Psychotherapy

There have been great strides in psychology regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and multicultural competence, but a need remains to translate these values into actionable practices in psychotherapy. While the case has been made that measurement-based care is an evidence-based intervention that improves outcomes and reduces dropouts (de Jong et al., 2021) and recently that it provides a transparent collaborative process to engage clients in treatment (Boswell et al., 2023), it has not been widely considered as a methodology for multicultural competence...

Developing affirming interventions for transgender and nonbinary (TNB) therapy clients requires understanding their experiences with microaggressions in psychotherapy, yet no self-report measure of anti-TNB microaggressions in this context exists. Moreover, few studies have tested the associations between anti-TNB microaggressions and therapy processes. To better address the burden of unmet mental health care needs among TNB people, this three-study investigation designed and tested the psychometric properties of the Gender Identity and Expression Microaggressions in Therapy Scale (GIEMTS), a measure of TNB individuals' encounters with microaggressions in psychotherapy...

Group supervision is an extensively used format across many training agencies, yet it has been largely disregarded in theory and research within the supervision literature. In fact, the Guidelines for Clinical Supervision in Health Service Psychology (American Psychological Association, 2015a) mentions group supervision only one time, despite the fact that supervision within a group context includes competencies and considerations that are both unique and essential to the effective and ethical practice of group supervision...

Identity concealment thwarts psychological needs of authenticity and belonging, both of which are important for mental health and relationship building. Through the lens of minority stress theory and relational-cultural theory, the present study examined whether identity concealment in the workplace by psychology trainees is indirectly associated with greater burnout and poorer therapeutic relationship quality. To test this hypothesis, a parallel mediation analysis was conducted on data from 335 clinical and counseling psychology doctoral trainees with concealable stigmatized identities using Hayes's (2018) PROCESS macro...

The tripartite model of the therapy relationship, which includes the working alliance, real relationship, and transference-countertransference configuration, has been a useful way to conceptualize the complexity of the connection between a therapist and a client. However, little research has focused on the interrelationships between these three components over time. This study sought to replicate the findings of Bhatia and Gelso (2018) by examining the between-person relationships among each of the three elements averaged across all sessions...

Meta-analysis has found a significant relation between rupture-repair and client outcome (Eubanks et al., 2018). Rupture-repair processes may be particularly important in psychotherapy for pregnancy loss wherein ruptures related to client feelings of shame and inadequacy, the societal invalidation of perinatal grief, and reenactments in the therapy relationship of early attachment experiences have been theorized to be common and important events (Markin, 2024). Thus, it is important to understand what occurs on a microlevel during the process of therapy to ultimately explain the rupture resolution (RR) and treatment outcome association...

Recent scholarship has highlighted the value of therapists adopting a multicultural orientation (MCO) within psychotherapy. A newly developed performance-based measure of MCO capacities exists (MCO-performance task [MCO-PT]) in which therapists respond to video-based vignettes of clients sharing culturally relevant information in therapy. The MCO-PT provides scores related to the three aspects of MCO: cultural humility (i.e., adoption of a nonsuperior and other-oriented stance toward clients), cultural opportunities (i...

Children's in-session involvement in child and family therapies correlates with both positive and negative treatment outcomes. Thus, it is important to gain a better understanding of the clinical practices that facilitate children's involvement in therapy sessions so that practitioners can employ them with greater precision. To address this need, we conducted a study to answer the following question: What clinical practices facilitate children's in-session involvement in child and family therapies? The data consisted of 16 extant audiovisual recordings of child and family therapy sessions and 24 stimulated-recall interviews with the participants in the recordings...

The association between emotional experience and expression, known as emotional coherence, is considered important for individual functioning. Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) make it possible to automatically recognize verbally expressed emotions in psychotherapy dialogues and to explore emotional coherence with larger samples and finer granularity than previously. The present study used state-of-the-art emotion recognition models to automatically label clients' emotions at the utterance level, employed these labeled data to examine the coherence between verbally expressed emotions and self-reported emotions, and examined the associations between emotional coherence and clients' improvement in functioning throughout treatment...

Sexual and gender minorities (SGM) experience higher rates of psychological distress and seek psychotherapy at higher rates compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts. However, few therapists are trained on how to provide effective psychotherapy with SGM clients. The multicultural orientation (MCO) framework, which has been linked to improved therapeutic processes and outcomes, may be a valuable tool for working with SGM clients. The primary aim of this systematic review was to link the MCO framework to existing empirical psychotherapy research with SGM clients...

Reports an error in "A comparison of emotion-focused therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy in the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder: Results of a feasibility randomized controlled trial" by Ladislav Timulak, Daragh Keogh, Craig Chigwedere, Charlotte Wilson, Fiona Ward, David Hevey, Patrick Griffin, Louise Jacobs, Suzanne Hughes, Christina Vaughan, Kea Beckham and Shona Mahon ( Psychotherapy , 2022[Mar], Vol 59[1], 84-95). In the article, the third n and percentage values in the second sentence in the second paragraph of the Treatment Drop Out, Number of Sessions, Research Attrition section should appear as n = 6 (20...

