Aims

- to master the whole approach of the psychodiagnostic examination. At the end of the course, the students should be able:
a) to analyse a request from an individual, familial, institutional and cultural point of view
b) to choose and justify the conceptual framework to refer to.
c) To choose a method of interview and appropriate diagnostic tools
d) To interpret the collected results
e) To integrate the various informations and to present a diagnosis
f) To correctly communicate the examination results

Main themes

The course is organised according to the various stages of the psychodiagnostic examination:
- analysis of the request
- socio-cultural aspects of the examination (ethnopsychiatric point of view)
- the dynamics of the diagnostic examination: concepts of interpretation and integration, principle of the decision tree, mental processes of the clinician (decision-making and probability; bias in the diagnostic judgment…)
- conceptual frameworks: antnosographic and idiographic points of view, descriptive nosographies (DSM-IV and ICD-10), psychopathological nosographies
- examination of the personality: interview (free, semi-structural, structural), rating scales (Hamilton…), questionnaires (MMPI-II, NEO-PIR, Beck, Spielberger…), projective tests (TAT, Rorschah…)
- examination of the cognitive functions: examination of intelligence (Weschler scales, K-ABC, piagetian evaluation, assessment of the learning potential…), of memory, of spatial organization, of language and of basic learnings.

Content and teaching methods

- to master the whole approach of the psychodiagnostic examination. At the end of the course, the students should be able:
a) to analyse a request from an individual, familial, institutional and cultural point of view
b) to choose and justify the conceptual framework to refer to.
c) To choose a method of interview and appropriate diagnostic tools
d) To interpret the collected results
e) To integrate the various informations and to present a diagnosis
f) To correctly communicate the examination results

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Lectures with case analyses, presentation of appraisal tools and data interpretations