Current Research
Projects
The Comprehensive Survey of
Psychotherapeutic Interventions
Clients’ perceptions of the
interventions in psychotherapy have often been overlooked in favor of
therapists’ and outside observers’ perceptions, as these are thought to be more
objective and therefore more informative.
However, clients’ perceptions might provide unique and valuable
information about the therapy process that cannot be found in therapists’ or
observers’ ratings. The Comprehensive
Survey of Psychotherapeutic Interventions (McCarthy, Barber, & DeRubeis, 2002) is an instrument that can measure clients’,
therapists’, and observers’ perceptions of interventions administered in a
given session. Currently we are
validating a revised version of the measure in a sample of clients receiving
treatment at community mental health centers.
Future studies will include comparing clients’, therapists’, and
observers’ ratings for the same sessions and investigating the relation of each
group’s perceptions of interventions to therapeutic alliance and outcome.
Differentiation as a Change Variable
in Psychotherapy
Many psychotherapy systems
share the goal of working to increase clients’ awareness of themselves and
their experiences, which presumably leads to symptom change and greater
well-being. While the rationale and
specific techniques for helping clients increase their awareness might vary by
therapy, the process underlying the positive benefits of greater awareness
might be the same in each system. Specifically,
lasting change probably comes through changing the structure of clients’
self-awareness – making clients’ representations of their worlds more complex
or differentiated so that they can seek out, reflect on, and use the type of
information of which they were previously unknowledgeable. I am currently reviewing the literatures from
several different therapy systems and drawing from the social and developmental
psychology literatures to find support for this idea.
The Role of Clinical Management
Techniques in Psychopharmacotherapy
A recent push toward the use
of pharmacological treatments for psychiatric disorders has led psychiatrists
to shift to a greater focus on clinical management techniques (e.g., discussing
the biochemical rationale behind the medication with the patient, discussing
dosing, assessing symptom and side effect changes from
the medication). Little is known
however, about how adherence to clinical management techniques relates to other
factors in treatment that might influence the quality and outcome of
treatment. We are currently examining
the relation of the use of clinical management techniques to therapeutic
alliance (the doctor-patient relationship), compliance with medication dosing,
and treatment retention.
The Central Relationship
Questionnaire
The Central Relationship
Questionnaire (CRQ) is a self-report measure of interpersonal tendencies, or
long-standing interactional patterns through which a
person typically relates to others. A
self-report instrument for assessing interpersonal tendencies is advantageous
compared to clinician- or observer-rated measures because it removes the burden
of training and scoring and might provide a more complete picture of an
individual’s interpersonal patterns as that individual might have access to
more information about their interpersonal tendencies than might clinicians or
observers. We are currently validating a
revised version of the measure in clinical and non-clinical samples. Soon, we hope to examine the relations of the
CRQ to attachment styles and compare ratings of interpersonal tendencies made
by observers to the rating of individuals themselves made using the CRQ.