There is an Indian parable of six blind men who encounter different parts of a large elephant and are asked to describe what they feel. The man who grabs the log reports that he is holding a snake in his hand; the next man, holding one of the large tusks, insists that it is a spear; another man, grabbing one of the animal's large paws, says that it is a tree. The point of the parable is that incomplete evidence leads to incomplete conclusions and a narrow perspective of the whole beast. As applied psychology becomes more specialized, psychologists also run the risk of drawing incomplete conclusions about patients and their functioning. Understanding something as complex as human phenomenology through a single narrow lens guarantees that our perceptions and conclusions will be equally narrow. I argue, as others have (Meyer, 2002; Ready, Stieman, & Paulsen, 2001; Wilson, 1993), that we can and should aim for both breadth and depth in all clinical activities, including psychological assessment. discuss the current division between neuropsychology and personality assessment. I examine differences in training, test use, and scientific literature that give rise to somewhat different (and perhaps incomplete) perspectives of our patients. I then discuss the neuropsychological challenges posed by traditional personality assessment and behavioral measurement of children and adolescents and the types of “lessons” that personality assessors can learn from neuropsychology. Similarly, I will explore the ways in which neuropsychological practice can inform the assessment of the personality and behavior of children and adolescents. Finally, I present an illustrative case and provide some recommendations for… half of the article… International Neuropsychological Society and APA Division 40 (Clinical Neuropsychology) to determine what measures are most commonly provided by neuropsychologists. In this survey, respondents were asked to rate their top three evaluation measures. A similar investigation was conducted by Camara, Nathan, and Puente (2000), who interviewed both neuropsychologists and clinical psychologists from the APA. The results of both investigations are displayed in Table 3.1. The question asked by the two surveys was slightly different (i.e., “top three” in Rabin et al. [2005] versus “most common” in Camara et al. [2000]), but it appears that neuropsychologists are quite unlikely to use traditional measures of personality and psychopathology (e.g., the Rorschach was listed 34th) and that most assessments by clinical psychologists focus on personality or cognitive functioning.
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