Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Keeley, Jared W.

Committee Member

Eakin, Deborah K.

Committee Member

McKinney, Cliff

Date of Degree

8-17-2013

Original embargo terms

MSU Only Indefinitely

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Campus Access Only

Major

Clinical Psychology

Degree Name

Master of Science

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Psychology

Abstract

This study questions whether expertise plays a role in how mental health clinicians remember case details about their clients. Specifically, are expert clinicians better at teasing apart complex case details than novices? Clinicians’ diagnostic schemas may afford a mechanism for easily retaining and retrieving information about particular cases. American Board of Professional Psychologists certified clinicians acted as our expert participants. Undergraduate students enrolled in general psychology acted as novices. Results indicated experts recalled more information than non-experts for each of three hypothetical case vignettes—simple, complex-coherent, and complex-incoherent. As complexity of the vignettes increased the overall amount of recall increased for the complex-coherent vignette and then decreased for the complex-incoherent vignette for both groups. Experts also exhibited more false recalls of symptom specific details for the complex-incoherent case. This finding is evidence of schema-based knowledge and experts’ tendency to use schemas in an effort to make sense of illogical cases.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/20229

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