acted across entire continents W r i t i n g

1) – How can asking about emotions and emotional experience be helpful in dealing with situations? How, if at all, can this be helpful in processing stress?

– Let’s talk about stress. Stress often has a bad reputation. We tend to think of it in terms of feeling overwhelmed and overworked and maybe even struggling to handle the daily grind. Are there times when stress can be good? How, if at all, can stress make us more productive or more successful? 

2) – How do you define personality? How does personality develop? Can it change?

– How do we test personality? How is such an assessment important? Do you think there is bias on the side of the assessor in this regard? 

– Is personality static? Does it ever change? Can it?

3) – Why do we have the DSM-5? Is such a manual useful? Why or why not?

– Clinicians are expected to utilize the DSM-5 in coming up with diagnoses for their patients. Do you think this allows for consistency across diagnoses? Or is there still room for bias and discrepancy?

4) – Discuss your thoughts on therapy. Is treatment beneficial? What factors determine such?

– Are there groups of people for which therapy is not useful or helpful? What factors are important to consider when addressing different groups of clients?

5) – When a child is going through the public school system, he or she may be assessed by the Child Study Team to determine if an IEP or 504 accomodations are warranted. In these circumstances, the student is likely to be assessed using a cognitive test (IQ), achievement testing, as well as other means of assessment specific to the child’s needs. Why do you think IQ is measured? If a child appears to score in the “average range of intelligence,” can he or she still have a learning disability? Or be assessed to need accomodations based on another classification (Emotionally Disturbed, Other Health Impairment, etc.)? 

– The history of the race and intelligence controversy concerns the historical development of a debate about possible explanations of group differences encountered in the study of race and intelligence.Since IQ testing began, around the time of WWI, Ithere have been observed differences between the average scores of different population groups, and there have been debates over whether this is mainly due to environmental and cultural factors, or mainly due to some as yet undiscovered genetic factor, or whether such a dichotomy between environmental and genetic factors is the appropriate framing of the debate. Today, the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Over the last century, intelligence testing has been criticized for not just being culturally insensitive, but inherently racially biased. In 2018, in response to a resurgence of public controversy over race and intelligence, the geneticist and neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell made a statement in The Guardian that described the idea of genetic IQ differences between races as “inherently and deeply implausible” because it goes against basic principles of population genetics. There he argued, “To end up with systematic genetic differences in intelligence between large, ancient populations, the selective forces driving those differences would need to have been enormous. What’s more, those forces would have to have acted across entire continents, with wildly different environments, and have been persistent over tens of thousands of years of tremendous cultural change.” Mitchell concluded that, “While genetic variation may help to explain why one person is more intelligent than another, there are unlikely to be stable and systematic genetic differences that make one population more intelligent than the next.”

In your opinion, how can we understand the bias within standardized testing that is still relevant today? What does that mean for the application of such testing in school assessments, psychological evaluations, etc? Are they accurate?