Fiche d’étude EPPP · Domaine 5
Interpersonal Relationships
Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP)
15 % de l’examen · 10 énoncés de compétence · EPPP intégré de l’ASPPB
This competency domain requires knowledge of factors affecting interpersonal relationships and application of this knowledge to (a) engage in ongoing, meaningful, and helpful professional relationships, (b) understand and interact appropriately in a variety of diverse cultural and social contexts, and (c) be self-reflective and receive feedback from others.
Chaque énoncé de compétence et ses notions clés
- 5.A.1 How moods, stereotypes and social systems shape what people think and do
Affective state: Mood seeps into judgment. In Forgas's affect infusion model, judgments that call for heuristic or substantive, constructive thinking are the most colored by current mood, while retrieving a view one already holds, or judging with a strong goal of reaching a set conclusion, is less affected.
Cognitive dissonance: When people freely act against their own attitude with little outside justification, they tend to shift the attitude toward the act. In Festinger and Carlsmith's classic study, people paid a small sum to call a dull task interesting later rated it more enjoyable than people paid a large sum.
- 5.A.2 Attraction, aggression, fairness and power between people
Attraction and familiarity: Repeated, responsive contact tends to increase liking. In live interaction experiments, strangers who talked for longer were more attracted to each other, partly because they saw the other as responsive, felt more comfortable and felt they knew the other better.
Aggression: Berkowitz's reformulation of the frustration-aggression hypothesis holds that frustrations and other aversive events produce aggressive inclinations to the degree that they arouse negative affect, and that how a person interprets a thwarting can change how unpleasant it feels.
- 5.A.3 Identity, diversity and intersectionality at every level
Intersectionality: Multiple social categories, such as race, gender, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status, intersect in individual experience and reflect interlocking systems of privilege and oppression such as racism, sexism and heterosexism. The term comes from Crenshaw's legal scholarship on how discrimination against Black women was overlooked.
Layered ecological model: APA's 2017 Multicultural Guidelines take intersectionality as their primary focus and present a layered ecological model in which identity develops within nested contexts over time. The ten guidelines apply to work with clients, students and research participants, and to practice, education, research and consultation.
- 5.B.1 Self-reflection: knowing what you bring into the room
Reflection in and on action: Schön described reflection-in-action: noticing surprise and adjusting while the work is under way. Reviewing work afterward, reflection-on-action, complements it. One catches a misstep in the moment; the other finds patterns across sessions and clients that no single moment reveals.
Values and cultural self-awareness: APA's Multicultural Guidelines ask psychologists to recognize that, as cultural beings, they hold attitudes and beliefs that shape how they perceive and interact with others and how they conceptualize clients. A value that feels like common sense may be one culture's norm.
- 5.B.2 Adapting your professional behavior to the person and the setting
Eye contact and display norms: Cultural norms shape eye contact. In one experiment, Japanese participants rated a face making eye contact as angrier, less approachable and more unpleasant than Finnish participants did, although basic physiological orienting to eye contact was similar, pointing to learned display rules.
Speech without talking down: Adjusting speech should not slide into over-accommodation. Elderspeak, infantilizing talk directed at older adults, was followed by resistiveness to care about twice as often as normal talk (probability .55 versus .26) among nursing home residents with dementia.
- 5.B.3 Naming and working through differences with clients and colleagues
Goals: Agreement on goals matters. Meta-analyses found medium-sized links between outcome and both patient-therapist goal consensus (54 studies) and collaboration (53 studies), and the authors recommend seeking clients' input on goals and plans throughout therapy.
Values: When a psychologist's personal values differ from a client's, the client's self-determination governs the goals of the work. APA's Principle E and Standard 3.01 bar unfair discrimination, so a value conflict calls for self-examination and consultation, not for turning away a group of clients.
- 5.B.4 Consulting about your own reactions
Countertransference: Countertransference here means a therapist's reactions to a client that draw on the therapist's own history and vulnerabilities. A meta-analysis of 14 studies found such reactions modestly related to poorer therapy outcomes, with wide variation across studies.
Managing reactions: Countertransference management factors, such as the therapist's self-insight and ability to manage anxiety, were found to dampen countertransference reactions, and successful management was related to better outcomes in a further meta-analysis.
- 5.C.1 Respectful, empathic engagement across differences
Empathy: Empathy means understanding what another person is experiencing or trying to express. Across 82 samples, therapist empathy predicted outcome (r = .28) across orientations and presenting problems; ratings by clients, observers and therapists predicted outcome better than tests of empathic accuracy.
Cultural humility: Cultural humility is an other-oriented interpersonal stance marked by respect and a lack of superiority toward a person's cultural background and experience. Clients who saw their therapist as culturally humble reported a stronger working alliance, which in turn carried its link to improvement.
- 5.C.2 Culturally attuned skills for building and keeping alliances
Personal distance: Hall's proxemics divides interpersonal space into intimate, personal, social and public zones, each suited to different kinds of interaction, and observed that preferred distances differ across cultures. Seating and room arrangement therefore send messages about formality and closeness.
The client's own words: "Thinking too much," an idiom of distress found worldwide, overlaps only partly with depression, anxiety and PTSD and should not be read as a gloss for a disorder. The DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview, found feasible and useful in an international field trial, elicits such explanations.
- 5.C.3 Consulting with stakeholders and advocating for clients
Consent and what to share: Collaboration rests on consent. Psychologists disclose confidential information with appropriate consent or as the law permits (Standard 4.05), share only what is germane to the purpose (4.04), and in consultations avoid identifying details unless the client consents or it cannot be avoided (4.06).
Cooperation with other professionals: Standard 3.09 directs psychologists to cooperate with other professionals, when indicated and professionally appropriate, in order to serve their clients effectively and appropriately, which includes teachers, physicians, social workers and community helpers the client wants involved.
ExamDragon, examdragon.com/eppp. Préparation indépendante, sans lien avec l’ASPPB ni approuvée par elle; rédigée dans nos mots d’après le Candidate Handbook de l’EPPP intégré de l’ASPPB.