Assessments
PSYCHOLOGICAL
Psychological assessment aims at understanding you as a person, the concerns you have in the situations where you have them, the things about yourself you wish to change, and the strengths you bring to accomplish those goals. An assessment will involve talking with you in detail about your concerns, and will be tailored to your individual needs. Depending on the problem, the assessment may involve psychological tests or questionnaires. Such measures may explore your emotional well-being, personality, thinking abilities, or specific areas of functioning. Information from other professionals or family members can also be helpful to consider. The results from a psychological assessment are integrated into a picture, or formulation of your concern and what influences it. Sometimes it may be useful to identify a diagnosis. This picture in turn leads to a plan or a set of options that may be helpful in following to address your concern and reach your goal. The assessment results, formulation, and recommendations are reviewed with you, and, if necessary, also summarized into a report.
NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL
Neuropsychological assessment adds to a psychological assessment by including detailed consideration of the brain and how it operates. By using an understanding of how the brain and brain injury affect a person's function, and by using tests that assess thinking abilities that depend closely on the working of the brain, neuropsychological assessment can help to describe whether problems in thinking, emotion, behavior, and day-to-day activity might be related to changes in the brain that have been caused by various disorders, illnesses, and types of brain injury. The more detailed assessment methods involved in neuropsychological testing may include tests of attention and concentration, learning and memory, language, perception, construction of designs and objects, problem-solving, reasoning, abstraction, and skills related to self-regulation and self-control, as well as sensation and movement. The results of neuropsychological assessment can also be used to plan ways of addressing problems so that you can function more effectively in the situations that matter most to you.
STRESS
When the problems you face are more than your coping abilities can manage, you may feel stress. This can affect not only how you feel emotionally, but also affect your thinking, what you do, and your physical health. Each person tends to have a somewhat different stress profile, for example, when it comes to how they respond to stress. A psychological assessment can help to identify your profile and what to do about the stress you are experiencing. A psychophysiological stress test can, in addition, help to pinpoint how you respond physically to stress, and, in turn, what types of adjustments to make. This type of stress test applies painless and noninvasive sensors to your body in order to see patterns of muscle tension, heart rate, breathing, skin temperature, and skin conductance since these reflect your body's response to psychological stress or pressure. The results of a stress test can point to specific types of biofeedback that can be beneficial in making changes to your stress response, and give you more freedom to cope with stressful situations.
BRAIN MAPPING
Brain mapping of the EEG (electroencephalogram) involves placing several sensors on your scalp so that brain waves of different sorts can be seen in various locations, in this way creating a map of where and how your brain is activated in a range of conditions. In combination with other assessment information, this helps to plan ways of training the brain with EEG biofeedback, or neurofeedback, so that by changing the brain's activation you can learn to better regulate how you feel, think, and act.
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