A formal approach to assist clinical evaluation of psychological disorders A procedure based on “items content” – “diagnostic criteria” relations

DOI: 10.5176/2251-1865_CBP15.28

Authors: Francesca Serra, Andrea Spoto, Giulio Vidotto

Abstract:

One of the main aims of a new project, moving from the Cognitive Behavioral Assessment (CBA) 2.0, is to create a pathway to assist the logical process of a human operator in the clinical evaluation of psychological disorders. This attempt wants to represent an improvement when compared with other similar procedures. One of the most important things it tries to do is to simulate a well-articulated question-answer progression that does not follows a mechanic deterministic order but considers the natural and logical flow of questions and answers contents. This procedure is also supposed to be effective and efficient. In order to do that, we defined a new formal approach, named Formal Psychological Assessment, to overcome the several limitations of the traditional procedures and give a new perspective to the cognitive behavioral assessment in terms of automatic-assisted procedures.

Keywords: Clinical Psychological Testing, Expert Systems, Cognitive Behavioral Assessment