Human Development and Interventions Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The key gives empathy as the counsellor's skill that enriches the therapeutic relationship and turns it into a healing relationship. It is the capacity to enter the client's world and understand it as the client does. Active listening and attentive listening are the skills that help to build empathy, and identification is taking on the feelings of another, which can stop a counsellor from staying objective.

Counsellors build empathy partly by active listening, but empathy itself is the understanding that turns a working alliance into a healing one.

Answer: A

According to Erikson, early adulthood is the stage of intimacy versus isolation, in which young adults seek a close, lasting relationship in which they can share their identity. Adolescence is identity versus role confusion, middle adulthood is generativity versus stagnation, and elementary school age is industry versus inferiority. Erikson's eight stages run from trust versus mistrust in infancy to integrity versus despair in old age. In young adulthood the task is to form intimate relationships; failure leads to isolation.

Answer: A

Derealisation disorder is the condition in which a person experiences a change in his or her sense of reality and perception of self, for example feeling that the world or the self is unreal. Dissociative amnesia is loss of memory, dissociative identity disorder involves two or more distinct identities, and multiple personality disorder is the older name for that last condition. Depersonalisation and derealisation involve feeling detached from oneself or from the surroundings. The person stays in contact with reality, but the sense that the self or the world is real is altered.

Answer: D

The keyed answer is uncertain termination. I could not find this four-term classification in a published counselling source, so this follows the official key; by inference from the wording of the question, it names an ending in which the professional function is completed but further contact is left open, in contrast to definite termination, where the ending is final. I could not check the other three terms either, so I have not argued against them in detail; the answer rests on the official key only.

Answer: C

A person with antisocial personality disorder shows less activation of the amygdala during emotional processing, which fits the reduced fear and empathy seen in the disorder. The cerebellum is mainly for coordination, the hippocampus for memory, and the cerebrum is the large upper brain, not the specific structure named in this finding. Studies of antisocial and psychopathic individuals have found reduced amygdala volume or activation when they process emotional stimuli, which is thought to underlie the reduced fear responses and weak empathy of the disorder.

Answer: B

Repeatedly feeling that germs are on one's hands is an obsession, a persistent, intrusive thought that cannot be dismissed. Compulsion is the repeated behaviour, such as washing the hands, that follows an obsession, and anxiety and phobia are broader conditions not defined by this recurring thought. In obsessive-compulsive disorder the obsession is the thought and the compulsion is the act performed to relieve it. Here the question mentions only the repeated feeling that germs are on the hands, which is the thought.

Answer: B

Paranoid schizophrenia is the condition in which a person has delusions of persecution, believing that others want to harm him. Disorganised schizophrenia is marked by incoherent speech and behaviour, psychogenic fugue is a flight from home with loss of identity, and dissociative identity disorder is the presence of more than one identity. The central feature of the paranoid type of schizophrenia was delusions of persecution or grandeur and auditory hallucinations, while speech and emotion were relatively intact.

Answer: D

In psychotherapy a person talks to a professional about personal problems such as emotional distress and difficulties in relationships. Career, job-related and partner suggestions are the work of career counsellors, employers and matchmakers, not the purpose of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a treatment in which a trained professional talks with a person about psychological and personal difficulties, such as anxiety, depression or conflicts in relationships, in order to help the person change.

Answer: A

Termination is the one that is not a key component of the therapeutic relationship; it is a phase at the end of therapy. Trust, empathy and professional intimacy are qualities that make up the relationship between a therapist and a client during the sessions. A therapeutic relationship is built on trust, empathy and a professional closeness, which are present throughout the work. Termination is the planned ending of the work and is treated as a stage of the process and not as a quality of the relationship.

Answer: C

Fritz Perls coined the term Gestalt therapy, with his wife Laura Perls and Paul Goodman. Julian Rotter is known for social learning theory and locus of control, Max Wertheimer founded Gestalt psychology of perception, and Albert Ellis created rational emotive behaviour therapy. Perls developed Gestalt therapy in the 1940s and 1950s with Laura Perls and Paul Goodman, as a therapy of present awareness and responsibility; the name borrows the Gestalt idea of the whole from the school of Wertheimer, Kohler and Koffka.