LPF LPC cheat sheet

ACA Code of Ethics core principles: autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, justice, fidelity, veracity. Each maps to a decision rule, not a vague virtue - e.g., veracity governs disclosure of limits of confidentiality at intake.

Informed consent elements: nature of services, counselor credentials, fees, confidentiality limits, risks/benefits, right to withdraw, emergency procedures, and complaint/grievance process. Consent is ongoing, not a one-time signature.

Privileged communication belongs to the client and is a legal concept defined by state statute; confidentiality is an ethical concept defined by professional codes. Privilege can be waived only by the holder (or guardian/court).

Mandatory reporting typically triggers on reasonable suspicion of child abuse/neglect, elder abuse, or dependent-adult abuse; the standard is suspicion, not proof, and the duty is personal and non-delegable.

Tarasoff-type duty to protect arises when a client poses serious imminent threat to an identifiable victim; responses include warning the victim, notifying police, or arranging hospitalization per state law.

Boundary crossings are often unavoidable and may be benign (e.g., attending a client's community event); boundary violations are harmful and exploit the relationship (e.g., sexual contact, financial entanglement).

Scope of practice: counselors practice only within education, training, and supervised experience; when a client's needs exceed competence, the rule is referral or consultation, not improvised treatment.

Ethical decision-making models share steps: identify the problem, consult the code and law, consider principles and cultural factors, consult, choose and document an action, then evaluate the outcome.

Cultural encapsulation (Wrenn) describes a counselor treating their own cultural assumptions as universal; it manifests as imposing one worldview, ignoring within-group variation, and overgeneralizing from stereotypes.

Racial/cultural identity development models (e.g., Cross's Black identity model, Helms's White identity model) are stage models: statuses range from pre-encounter/conformity to immersion and internalization/autonomy. A client's status predicts how they perceive a counselor of the same or different race.

Microaggressions are brief, commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, often unintentional; categories include microassaults (deliberate), microinsults (demeaning), and microinvalidations (negating experience).

Acculturation strategies (Berry) are defined by two dimensions - maintenance of heritage culture and contact with the host culture - yielding integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization.

The multicultural counseling competencies framework organizes into awareness of own biases, knowledge of clients' worldview, and skills for culturally appropriate intervention; the later Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies add counselor/client privilege and oppression statuses.

Worldview dimensions relevant to counseling: individualism vs. collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and locus of control (internal vs. external); these shape help-seeking, symptom expression, and expectations of counselor directiveness.

Barriers to service use for marginalized groups include stigma, mistrust rooted in historical mistreatment, language access, cost/insurance, and lack of culturally responsive providers; underutilization is not evidence of low need.

Intersectionality holds that identities (race, gender, class, disability, sexual orientation) interact to produce unique privilege/oppression, so single-axis analysis of a client's experience is incomplete.

Piaget's stages: sensorimotor (0-2, object permanence), preoperational (2-7, egocentrism, symbolic play), concrete operational (7-11, conservation, reversibility), formal operational (11+, abstract and hypothetical reasoning).

Erikson's psychosocial stages pair a crisis with a virtue: trust/mistrust (hope), autonomy/shame (will), initiative/guilt (purpose), industry/inferiority (competence), identity/role confusion (fidelity), intimacy/isolation (love), generativity/stagnation (care), integrity/despair (wisdom).

Kohlberg's moral development: preconventional (punishment, self-interest), conventional (approval, law-and-order), postconventional (social contract, universal principles). Gilligan critiqued it as privileging a justice orientation over an ethic of care.

Attachment classifications (Ainsworth strange situation): secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-ambivalent/resistant, disorganized; early patterns predict later relationship expectations but are not deterministic.

Bronfenbrenner's ecological model: microsystem (direct settings), mesosystem (interactions between microsystems), exosystem (indirect influences), macrosystem (cultural values), chronosystem (time and life transitions).

Brain development: the prefrontal cortex matures last (into the mid-20s), which underlies adolescent risk-taking and incomplete impulse control; synaptic pruning and myelination increase efficiency.

Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is the gap between what a learner can do alone and with guidance; scaffolding is temporary support withdrawn as competence grows.

