2025 SPA Convention & Workshops

In this presentation I discuss the importance of utilizing an evidence-based framework for psychological assessment and test score integration in clinical and research settings.  I outline key elements of multimethod assessment, emphasizing the need for the assessor to attend to test score divergences as well as convergences to obtain a more complete understanding of the person.  I describe a process-focused approach to test score validation that helps overcome some limitations of traditional validation methods in laboratory and field settings.  Beyond these empirical advances, I argue that 21^st century personality assessment can benefit from a shift in emphasis: Greater attention to pedagogy and classroom teaching are crucial for strengthening our discipline, and I discuss my experiences in these areas during the past 40 years.  I am grateful to everyone who helped me along the way, and especially to my mentors who saw potential in me that I did not see, and my students, who have helped me to become a better teacher, and better person. 

Learning Objectives: 

After attending this presentation, participants will be able to:

• Describe key elements of multimethod personality assessment
• Utilize a process-focused framework for psychological test score validation
• Discuss the importance of pedagogy and classroom teaching in strengthening 21^st century personality assessment

The aim of this presentation is to outline interpersonal factors that exacerbate and mitigate risk for mental health problems among Latine immigrants, particularly asylum seekers from Central America.Data from across the lifespan, including children, adolescents, young adults, and adults, will be presented centered on how interpersonal processes shape risk and resilience for immigrants. 

Learning Outcomes: 

1. Understand significant health disparity in posttraumatic stress facing Latine asylum seekers of all ages 
2. Elaborate several interpersonal factors that shape mental health risk 
3. Leverage interpersonal factors in clinical practice

Emotions are powerful processes that enable us to respond adaptively to life’s triumphs and challenges. A longstanding assumption has been that positive emotions are predominantly adaptive relative to negative emotions. This talk will provide an overview of our research that strives to shift these theoretical and empirical tides to illuminate the nature of, and mechanisms underlying, positive emotion disturbance and its risk for psychopathology onset and severity. This guiding framework will be used to review supportive evidence we’ve collected utilizing a multi-modal clinical-affective science approach outlining key themes in positive emotion difficulties in individuals at risk for, and diagnosed with, affective disorders. Recent findings will be discussed including multi-site studies examining changes in affective trajectories among a large sample of diverse young adults as well as international partnerships examining cross-cultural variation in positive emotion difficulties. Implications will be discussed for considering the importance of positive emotion in elucidating mood health and its translational relevance.

Learning Objectives: 

1. Describe the nature of positive emotion disturbance and its risk for psychopathology onset and severity.
2. Discuss the importance of positive emotion in elucidating mood health and its translational relevance.

This full-day workshop provides an advanced look at the multimethod psychological assessment of major psychotic disorders within the schizophrenia and bipolar spectra, by presenting recent developments in the understanding of diagnostic categories and psychotic dimensions across a continuum of severity and by reviewing several detailed clinical cases to help sharpen differential diagnostic decision-making. The workshop will focus on integrating psychological tests with clinical interviews and patient history. Attention is also directed toward assessing prodromal states and emerging psychosis, risk and protective factors, and delusions and hallucinations in a forensic and multicultural context and distinguishing core features of psychosis from extreme beliefs and conspiracy theories. 

Psychological assessors face unique challenges conducting assessments across a range of cultural contexts. Even when standard indicators of reliability and validity for use of a measure with a particular patient are present, it continues to be important to interpret assessments and their results in context. When these standard indicators of psychometric quality are not available, the assessor faces important questions about how to offer an assessment that meaningfully represents the patient’s experience. This applied workshop will support participants to consider tools for conducting assessments at the liminal edges - with patients who are not well represented in the creation and standardization of assessments. Presenters will review relevant literature and frameworks for considering culture in context as well as related guidelines from the APA and professional associations. These serve as a foundation and starting point and our aim will be to critique and extend them to think through approaches to complex cases. Presenters will then share relevant case material - affording participants a live experience of navigating the important technical and ethical questions that arise in unique cases. Cases span a range of cultural considerations including: language, race, ethnicity, nationality, neurodiversity, gender, and LGBTQ identity. The presenters will use these cases to model how to navigate complex cultural formulations in an assessment. Participants will have an opportunity to identify their own practice issue and consider ways to attend to culture in context. 

