Guide to Psychological Assessment with Asians

To effectively serve minority clients, clinicians require a double understanding: of both evidence-based practice and the cultures involved. This particularly holds true when working with Asian-Americans, a diverse and growing population.

The Guide to Psychological Assessment with Asians synthesizes real-world challenges, empirical findings, clinical knowledge and common-sense advice to create a comprehensive framework for practice. This informed resource is geared toward evaluation of first-generation Asian Americans and recent immigrants across assessment methods (self-report measures, projective tests), settings (school, forensic) and classes of disorders (eating, substance, sexual). While the Guide details cross-cultural considerations for working with Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean and Indian-American clients, best practices are also included for assessing members of less populous groups without underestimating, overstating or stereotyping the role of ethnicity in the findings. In addition, contributors discuss diversity of presentation within groups and identify ways that language may present obstacles to accurate evaluation. Among the areas covered in this up-to-date reference:

• Structured and semi-structured clinical interviews.
• Assessment of acculturation, enculturation and culture.
• IQ testing.
• Personality disorders.
• Cognitive decline and dementia.
• Mood disorders and suicidality.
• Neuropsychological assessment of children, adolescents and adults.
• Culture-bound syndromes.

Designed for practitioners new to working with Asian clients as well as those familiar with the population, the Guide to Psychological Assessment with Asians is exceedingly useful to neuropsychologists, clinical psychologists, health psychologists and clinical social workers.

Lorraine Benuto received her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she provides treatment to victims of sexual assault, sexual abuse and child physical abuse. She is project coordinator and therapist the Victims of Crime Treatment Center at the University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. Benuto completed her APA-accredited internship at the VA in San Juan, Puerto Rico where she delivered psychological services to a culturally diverse clientele presenting with depression and anxiety. Dr. Benuto has extensive experience delivering evidence-based treatments and conducting psychological assessments with the Latino population. She has delivered professional presentations at state, national and international conferences on topics related to cultural competence and is co-editing Handbook of Adolescent Health Psychology for Springer. Nicholas S. Thaler is a post-doctoral fellow at. He completed his internship in 2012 at the Oklahoma Health Sciences Center Neuropsychology track and received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has published over fifteen articles focusing on childhood and adult disorders including traumatic brain injury, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder. His work has covered neuropsychological and social cognitive impairments associated with these illnesses and how such impairments might be predictive of functional and psychosocial outcomes. Nicholas is also committed to promoting cross-cultural neuropsychological competency among minority and underrepresented groups and has extended his research towards this endeavor.