Grief models: Kübler-Ross's five stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) are non-linear and not a required sequence; Worden's tasks of mourning (accept reality, process pain, adjust, relocate the bond) are task-based alternatives.

Holland's RIASEC typology: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional. Congruence between personality type and work environment predicts satisfaction; differentiation and consistency describe the clarity of a profile.

Super's life-span, life-space theory: self-concept develops through roles (child, student, worker, citizen, homemaker, leisurite) in life stages (growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, decline). Career maturity became career adaptability (concern, control, curiosity, confidence).

Krumboltz's social learning theory of career decision-making: genetic endowment, environmental conditions, learning experiences, and task-approach skills shape decisions; happenstance theory encourages capitalizing on unplanned events.

Gottfredson's circumscription and compromise: children progressively rule out options by gender, then prestige, then field of interest; compromise occurs when choices must be sacrificed for accessibility.

Donald Super's archway and Savickas's career construction emphasize narrative identity - vocational personality, career adaptability, and life themes - assessed through career style interviews rather than test scores alone.

Interest inventories: Strong Interest Inventory and Self-Directed Search (Holland-based) compare interests to occupational groups; values inventories (e.g., Work Values Inventory) address what a client wants from work, not what they like doing.

Career decision-making difficulties include indecision (developmental, normal) vs. indecisiveness (pervasive, anxiety-linked); the distinction determines whether psychoeducation or clinical intervention is indicated.

Dual-career and work-family issues: role conflict, spillover, and role overload are assessed using role salience; career counseling should map all life roles rather than the worker role alone.

Rogers's core conditions: unconditional positive regard, empathic understanding, and congruence (genuineness). These are necessary and sufficient relationship conditions in person-centered theory.

Psychoanalytic constructs: id/ego/superego, defense mechanisms (repression, projection, displacement, rationalization, reaction formation), transference (client projects onto counselor), countertransference (counselor's unresolved reactions).

Behavioral techniques: systematic desensitization (relaxation + graded exposure hierarchy), flooding, token economy, shaping, and behavioral rehearsal. Extinction removes reinforcement; negative reinforcement increases behavior by removing an aversive stimulus.

Cognitive therapy (Beck): the cognitive triad (negative views of self, world, future); cognitive distortions include all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, mind reading, and overgeneralization. CBT is skills-based, structured, and homework-driven.

Solution-focused brief therapy (de Shazer, Berg): miracle question, scaling questions, exception questions, and focus on strengths; the counselor assumes the client already possesses resources.

Motivational interviewing (Miller & Rollnick): four processes - engaging, focusing, evoking, planning; OARS skills (open questions, affirmations, reflections, summaries); the righting reflex (arguing for change) increases resistance.

Stages of change (Prochaska & DiClemente): precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and relapse; interventions should match stage - advice-giving in precontemplation is typically counterproductive.

Common factors (Frank, Wampold): alliance, empathy, expectations, and extratherapeutic factors account for most outcome variance; specific technique accounts for a smaller share than the therapeutic relationship.

Tuckman's stages of group development: forming (orientation, dependence), storming (conflict, power), norming (cohesion, standards), performing (productivity), and adjourning (termination, separation).

Group types: psychoeducational (skill/knowledge delivery), counseling (interpersonal growth, moderate disclosure), psychotherapy (remediation of severe symptoms, deep disclosure), and task/work groups (productivity, not treatment).

Screening and selection: leaders screen for fit, assess risk (e.g., active suicidality, acute psychosis, extreme hostility) and prepare members for norms and expectations; inadequate screening is a common ethical failure.

Confidentiality in groups cannot be guaranteed by the leader; the leader obtains a commitment from members and states limits explicitly, but members are not bound by professional ethics.

Yalom's therapeutic factors include universality, altruism, instillation of hope, cohesiveness, catharsis, corrective recapitulation of the family, imitative behavior, interpersonal learning, and existential factors.

Group leader roles shift with stage: high structure and norm-setting early; process facilitation and conflict management during storming; less directiveness and member-to-member interpretation during performing.

Ethical group practice: informed consent covering risks, voluntary participation, right to withdraw, and limits of confidentiality; leaders avoid dual relationships with members and address scapegoating promptly.

