Personality Assessment in Today's Health Care Environment: Therapeutic Alliance and Patient Satisfaction

Abstract

This article addresses the role of personality assessment-specifically the Rorschach (Exner, 2002)-]in the context of the health care industry's increased focus on patient satisfaction. When providing psychotherapy, a challenge to providing patient-centered care turns on understanding and acting on the key aspects of the patient's personality that are crucial to forming an effective alliance. This article includes a description and examples of how personality assessment can enhance therapists' understanding of the ideational, affective, and self-control aspects of complicated patients' problem-solving styles. This enhanced understanding in turn can lead to improved therapeutic alliance between therapists and patients and to increased patient satisfaction with their care. How to provide feedback to the therapist also is addressed.

An Updated Statement for the Clinical Case Applications Section: Suggestions for Clinical and Empirical Case Reports

“…These types of submissions could include descriptions of administration and scoring procedures, techniques specific to a particular type of assessment (e.g., forensic, biopsychosocial, collaborative/therapeutic), and broad techniques applicable to all personality assessment practice, such as conducting an effective initial interview and establishing a therapeutic alliance with clients. JPA has previously published case studies of parent-child interaction assessment (Holigrocki, Crain, Bohr, Young, & Bensman, 2009; Holigrocki & Raches, 2006), the personality assessment of Asberger’s and Nonverbal Learning Disorder (Yalof, 2006), short- and long-term changes on the Rorschach (Silverstein, 2007), personality assessment in healthcare settings (Quirk, Erdberg, Crosier, & Steinfeld, 2007), and forensic case studies of the MMPI-A (Pennuto & Archer, 2008). …”

Perspectives for the Therapeutic Assessment in Brazil

“…Do ponto de vista clínico, aqui entendido como atitude e modo de apreensão dos fenômenos psicológicos, há modalidades de atendimento que usam o processo de avaliação não somente como investigação, mas também com propósitos de intervenções imediatas e benefícios terapêuticos diretos à pessoa ou grupo avaliado (Quirk, Erdberg, Crosier, & Seinfeld, 2007), que podem ser utilizados como forma de investigar a validade consequencial dos instrumentos empregados no processo. Esse é um dos grandes diferenciais do trabalho em Avaliação Terapêutica (Therapeutic Assessment), tal como proposto por Finn (2007), uma vez que é nesse procedimento que se pode observar de modo mais objetivo e claro a contribuição dos métodos avaliativos usados no processo e sua consequência imediata para o trabalho do psicólogo na sua relação construtiva e colaborativa com o cliente, conforme se verá mais adiante.…”