This practical full-day workshop helps assessors who trained to use Exner’s Comprehensive System (CS) make the transition to using the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS). R-PAS is a replacement for the CS that fixes five well-known CS limitations and that also improves on it in other ways. R-PAS was created by psychologists who worked closely with John Exner from 1997 until he passed away in 2006 to identify CS limitations and help fix them. This was accomplished through Exner’s Rorschach Research Council (RRC), a group of seven psychologists he hosted twice per year for weekend meetings that focused on advancing the CS. R-PAS incorporates all the work begun through the RRC.

This workshop aids the development of proficiency in coding and administration and provides a response process foundation to foster clearer interpretation of scores and understanding of the respondents producing them. Participants should have previous experience with Exner’s CS.

The workshop begins with a broad focus on the Rorschach task and the type of data it provides, which gives a strong foundation for understanding administration, coding, and interpretation. Next, focus shifts to delineating the key differences in administration, clarification, coding, score calculation, norms, and interpretation between the CS and R-PAS, which includes an introduction to the R-PAS website and some of the resources and functions available there to account holders. Training closes with a case interpretation.

The Millon Inventories are often relegated to secondary or incremental validity status within the context of traditional assessments. In this workshop, we take a deeper dive into the MCMI-IV and MACI-II and their potential for more informative use. Through an exploration of the guiding theory, examination of cultural and contextual factors, and developmental/attachment considerations, participants will engage in elements of responsible, attuned, contextual use/limitations on use based on population and mental health status. This is in service to the goals of engaging individuals most effectively in the clinical alliance, examining conflicts, identifying relevant culture and identity needs, using unexpected results to understand deeper motivations, and building meaningful interventions based around the person’s improved self-understanding from the assessment process. Adult and adolescent case examples will provide interactive opportunities for participants to practice skill sets enhanced by the theory. 

Our workshop is designed to provide personality assessors with practical information on how to use and intelligently present the value of the Rorschach in both clinical and neuropsychological forensic settings in clear and positive ways. It first provides a review of the underlying empirical evidence of the reliability and validity the instrument, discussing its strengths and weaknesses, as well as guidelines for competent practice. We will cover the Comprehensive System (CS), the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS), and the Comprehensive System – Revised (CS-R) in our presentation. We will next evaluate the current criticisms of the Rorschach with an emphasis on revealing their frequently empirically unsupportable basis. Next, it will provide strategies for effectively presenting the value of the Rorschach, and for dealing with challenges of its use in forensic settings. Finally, we will describe how to integrate Rorschach findings with neuropsychological assessment based on research and clinical practice with the help of several case illustrations.

We will also provide an extensive list of recommended reading materials relevant to dealing with the Rorschach in forensic practice. 

Preoccupied attachment is the most difficult attachment pattern to open up and treat in psychotherapy. The difficulty arises from two inconsistent representations of self-states created by defensive disconnection of affect and experience. The disconnection creates a mental fog. This workshop first describes the conceptualization of preoccupied attachment and the development of incompatible self-representations using a video demonstration of a preoccupied mother-child dyad. The workshop then highlights therapeutic changes in attachment representation using AAPs administered two years apart. Participants will examine the Time 1 AAP and learn how to develop “attachment plots” to understand the client’s original self-state. The discussion then moves to describe the therapeutic process the clinician used to help the client see how the inconsistent self models originated from attachment trauma and the effects it had on his expectations for self and others. Finally, participants will be asked in break out groups to evaluate and create attachment plots for the Time 2 AAP looking for representational changes from Time 1. We will come together to discuss the groups’ observations and use observed changes to co-create the next steps in therapy. 

