The design of an individualized treatment program in behavior therapy is critical, complex, and strongly affected by pretreatment data obtained as part of a multimethod, multimodal assessment.The functional analysis is the integration of several elements for individualized treatment decision making: the relative importance, interrelationships, and sequelae of a client's behavior problems and treatment goals and the relative modifiability, interrelationships, and strength of causal variables. The functional analysis can be represented visually with the functional analytic clinical case model (FACCM), a vector-graphic representation of variables and functional relationships. This article describes and illustrates the methods, rationale, and characteristics of both the functional analysis and the FACCM, using a clinical case example. Research and restrictions on the treatment utility of the functional analysis are discussed.The design of an individualized behavioral treatment program involves important and complex clinical judgments. These judgments can affect the degree to which clients will experience a reduction in distress and an increase in quality of life. Individualized treatment programs can be difficult to design because they are often based on an integration of many separate clinical judgments, each of which is affected by multiple sources of data and subject to many sources of error and bias (see discussions in

This study inspected the deterministic structure of unipolar depression. Two women self-monitored sadness hourly 10 times a day for 6 months. One woman had a recurrent history of unipolar depression, and the other did not. Data were analyzed by visual inspection, examination of the Fourier transforms of the time plots, and the correlation dimension. Results suggested that in addition to a strong periodic component that existed only within the depressed subject's mood time series, a low-dimensional chaotic process might have been operating. In the nondepressed control subject, no such periodicity or process could be identified. The findings support maladaptive deterministic theories of mood disorders and have implications for the assessment of unipolar depression.

Quality of life (QOL) is increasingly assessed in cancer patients. In this article, the authors examined the psychometric performance of a commonly used QOL questionnaire, the Quality of Life Questionnaire--Cancer 30 (QLQ-C30; N. K. Aaronson et al., 1993), in multiethnic cancer patients. Content validation studies in patients and clinicians identified possible new items. Multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis supported equivalent structure across ethnic groups (Caucasians and Asian/Pacific Islanders [APIs]). A higher order QOL factor appeared to directly affect functioning scales and symptom count. Exploratory factor analysis examined effects of new items. Ten factors were extracted, 6 consistent with the original instrument and 4 reflecting potentially new aspects of QOL: Positive Social Support, Coping, Existential Well-Being, and Sexuality/Intimacy. The QLQ-C30 appears appropriate for use in API cancer patients. Further work needs to ensure that it includes all important domains.

This article examines the implications of phase space functions for psychological assessment. Behavior problems, causal variables, and causal relationships are dynamic and demonstrate complex nonlinear and discontinuous relationships. Measuring the temporal, dynamic, and nonlinear dimensions of variables can enhance the accuracy of predictions of the future time course of variables and of the strength of causal relationships for behavior problems. Cross-sectional, longitudinal, and time series research designs are prone to inferential errors because they often fail to consider the dynamic time course functions of variables. The value of a variable (its stale) coupled with the current direction and rate of change of the variable (its phase), at a single measurement point, is its phase state. Equal state values across persons on a variable dimension does not mean that those persons are in equal phases on that variable dimension.

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