Effectiveness of adolescent identity treatment (AIT) versus DBT-a for the treatment of adolescent borderline personality disorder.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is among the most severe mental health problems with long-lasting deterioration of functioning. According to a Cochrane review, evidence for methods focused on treatment for adolescent BPD patients is very limited. Aims of the study were to demonstrate the noninferiority of adolescent identity treatment (AIT) compared with dialectical behavior therapy for adolescents (DBT-A), and that intensive early treatment of BPD leads to significant improvement of psychosocial and personality functioning in adolescent patients.

A design for process-outcome psychotherapy research in adolescents with Borderline Personality Pathology.

Underage patients with Borderline Personality Pathology (BPP) are in need of specialised psychotherapeutic treatment. A handful of these treatments, including Adolescent Identity Treatment (AIT) and Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Adolescents (DBT-A), have been adapted for adolescent patients. Psychotherapy research has shown that the outcome of different psychotherapeutic approaches can be very similar despite conceptual and practical differences between the theoretical models.

Using decision trees to characterize verbal communication during change and stuck episodes in the therapeutic process.

Methods are needed for creating models to characterize verbal communication between therapists and their patients that are suitable for teaching purposes without losing analytical potential. A technique meeting these twin requirements is proposed that uses decision trees to identify both change and stuck episodes in therapist-patient communication. Three decision tree algorithms (C4.

Maternal stress and perceptions of self-efficacy in socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers: an explicative model.

Studies have demonstrated that maternal stress and perceptions of self-efficacy influence a mother's performance, affecting her ability to interact with her child and to understand and answer his needs. The purpose of this study was to evaluate maternal stress and the perception of self-efficacy in the mothers of infants who are cared for in child-care centers and belong to the poorest segment of the Chilean population. To this end, these aspects were studied in 121 low-income, high-social-risk mothers with children between the ages of 4 and 9 months.

Clients', therapists', and observers' agreement on the amount, temporal location, and content of psychotherapeutic change and its relation to outcome.

Clients', therapists', and observers' identification of change was studied in 27 therapeutic processes, and agreement on the amount, temporal location, and content of change was related to outcome. Results show that clients reported more changes in successful therapies. Client-therapist temporal match of change moments was low irrespective of outcome.

Analysis of verbalized emotions in the psychotherapeutic dialogue during change episodes.

As described by many theorists, emotional expressions contribute to the activation and regulation of personal emotional experiences and communicate something about internal states and intentions. These emotional expressions can be observed in the words used in our speech and nonverbal behaviors, even when nonverbal behaviors are synchronized to one's own speech or to the speech of others. Using a quantitative and qualitative methodology, this article reports a classification of verbal emotional expressions of both psychotherapists and patients in change episodes.

Language and therapeutic change: a speech acts analysis.

Drawing on the speech acts theory, a linguistic pattern was identified that could be expected to be associated to therapeutic change, characterized by being uttered in the first person singular and present indicative, and by being self-referential in its propositional content. The frequency of the pattern was examined among verbalizations defined as change moments in three therapies with different theoretical orientation. Results show that the majority of change moments have the specified pattern, and that this pattern is significantly more frequent in change moments than in random non-change-related verbalizations, and so, it does not pertain to therapeutic conversation in general.