Assessing Childhood Psychopathology and Developmental Disabilities

Not long ago, conducting child assessment was as simple as stating that “the child gets along with others” or “the child lags behind his peers”. Today’s pediatric psychologists and allied professionals, by contrast, know the critical importance of using accurate measures with high predictive quality to identify pathologies early, form precise case conceptualizations, and provide relevant treatment options.

Assessing Childhood Psychopathology and Developmental Disabilities provides a wide range of evidence-based methods in an immediately useful presentation from infancy through adolescence. Noted experts offer the most up-to-date findings in the most pressing areas, including: (1) Emerging trends, new technologies, and implementation issues. (2) Interviewing techniques and report writing guidelines. (3) Intelligence testing, neuropsychological assessment, and scaling methods for measuring psychopathology. (4) Assessment of major pathologies, including ADHD, conduct disorder, bipolar disorder, and depression. (5) Developmental disabilities, such as academic problems, the autism spectrum and comorbid pathology, and self-injury. (6) Behavioral medicine, including eating and feeding disorders as well as pain management.

This comprehensive volume is an essential resource for the researcher’s library and the clinician’s desk as well as a dependable text for graduate and postgraduate courses in clinical child, developmental, and school psychology.

(A companion volume, Treating Childhood Psychopathology and Developmental Disabilities, is also available to ensure greater continuity on the road from assessment to intervention to outcome.)

Johnny L. Matson, is Professor and Distinguished Research Master and Director of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA. He is the author of 29 books and more than 350 scientific papers and book chapters. His area of clinical and research interests are developmental disabilities, autism, and severe child psychopathology.

Frank Andrasik holds the positions of Professor of Psychology at the University of West Florida and Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. He has published approximately 200 articles and chapters and has delivered more than 450 talks on the topics of pain, stress, biofeedback, developmental disability, psychiatry, and organizational behavior management; he has also produced several texts for professionals. His most recent published texts are Biofeedback: A Practitioner’s Guide, 3^rd edition (Guilford, $80), co-edited with Mark S. Schwartz in 2003, and Comprehensive Handbook of Personality and Psychopathology, Volume Two: Adult Psychopathology (Wiley, $200), an edited volume that has just been released (with a publication date of 2006). He belongs to a number of professional societies, holding the status of Fellow in the American Psychological Association (Division of Health Psychology and Society of Clinical Psychology), American Psychological Society, and Society of Behavioral Medicine, and serving as President of the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback in 1993-1994.

Michael L. Matson is a student at Louisiana State University. He is co-author of 2 books and 7 scientific papers. His research interests are in the area of developmental disabilities.