Professional training, psychodiagnostic skill, and kinetic family drawings

When Does Group Efficacy Deteriorate Group Performance? Implications of Group Competency

While the social cognitive theory suggests that a group’s efficacy belief enhances its performance, emerging evidence indicates that this relationship is more complex than it appears to be. This study explores the boundary conditions of this relationship using the data of 389 employees from 41 work groups in a manufacturing company in South Korea. The results show that group efficacy is positively related to group performance and that this relationship is stronger when members are generally incompetent than competent. We also found that a bottleneck, which is operationalized as a group’s minimum competency, in an efficacious group is at least one condition that forms a negative relationship between group efficacy and its performance.

The House-Tree-Person test is not valid for the prediction of mental health: An empirical study using deep neural networks

As one of the projective drawing techniques, the House-Tree-Person test (HTP) has been widely used in psychological counseling. However, its validity in diagnosing mental health problems remains controversial. Here, we adopted two approaches to examine the validity of HTP in diagnosing mental health problems objectively. First, we summarized the diagnostic features reported in previous HTP studies and found no reliable association between the existing HTP indicators and mental health problems studied. Next, after obtaining HTP drawings and depression scores from 4196 Chinese children and adolescents (1890 females), we used the Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to explore implicit features from entire HTP drawings that might have been missed in previous studies. We found that although the DNNs successfully learned to extract critical features of houses, trees, and persons in HTP drawings for object classification, it failed to classify the drawings of depressive individuals from those of non-depressive individuals. Taken together, our study casts doubts on the validity of the HTP in diagnosing mental health problems, and provides a practical paradigm of examining the validity of projective tests with deep learning.

The Scientific Status of Projective Techniques

Although projective techniques continue to be widely used in clinical and forensic settings, their scientific status remains highly controversial. In this monograph, we review the current state of the literature concerning the psychometric properties (norms, reliability, validity, incremental validity, treatment utility) of three major projective instruments: Rorschach Inkblot Test, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and human figure drawings. We conclude that there is empirical support for the validity of a small number of indexes derived from the Rorschach and TAT. However, the substantial majority of Rorschach and TAT indexes are not empirically supported. The validity evidence for human figure drawings is even more limited. With a few exceptions, projective indexes have not consistently demonstrated incremental validity above and beyond other psychometric data. In addition, we summarize the results of a new meta-analysis intended to examine the capacity of these three instruments to detect child sexual abuse. Although some projective instruments were better than chance at detecting child sexual abuse, there were virtually no replicated findings across independent investigative teams. This meta-analysis also provides the first clear evidence of substantial file drawer effects in the projectives literature, as the effect sizes from published studies markedly exceeded those from unpublished studies. We conclude with recommendations regarding the (a) construction of projective techniques with adequate validity, (b) forensic and clinical use of projective techniques, and (c) education and training of future psychologists regarding projective techniques.

The Use of Kinetic Family Drawing with Hispanic Mothers in the School Setting

In this study the Kinetic Family Drawing (KFD) was utilized with Hispanic mothers to facilitate openness regarding their child's problems in the school setting. Three goals for the KFD were explored: to encourage parents to state their perception of the problem; to modify parents' perception of the problem; to work through parents' denial of the problem when it occurred. Findings indicated that the qualitative use of the KFD with parents can be helpful to school psychologists in terms of developing problem-solving techniques.

Individual Psychological Assessment: A Practice and Science in Search of Common Ground

During the past 30 years, individual psychological assessment (IPA) has gained in use and in value to organizations in the management of human resources. However, even though IPA is considered a core competency for industrial–organizational (I–O) psychology, its practice is not without critics. This article is written not only to address several criticisms of IPA but also to discuss a variety of issues that must be taken into consideration if IPA is to advance as a major component of the I–O scientist–practitioner model. We rely upon a working definition of IPA in general but, when possible, focus on executive assessment in particular, given its high level of complexity and growing popularity. We discuss the effectiveness of assessment practice, including the ongoing statistical versus clinical prediction argument and the difficulties with establishing validity. Although we are confident that IPA has many strong research and practice underpinnings, we also propose some important research questions, training guidelines, and opportunities for assessing psychologists to improve their practices.

The Meta-Analysis of Clinical Judgment Project

Clinical and educational experience is one of the most commonly studied variables in clinical judgment research. Contrary to clinicians' perceptions, clinical judgment researchers have generally concluded that accuracy does not improve with increased education, training, or clinical experience. In this meta-analysis, the authors synthesized results from 75 clinical judgment studies where the experience of 4,607 clinicians was assessed in relation to the accuracy of their judgments about mental health (e.g., diagnosis, prognosis, treatment) and psychological issues (e.g., vocational, personality). The authors found a small but reliable effect, d = .12, showing that experience, whether educational or clinical, is positively associated with judgment accuracy. This small effect was robust across several tested moderator models, indicating experienced counselors and clinicians acquire, in general, almost a 13% increase in their decision-making accuracy, regardless of other factors. Results are discussed in light of their implications for clinical judgment research and for counseling psychology training and practice.

The Family Drawing Depression Scale

Described the development of a standardized rating scale for scoring Kinetic Family Drawings of depressed patients. The Zung Self Rating Depression Scale (SDS) and a Kinetic Family Drawing (KFD) task were administered to hospitalized depressives who met the DSM-III criteria for Major Depression. Using the Family Drawing Depression Scale (FDDS), family drawings were analyzed in the depressed patients, pre- and posttreatment, and in a group of normal control Ss (N = 71). It is concluded that the FDDS is a useful and reliable measure of depression. Potential clinical and research applications are discussed.