Distinguishing whether the cognitive and/or psychiatric problems reported by an assessee are authentic/credible or feigned/non-credible is one of the primary tasks of forensic evaluators. Several instruments have been developed for this purpose, including Symptom Validity Tests (SVTs) and Performance Validity Tests (PVTs). SVTs assess the credibility of self-reported symptoms, whereas PVTs assess the credibility of observed results on cognitive tests. Recent research suggests that the use of SVTs with PVTs in assessing the credibility of presented symptoms is likely to increase signal detection and classification accuracy compared with the use of SVTs alone or PVTs alone. Consistent with this emerging trend, this workshop will first provide an overview of available research informing on the complex relationship between symptom and performance validity assessment. It will then describe the Inventory of Problems – 29 (IOP-29; www.iop-test.com) and its memory module (IOP-M): the IOP-29 is a 29-item SVT; the IOP-M is a 34-item PVT. Together, these two short tests, each taking five to ten minutes to administer, provide the most efficient symptom and performance measurement for the busy practitioner. After attending this workshop, participants will be able to administer, score, and interpret the IOP-29 and the IOP-M and integrate the results of these two tests with those of other SVTs and PVTs. 

This four-hour workshop will focus specifically on how to use the DSM-5's Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD) in clinical practice. The emphasis will be on practical clinical issues in assessment and case conceptualization. In 2024, the American Psychiatric Association published the official manual for the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5), the instrument designed to assess maladaptive personality traits within the AMPD framework. Thus, the focus of the workshop is timely, and specific attention will be devoted to familiarizing attendees with the contents of the PID-5 manual and practical aspects of using the PID-5 in clinical personality assessment. 

In this workshop, Dr. Krista Brittain will review the process and utility of family sessions in Child Therapeutic Assessment (TAC). Participants will review four (4) common conceptualizations of family systems in TAC and explore how they may present with varying intensity and in combination with other factors at play in the family system. Participants will draw on their own clinical work and a case example. 

This workshop will allow participants the opportunity to practice with multiple AI language generation tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot) by providing multiple case scenarios in which the use of AI might come up in clinical practice, graduate teaching, and/or supervision of trainees. Participants will be given the opportunity to both generate and review assessment samples produced by AI tools in small and large group activities. With each scenario, relevant ethical and legal standards of practice will be presented, and participants will engage in small-group discussions regarding whether each case scenario presented is ultimately permissible, not permissible, or unclear based on available guidance. Particular focus will be given to scenarios involving appropriate and inappropriate use of AI technology in the context of teaching and supervision. Through case discussion and review of relevant ethical and legal standards, we seek to provide clinicians, teachers, and supervisors methods of utilizing AI in their daily practice to enhance efficacy and to guide their own students and trainees in how to use AI tools responsibly, rather than taking an abstinence-only approach. In particular, our discussions will highlight how AI holds particular advantage for promoting equity and inclusion for trainees and practitioners who identify themselves on the spectrum of neurodivergence, as well as those for whom English is a second language. 

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is a dimensional alternative to categorical diagnostic systems like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders and International Classification of Diseases. The Clinical Translation Workgroup has developed a workshop to provide training in applying HiTOP principles to clinical practice. Trainees who complete the workshop will learn how to assess and conceptualize symptoms though a HiTOP lens and integrate findings into treatment planning and monitoring. The workshop also reviews how to apply principles to work with diverse and underserved populations. Training includes hands-on interactive discussion of cases and practical considerations such as billing and reporting. 

This workshop focuses on teaching how to use the Early Memories Procedure (EMP, Bruhn, 1992) to explore clients’ attachment defenses, gain insights into their emotional functioning and promote therapeutic change. The Early Memories Procedure (EMP, Bruhn, 1992) is a time and cost-efficient assessment technique that can be used both during a psychological evaluation or in the course of therapy. This test offers a powerful window into the clients’ attachment world, because it elicits memories about clients’ main sources of pain, internal conflicts and coping strategies. Through the EMP, the assessor can explore hypotheses about the clients’ attachment wounds and their defenses. The information gathered through the EMP can thus be an invaluable complement within a multi-method evaluation of clients' attachment history.