Termination in groups addresses members' reactions to ending, consolidation of gains, and referral or follow-up planning; unplanned member departure should be processed by the group, not ignored.

Reliability refers to consistency of scores; types include test-retest, internal consistency (split-half, coefficient alpha), inter-rater, and parallel forms. Reliability sets an upper bound on validity.

Validity is the evidence supporting intended score interpretation: content (test blueprint), criterion-related (concurrent, predictive), construct (convergent, discriminant), and face validity (appearance, not psychometric evidence).

Standard error of measurement: SEM = SD × √(1 − r); a 95% confidence interval is roughly the obtained score ± 1.96 × SEM. Use it to interpret score bands, not single points.

Standard scores: z (mean 0, SD 1), T (mean 50, SD 10), IQ/deviation (mean 100, SD 15), stanines (1-9), and percentiles (percentage of the norm group scoring at or below a score).

Norm-referenced vs. criterion-referenced: the first compares a client to a norm group, the second to a defined performance standard; criterion-referenced tests do not require a representative norm sample.

Common instruments: WAIS (cognitive ability), MMPI-2/MMPI-3 (personality/psychopathology, validity scales including L, F, K), Beck Depression Inventory (symptom severity), and the BASC/ASEBA (behavior ratings across informants).

Test bias vs. fairness: a test is biased when scores systematically mispredict for a subgroup; fairness concerns equitable use. Adverse impact alone is not proof of bias.

Assessment ethics: use only instruments within competence and qualifications (e.g., Level A/B/C), obtain informed consent, respect test security, and interpret in cultural context including language and acculturation.

Internal validity threats: history, maturation, testing, instrumentation, regression to the mean, selection bias, and attrition. External validity concerns generalizability across populations, settings, and time.

Design types: true experimental (random assignment + control), quasi-experimental (no random assignment), pre-experimental (one-group pretest-posttest), and single-subject designs (ABA, multiple baseline).

Sampling: probability methods (simple random, stratified, cluster, systematic) support generalization; nonprobability methods (convenience, purposive, snowball) limit it.

Inferential error: Type I error (rejecting a true null, alpha) vs. Type II error (failing to reject a false null, beta); power = 1 − beta and increases with sample size and effect size.

Effect size indices: Cohen's d (0.2 small, 0.5 medium, 0.8 large), Pearson r, and eta squared; statistical significance does not equal practical significance.

Correlation does not establish causation; a correlation coefficient r ranges from −1 to +1, and r² is the proportion of variance shared.

Qualitative approaches: grounded theory (theory building from data), phenomenology (lived experience), ethnography (culture), and case study; trustworthiness uses credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability.

Program evaluation: needs assessment, process/formative evaluation, outcome/summative evaluation, and cost analysis; logic models link inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes.

DSM-5-TR diagnostic criteria require clinically significant distress or impairment and exclusion of substance/medical causes; a diagnosis is not required for every client, and diagnosis drives treatment planning, not identity.

Risk assessment: ask directly about suicidal ideation, plan, intent, means, and prior attempts; document the assessment, the rationale, and the safety plan (e.g., Stanley-Brown) or referral action.

Duty-to-warn/protect, involuntary commitment, and Tarasoff obligations are governed by state statute; the counselor must know the jurisdiction's criteria (e.g., imminent danger to self/others, grave disability).

Crisis intervention follows a sequence: establish safety, stabilize, assess risk, mobilize supports, plan follow-up; hospitalization is indicated when less restrictive options cannot ensure safety.

Psychotropic medication basics: SSRIs (first-line for depression/anxiety), benzodiazepines (short-term, dependence risk), antipsychotics (psychosis, metabolic monitoring), mood stabilizers (lithium requires level monitoring). Counselors coordinate, not prescribe.

Trauma-informed care principles: safety, trustworthiness, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural humility; avoid re-traumatization and recognize that symptoms may be adaptive survival responses.

Co-occurring disorders require integrated treatment; sequential (treat one then the other) and parallel models have poorer outcomes than integrated care for substance use plus mental illness.

Documentation standards: record date, session content, clinical impression, interventions used, client response, and plan; SOAP (subjective, objective, assessment, plan) and DAP are common formats. Records are legal documents.