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Culture in Psychotherapy Practice and Research: Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills

By Mamta Dadlani, M.S. and David Scherer, Ph.D. University of Massachusetts Amherst Introduction As the people of the United States become even more culturally diverse, psychotherapists are required to develop their cultural competence.  Health disparities persist with regard to many cultural identities including race, class, sexual orientation, and ability (Gehlert, Mininger, Sohmer & Berg, 2008; [...]

Cultivating Cultural Competence: Understanding and Integrating Cultural Diversity in Psychotherapy

In today’s rapidly growing multicultural society, psychotherapists are faced with the complex task of working effectively with clientele whose psychosocial dynamics include increasingly diverse cultural values, beliefs and attitudes that the psychotherapist is either not aware of or not prepared to engage as part of the therapy.

The Implications of Attachment Theory in Counseling and Psychotherapy

By Meifen Wei Iowa State University Over the past decade, researchers have found that Bowlby’s attachment theory (1973, 1988) has important implications for counseling and psychotherapy (Cassidy & Shaver, 1999, Lopez, 1995; Lopez & Brennan, 2000; Mallinckrodt, 2000). Attachment theory is a theory of affect regulation and interpersonal relationships. When individuals have caregivers who are emotionally [...]

Conflict in Supervision: Avoidable or Useful?

By Lee Nelson Supervision is a fact of life for most of us.  We experience years of supervision in our professional training sequence and possibly afterward, and many of us move on to becoming supervisors of other professionals.  In their classic text, Coping with Conflict, Mueller and Kell (1972), some of the earliest writers in [...]

Working with Autobiographical Memory Narratives in Psychotherapy

Tali Z. Boritz, Emily Bryntwick, and Lynne E. Angus Within psychotherapy, client storytelling is fundamental to the development of the therapeutic relationship and allows a shared context of meaning and understanding to emerge between client and psychotherapist, typically based on personal memories of past experiences (Angus, Lewin, Bouffard, & Rotondi-Trevisan, 2004). When clients provide narrative [...]

How We Say Goodbye: Research on Psychotherapy Termination

Jennifer A. Hardy and Susan S. Woodhouse The Pennsylvania State University Termination is generally viewed by psychotherapists as a complex stage of psychotherapy (Gelso & Woodhouse, 2002). Research confirms that during this phase, the process and progress of psychotherapy are typically reviewed, goals are developed for the future, and the dyad says goodbye (Marx & [...]

Assimilating Common Factor Treatment Components into Cognitive Therapy for Depression

Michael J. Constantino, Ph.D. University of Massachusetts Amherst A voluminous and ever-expanding research literature points to the general effectiveness of psychotherapy (Lambert & Ogles, 2004). Through the use of controlled clinical trials, psychotherapy researchers have identified many empirically-supported treatments for specific clinical phenomena (Roth & Fonagy, 2005). The extant research also suggests that, with just [...]

Believing is Seeing: Clinical Implications of Research on Patient Expectations

Michael J. Constantino and Joan DeGeorge University of Massachusetts Amherst A classic social psychological finding is that expectations shape people’s experiences, perceptions, and behaviors (e.g., Asch, 1946). Clinical psychologists have long been interested in how expectations specifically affect psychotherapy (e.g., Frank, 1968). After decades of theoretical and empirical attention, it appears safe to say that patient [...]

Three Ways to Improve our Effectiveness

By Bruce E. Wampold Garrison Keillor observes of the residents of Lake Wobegon, “All the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” As psychotherapists, it is likely that we similarly believe we are above average, but as Keillor’s folksy humor reminds us, it ain’t so—half of us [...]