The following is a general outline of psychological assessments provided by Dr. Murphy:
Comprehensive Psychological Evaluation: This evaluation includes cognitive, emotional, and personality testing, and provides in-depth information on an individual’s functioning in all three of these areas. It is useful to help understand a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It helps understand their underlying personality structure as well as general cognitive functioning. A comprehensive psychological evaluation can be an invaluable resource for providing diagnostic clarification and treatment recommendations.
Personality Testing: This includes emotional and personality testing, and provides in-depth information on an individual’s functioning in both of these areas. It is useful to understand a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and ingrained patterns of how he or she approaches their environment. This type of evaluations may occur when it seems fairly certain that cognitive factors do not bear on the case.
Psychoeducational Evaluations/Achievement Testing: This evaluation includes cognitive and achievement testing which will provide in-depth information on several factors such as factual knowledge, memory, and visual-spatial abilities, as well as academic strengths and weaknesses. The results are also used by many educational programs to determine the “gifted” label, or it can determine if one is struggling with a learning disability.
PTSD/ Trauma: This evaluation will measure social and emotional functioning as a result of exposure to traumatic experiences including war/combat, urban violence/crime, rape/sexual assault, natural disasters, and accidents. This type of testing may occur within the context of a comprehensive psychological evaluation.
ADHD testing: This assessment evaluates attentional difficulties (e.g. problems staying on task, sustaining attention, and the use of working memory) with a clinical interview, ADHD specific tests, as well as cognitive, emotional, and personality tests.
What’s Included in an Assessment:
- Clinical interview. Depending on the type of assessment, this can involve the clients and those who may be able to provide collateral information.
- Records Review
- Administration, scoring, and interpretation of tests
- Feedback and Consultation.
Dr. Murphy works with individuals 16 years of age through Adulthood.
