years, with mixed success
• Signal Detection Procedures
• measures information processing speed, sensitivity
• some intriguing hypotheses relate speed to intelligence
• other studies suggest schizophrenics may be slower than normals
• interpretation of these findings remains complex & uncertain

Computerization of Existing Tests

• Computers can administer, score, even interpret traditional tests
• Benefits include enhanced reliability, perhaps validity, cost-effectiveness
1. Administration: better standardization, response latencies, adaptive testing
2. Scoring: better use of norms, subscales, statistical checks
3. Interpretation: standardization based on experts & research
• Drawbacks: loss of flexibility, behavioral observation, increased potential misuse

Measures of Anxiety

• Early measures were global, general, not very specific in defining anxiety
• Examples: MMPI 7 scale, Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, IPAT Anxiety Scale

• Speilberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) distinguished between
1. Trait Anxiety is the tendency to become anxious
2. State Anxiety is current, immediate anxiety level
3. actually, both scales contain same 20 items, with different instructions

Greatly improved reliability, probably validity too for many uses

Others have tried to better define anxiety, and represent their constructs more fully

Endler Multidimensional Anxiety Scale (EMAS)

• Based on factor analysis, measures
1. social evaluation anxiety
2. sense of physical danger
3. ambiguous anxiety (discomfort with novel, uncertain situations)
4. daily routines (distress involving common daily activities and experiences)

• Conceptualizes anxiety in terms of four dimensions
1. Somatic
2. Cognitive
3. Emotional/Affective
4. Behavioral

Others have gotten even more specific: For example, there are specialized measures of Test Anxiety extensively discussed in your book. These attempt to focus even more exactly on the variations of anxiety, and anxious persons, in a particular context. This raises a general issue, commonly known as the Bandwidth-Fidelity Problem: Techniques that measure broadly tend to be less exact than specific ones, encouraging use and development of highly focused, narrow tools. Of course, when to use which tool then becomes hard to assess, and integrating test results grows increasingly difficult.