psychotherapy - common factors

Wampold’s three pathways in his contextual model

“real” relationship, expectations, health-promoting actions

"real” relationship

when you feel like you know someone and they understand you, not superficial, may take a while to develop

expectations

presumably client goes bc they expect therapy to help, if they don’t, not likely to do the necessary work

health-promoting actions

not just talking, client has to be doing something to move towards goals, will look different between different therapies

what did the Anderson (2016) study look at?

therapist effects

how did Anderson (2016) investigate therapist effects?

tested grad students on their facilitative interpersonal skills (FIS) and looked at how this affected their therapy efficacy a year later

why did Anderson (2016) use grad students?

to exclude the confound of learning from doing therapy

why did Anderson (2016) use a performance task to test FIS skills instead of a self-report measure?

to combat potential bias

how did Anderson (2016) handle the potential confound of type of therapy?

the therapists practiced different kinds of therapy

what evidence is there for common factors?

therapy relationship is the most important common factor and any therapy is better than no therapy

what are the main limitations of studying common factors?

there is no research that common factors alone are sufficient and all research is correlational bc you can’t remove common factors