Formal Psychological Assessment in Evaluating Depression: A New Methodology to Build Exhaustive and Irredundant Adaptive Questionnaires

Abstract

Psychological Assessment can be defined as a complex procedure of information collection, analysis and processing. Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA) tries to improve this procedure by providing a formal framework to build assessment tools. In this paper, FPA is applied to depression. Seven questionnaires widely used for the self-evaluation of depression were selected. Diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder were derived from the DSM-5, literature and Seligman’s and Beck’s theories. A Boolean matrix was built, including 266 items from the questionnaires in the rows and 20 selected attributes, obtained through diagnostic criteria decomposition, in the columns. In the matrix, a 1 in a cell meant that the corresponding item investigated the specific attribute. It was thus possible to analyze the relationships between items and attributes and among items. While none of the considered questionnaires could alone cover all the criteria for the evaluation of depressive symptoms, we observed that a set of 30 items contained the same information that was obtained redundantly with 266 items. Another result highlighted by the matrix regards the relations among items. FPA allows in-depth analysis of currently used questionnaires based on the presence/absence of clinical elements. FPA allows for going beyond the mere score by differentiating the patients according to symptomatology. Furthermore, it allows for computerized-adaptive assessment.

Memantine: New prospective in bipolar disorder treatment

“…To review the clinical reports on the effect of memantine in manic symptoms in psychiatric syndromes other than bipolar disorder, we use a new methodological approach: Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA) [103][104][105] ; From a theoretical-mathematical perspective, FPA jointly applies two theories from mathematical psychology: The Knowledge Spaces Theory (KST) [106][107][108] and in the Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) [109,110] . The FPA provides a strong methodological approach based on the construction of a Boolean matrix that relates the so-called objects and attributes.…”

New Perspectives in the Adaptive Assessment of Depression: The ATS-PD Version of the QuEDS

“…The self-report questionnaires provide scores that are supposed to indicate the severity of the symptomatology and the impairment level (Groth-Marnat, 2009 ). The score of a questionnaire is helpful in distinguishing individuals with critical clinical features, but it is not sufficient, in the form so far provided by both CTT and IRT, to differentiate patients with different symptom configurations who obtained similar scores (in the limit, the same score) to the test (Spoto et al, 2013a ; Bottesi et al, 2015 ; Serra et al, 2015 , 2017 ). Moreover, not all the items have the same “weight” from the clinical point of view, since they reflect different symptoms that may be more or less severe (Gibbons et al, 1985 ; Serra et al, 2017 ).…”

“…Although there have been several attempts to apply adaptive clinical assessment, as far as we know, no system is able to combine adaptivity, quantitative and qualitative information, and punctual estimates of error parameters. Within clinical psychology, the Formal Psychological Assessment (Spoto et al, 2010 , 2013a ; Serra et al, 2015 ; Granziol et al, 2018 ) represents an important contribution in the improvement of adaptive psychological assessment, allowing to overcome the obstacles encountered up to now in this field. The main deterministic and probabilistic concepts of this methodology are presented in the next section.…”

“…It refers to the possibility of depicting the relations among items according to well established mathematical tools such as lattices and posets (Birkhoff, 1937 , 1940 ; Davey and Priestley, 2002 ). It is the Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA; Spoto, 2011 ; Spoto et al, 2013a ; Bottesi et al, 2015 ; Serra et al, 2015 , 2017 ). It was developed with the aim of providing detailed information about the clinical features endorsed by a patient who answered a specific set of items of a questionnaire.…”

The assessment of nonverbal behavior in schizophrenia through the Formal Psychological Assessment

“…The FPA (Bottesi, Spoto, Freeston, Sanavio, & Vidotto, ; Spoto et al, ; Spoto, Stefanutti, & Vidotto, ) is an assessment methodology formally developed from two theories of mathematical psychology: the knowledge space theory (Doignon & Falmagne, , ; Falmagne & Doignon, ) and the formal concept analysis (Ganter & Wille, ; Wille, ). The FPA has been applied to assess depression (Serra, Spoto, Ghisi, & Vidotto, , ) and obsessive–compulsive disorder (Bottesi et al, ; Donadello et al, ; Spoto et al, ; Spoto, Vidotto, Postal, & Pendoni, ). The FPA's rationale relies on the relationships between assessment tool items and diagnostic criteria.…”