Psychologist Interview Preparation Guide

As a Psychologist, attention to detail is needed from charting to counseling patients. Explain your skills and use examples. Tell the interviewer about your patience, determination and proactive attitude.

This question provides you insight into the applicant's personal experiences and motivations. Some people enter the field of clinical psychology due to their own experience with a psychologist or other mental health professional as a child or youth. Some have an inherent yearn to help to others. Some exhibit a curiosity about how the mind works and wish to better understand human behavior. Their response give you a window into their background, personality and work ethic. What to look for in an answer:

Personal experience with psychology
Motivation and passion for the field
Communication of work ethic and habits

In the event that a candidate fails to offer the counseling a patient requires, the candidate should recommend the patient to a specialist who they believe is better suited to deal with their problem. It is important that candidates do not create the impression that the patient's problem is unsolvable, but rather that they require care beyond the candidate's professional capacity.

acupuncture a treatment in traditional Chinese medicine in which sharp needles are inserted in special places on the skin and twirled rapidly to affect other parts of the body, this technique is used to suppress pain and to treat other bodily problems

An effective clinical psychologist will not only be listening carefully to a patient's answers to questions or evaluating the direction a client chooses to take, but they will also be aware of nonverbal cues. You'll want to assess your candidate's ability to observe things like body language, tone of voice, eye contact and nervous habits. These nonverbal cues are important when assessing and treating a client. What to look for in an answer:

Ability to observe nonverbal cues
Experience in interpreting nonverbal cues
Effectiveness in using cues to help in assessment and treatment

altered state of consciousness a condition r state that is considered outside the realm of normal consciousness, resulting from any number of different conditions, such as sensory deprivation or overstimulation, hypnosis, meditation, or the use of psychoactive drugs

associative learning the learning of associations between two stimuli or between a stimulus and a response based on repetition, includes classical and operant conditioning

beauty principle the tendency for individuals to like physically attractive persons more than physically unattractive persons, especially in first impressions

brightness contrast the perceiver’s tendency to exaggerate the physical difference in the light intensities of two adjacent regions, as a result, a gray patch looks brighter on a black background and darker on a white background

cohort effect age-related differences among people who grew up at the same time attributable to cultural or historical differences while growing up rather than real developmental change