Reports an error in "Psychotherapy skills and methods: Introduction to the special issue" by Clara E. Hill and John C. Norcross ( Psychotherapy , 2023[Sep], Vol 60[3], 237-245). In the article, the correct affiliation for John C. Norcross is the Department of Psychology, University of Scranton. The online version of this article has been corrected, (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2023-99100-001.) This article introduces the special issue of Psychotherapy on evidence-based skills and methods and concomitantly, outlines the purposes and processes of the Interorganizational Task Force that guided the work...

The Comparative Psychotherapy Process Scale (CPPS) is a 20-item scale which aims to capture technical features distinguishing cognitive behavioral (CBT) from psychodynamic (PD) psychotherapy (and vice versa) in two corresponding subscales (CBT and PD Subscale). Our objective was to validate a German self-report version of the CPPS regarding a previous psychotherapy session in a psychotherapist- and in a patient-version. Fifty-three psychotherapists and their 53 patients answered to the according German CPPS Scale as well as to specific subscales of the Multitheoretical List of Therapeutic Interventions self-report-instrument (MULTI-30 subscales) assessing CBT- and PD-specific intervention characteristics...

This study aimed to explore how Chinese counseling trainees' trait and state mindfulness predicted their clients' symptom level over the course of therapy. A data set consisting of 6,888 sessions from 1,216 clients and their 211 master's level beginning therapist trainees in China was used, which included a measure of trainees' trait mindfulness at the beginning of their practicum and their state mindfulness and client-rated symptom distress level at the beginning of each of their therapy sessions. Multilevel modeling and random-intercept cross-lagged panel model results suggested that (a) at the trainee level, a trainee's trait mindfulness did not predict their average client symptom improvement over practicum; (b) at the session-to-session level, higher trainee state mindfulness before one session significantly predicted lower client distress before the next session, and higher client distress before one session did not predict trainee state mindfulness before the subsequent session...

Alliance ruptures in youth psychotherapy can have a significant impact on treatment outcomes. However, there is currently limited guidance on how to effectively repair these ruptures with young people. This study aims to address this gap specifically in the context of psychodynamic psychotherapy with adolescents. The objectives of the study are (a) to understand the therapeutic interventions and attitudes that either facilitate or hinder the resolution of alliance ruptures and (b) to develop a model for repairing these ruptures within this particular treatment approach...

Alexithymia is the inability to identify and recognize emotions. The present study examined the impact of alexithymia on prolonged exposure (PE) therapy. Participants ( n = 68) with PTSD underwent 10 PE sessions. Alexithymia was assessed via the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and the emotional clarity and awareness subscales of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale. Treatment outcomes were assessed via the PTSD checklist and Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition at posttreatment and 6-month follow-up...

The quantitative reviews of the outcome research on couple therapy show that this type of therapy can produce positive outcomes for couples and improve relationship satisfaction. There is now also a number of qualitative studies in which clients report in their own words on the outcomes of couple therapy. This study aimed to meta-analyze the client-reported outcomes of couple therapy generated in the studies using qualitative methods. A sample of 15 primary studies examining clients' reported outcomes of couple therapy was identified through an extensive literature search...

Therapeutic alliance and mentalization are common factors inherent to all effective treatments. Mentalization-based interventions have the potential to create a safe relationship, which makes further mentalizing interventions possible. However, to date, no study has examined the bidirectional relationship between these variables in child psychotherapy. In an evidence-based case study design, psychodynamic therapy processes of two Turkish children (age: 9 and 10 years) who presented with social withdrawal problems were compared...

Discrimination against and negative beliefs about large-bodied individuals, known as weight stigma, is pervasive and harmful. While previous research has focused on the negative consequences of weight stigma, the present study aims to highlight the lived experience of large-bodied individuals while also exploring the process of healing from harmful experiences of weight stigma. Ten adult (9/10 White, 8/10 cisgender women), large-bodied individuals recruited via snowball sampling through a nonprofit, grassroots, eating disorder advocacy organization participated in a 10-week, counselor-facilitated support group with the shared goal of healing from the impact of weight stigma...

Intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (ISTDP) is theorized to reduce negative affect by challenging patients' defense mechanisms so that they can experience and work through attachment-trauma-related emotions. While ISTDP has been shown to decrease depressive symptoms in single treatment-resistant depression (TRD), it has not been established whether negative affect and emotional repression are reduced, as theorized. Next to depressive symptoms, this retrospectively registered (https://osf.io/v46gy) randomized controlled trial, therefore, examined the effects of ISTDP on emotional repression and negative affect in adults with TRD...