Therapist verification of patient self-concepts as a responsive precondition for early alliance development and subsequent introject change.

Objective: Social psychological research has indicated that people strive for self-consistent feedback and interactions, even if negative, to preserve the epistemic security of knowing themselves. Without such , any interpersonal exchange may become frustrated, anxiety-riddled, and at risk for deterioration. Thus, it may be important for therapists to meet patients' self-verification needs as a responsive precondition for early alliance establishment and development.

Indirect effect of patient outcome expectation on improvement through alliance quality: A meta-analysis.

A meta-analysis revealed a positive correlation between patients' optimistic baseline, or early treatment, outcome expectation (OE) and posttreatment improvement (Constantino, Vîslă, et al., [2018]. A meta-analysis of the association between patients' early treatment outcome expectation and their posttreatment outcomes.

Patient motivational language in the prediction of symptom change, clinically significant response, and time to response in psychotherapy for generalized anxiety disorder.

Existing research demonstrates that patient change-talk (CT), or self-arguments for change, associates variably with favorable outcomes, whereas counter change-talk (CCT), or self-arguments against change, associates consistently with poorer outcomes. However, most studies on change language have focused on posttreatment versus more proximal outcomes. Addressing this gap, we examined Session 1 CT and CCT as predictors of during-treatment worry change, likelihood of clinically significant response during treatment, and time to response across cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT; = 43) and CBT integrated with motivational interviewing (MI; = 42) for generalized anxiety disorder.

Childhood Trauma and Psychosis: An Updated Review.

There is growing evidence to support the link between childhood trauma and psychosis. Childhood trauma increases the risk for psychosis and affects severity and type of psychotic symptoms, and frequency of comorbid conditions, including depression and substance use. Childhood trauma is linked to more severe functional impairment in individuals with psychosis.

Extending the context-responsive psychotherapy integration framework to cultural processes in psychotherapy.

Psychotherapist competence in attending to cultural processes has long been considered an ingredient of successful treatment. Although some research findings support a positive association between clinician multicultural competence (MCC) and client improvement, others suggest that MCC may not be a skill that therapists uniformly acquire and then stably maintain. Rather, MCC is likely more fluid and contextualized, potentially rendering within-therapist variability across their patients and within-dyad variability across different moments in a given case.

Using interpersonal process recall to compare patients' accounts of resistance in two psychotherapies for generalized anxiety disorder.

In a trial examining whether cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) could be improved by integrating motivational interviewing (MI) to target resistance, MI-CBT outperformed CBT over 12-month follow-up (Westra, Constantino, & Antony, 2016). Given that effectively addressing resistance is both a theoretically and an empirically supported mechanism of MI's additive effect, we explored qualitatively patients' experience of resistance, possibly as a function of treatment. For 5 patients from each treatment who exhibited early in-session change ambivalence, and thus were at risk for later resistance, we conducted interpersonal process recall interviews after a session.

Patients' Perceptions of Corrective Experiences in Naturalistically Delivered Psychotherapy.

Corrective experiences (CEs), which suggest transformative experience(s) for the psychotherapy patient, have a rich theoretical history; yet there is little empirical information on patients' own perceptions of what gets "corrected" from therapy, and what is "corrective" (i.e., the mechanisms driving the CE).