Emotional/Behavioral Disorders Evaluation

Social/emotional testing can be helpful when your child is experiencing behavioral or emotional problems. Testing may be appropriate if your child is experiencing significant difficulties in one or more of the following areas:

• Irritability and anger
• Difficulty focusing and concentrating
• Moodiness or emotional outbursts, difficulty regulating mood
• Physical complaints without a known medical cause
• Social withdrawal, isolating from friends and/or family
• Has difficulty making or keeping friends
• Sadness/crying
• Low frustration tolerance, difficulty coping
• Sleep problems, sleeps too much or has difficulty sleeping
• Poor self image, low self-esteem
• Negative thoughts, pessimistic thinking, hopelessness
• Impulsivity
• Thoughts of death or suicide, self-injurious behaviors, threatens to harm self
• Difficulty getting along with others
• Decline in school performance, lack of motivation for schoolwork
• Lack of remorse for misbehavior
• Hyperactivity and excitability
• Panic attacks, worrying and obsessions
• Anxiety
• School avoidance or refusal to go to school
• Runs away or threatens to run away

Emotional testing is often needed to clarify a diagnosis, provide a jump start for treatment planning, determine why your child is not progressing in treatment, or to better understand why he/she is behaving a certain way.

How are emotional/behavioral diagnoses made?

A diagnosis will be made after careful review and integration of test data, observations, information gathered from multiple sources including your child or adolescent, family members, school personnel, and other mental health providers working with your child.

What does an emotional/behavioral evaluation include?

• Clinical interviews (with you and your child/adolescent)
• Consultation with professionals, including teachers and other professionals working with your child/adolescent
• Objective testing measures, including behavior rating scales, self-report personality measures and measures of family functioning
• Assessment of early temperament, developmental history and psychosocial stressors
• Projective tests which are designed to provide insight about the unconscious processes that might be influencing your child's behavior and emotions

What can an emotional/behavioral evaluation tell me about my child?

Testing will provide clarity about your child's diagnosis. In addition we will provide in-depth information about your child's self-image, style of relating to others, coping skills and frustration tolerance, and thought processes.

This information will be invaluable to achieve a better understanding of why your child behaves as he/she does and can be beneficial in directing the course of treatment.

Additional information on evaluations for emotional/behavioral disorders

Review this information packet for details on evaluations for emotional/behavioral disorders at Inova Kellar Center