This workshop is both practical and experiential. After an initial lecture on attachment defenses, attendees will learn how to identify the most common attachment defenses in the memories produced during the EMP and how to connect these defenses to the different insecure attachment internal working models (Dismissing, Preoccupied, and Unresolved/Dysregulated). In the spirit of promoting self-compassion and of acknowledging the clients’ resilience, particular attention will be given to the adaptive value of attachment defenses and how they are key to cope with specific life circumstances despite the emotional struggles these defenses also create. The experiential component of the workshop includes the possibility for participants to self-administer the EMP and reflect individually on their own attachment defenses during the course of the workshop. 

To showcase the flexibility of the EMP for different clients, early memories of clients who are second-generation immigrants in the United States will be discussed in depth to illustrate the function of attachment defenses as a way to cope with the challenges the clients faced growing up, such as being raised in a country unfamiliar to their parents, having to code-switch between different cultures, and struggling to feel accepted. In addition, early memories of assessment clients with a diverse background will be used as examples to illustrate a variety of attachment defenses. 

Further, strategies will be presented that can be used during the EMP process to help clients develop a more integrated view of the self in relation to others and move towards a more secure attachment representation. Adult and adolescent EMP protocols will provide participants with the opportunity to see specific examples of early memories, as well as practice conducting clinical work on the memories from an attachment perspective. 

Madeleine Starin, Psy.D. and Connor Adams, Psy.D. will focus their workshop on clinical applications of multimethod test data. Specifically, the workshop will highlight how to transform test data into meaningful reports and feedback. Various types of data, such as structural, thematic, and behavioral, will be discussed, and the workshop will teach how to weave these data together into an impactful narrative. Several approaches of report writing, case conceptualization, and feedback provision will be introduced. The needs of different clinical settings and patient populations will be emphasized, and information about each setting, populations served, chosen assessment methods, and potential outcomes and consequences of reports will be provided (e.g. DSM, HiTOP, Therapeutic Assessment). A forensic multi-method case example involving trauma and a psychiatric outpatient multi-method case example involving previously undetected psychosis will be presented, along with instructions detailing the use of various elements of test data in case conceptualization, interpretation, report writing, and the formulation of diagnostic impressions and recommendations. Empirical literature will be referenced to support the practices used. Attendee discussion, participation, debate, and applied practice of techniques taught will be highly encouraged. By the end of the workshop, attendees will have gained practical knowledge and experiential practice on how to turn multi-method assessment data into effective written reports and impactful feedback.

A variety of forces (e.g., COVID, social media, political divisions) have created huge stresses on families, with the result that there is an acknowledged mental health crisis among children in the USA. In this context, mental health providers are searching for cost-effective ways to address the needs of children and families and that are effective with diverse clients. This workshop introduces attendees to Therapeutic Assessment with Children (TA-C), an 8-step, empirically supported family-centered intervention that uses psychological assessment to support parents and increase their empathy for their children. In this beginning workshop, Drs. Finn and Rudin will discuss the rationale and research on TA-C, and then lead participants through each step of the intervention. Video tapes of actual client sessions will be used to illustrate the steps of TA-C. Particular attention will be given to Brief TA-C, assessments of diverse clients, and how to adapt TA-C to different settings. 

This workshop has many aims. First to start with some “descriptive information” derived from the clinical interview with the child’s parents to identify “possible indications” of parents’ attachment status which needs to be deepen by using the AAP to assess parents’ attachment with a valid method. Second why to use the AAP versus other possible assessment tools. Third, to present some clinical cases where parents’ AAP was a useful tools for their child assessment. Finally, to discuss how to talk with parents about the AAP results in connections with how to help them with their child’s problems.

• List and describe the different steps in the Therapeutic Assessment model.
• Explain the core values of Therapeutic Assessment.
• Describe the importance of the assessor-client relationship in Therapeutic Assessment.