Yesterday I blogged about the pre-conference workshop I attended on "Anger dysregulation". Today was the first full day of the conference proper.  Breakfast illustrated the kind of helpful, fun conversation that can emerge at this kind of event.  I talked to Fiona McFarlene & Tara Murphy who were going on to run a skills class on "Exposure and response prevention: adapting skills you already have to the treatment of tics".

I recently wrote the blog post "New research describes effective ways of changing long-term personality traits & other persistent behaviour patterns (1st post)" where I introduced two new research articles - Hudson and Fraley's "Volitional personality trait change: Can people choose to change personality traits?" and Elliott et al's "Psychometrics of the Personal Questionnaire: A client-generated outcome measure".  The Hudson & Fraley paper describes an intriguing way of deliberately changing long-term personality patterns.

Hudson and Fraley's great new article "Volitional personality trait change: Can people choose to change their personality traits?" still just has "online first" status at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology so it hasn't even got to "hot off the press" yet.  It describes such interesting findings.  The abstract reads "Previous research has found that most people want to change their personality traits. But can people actually change their personalities just because they want to? To answer this question, we conducted 2, 16-week intensive longitudinal randomized experiments.

I wrote a post a few days ago entitled "Resource activation: using clients' own strengths in psychotherapy and counseling - background (1st post)" giving some of the research basis for suggesting this territory is very relevant for therapists who are pushing to help their clients more effectively.  In order to follow up these ideas further I bought the short 'how to do it' 70 or so page book by Fluckiger, Wusten, Zinbarg & Wampold.

A bit over two years ago I wrote a sequence of three blog posts starting with "New research suggests CBT depression treatment is more effective if we focus on strengths rather than weaknesses".  This was triggered by the fascinating paper by Cheavens & colleagues "The compensation and capitalization models: A test of two approaches to individualizing the treatment of depression" - with its abstract reporting "Despite long-standing calls for the individualization of treatments for depression, modest progress has been made in this effort.

Is this one question or many?  If you see a therapist, how many treatment sessions are you likely to need?  Sometimes that's a little like asking "If I go on a journey, how long should I travel for?"  Happily though, we do now have enough research evidence to be able to respond fairly helpfully to this "how many treatment sessions?" question.  To give useful answers though, it’s probably sensible to break the very general “how many sessions?” query into a number of more targeted sub-questions.

Needs-Beliefs-Behaviours

See too Nissen-Lie et al's "Patient and therapist perspectives on alliance development: Therapists' practice experiences as predictors" with its finding about the toxic effects on client rated therapeutic alliance produced by the "leaking" of unspoken critical therapist. 

"Humble warmth" "Therapist predictors of early patient-rated working alliance: A multilevel approach"

Pre-session 'meditation' on client strengths & resources.  Compassion work.

Work on compassion both for self and for others and its effects on self-esteem ... and note too the benefits of "saying turquoise" and other emotional intelligence aspects.

Yesterday I wrote a blog post "Routine Outcome Monitoring can really help therapists clarify where they need to try harder".  Today's post extends this extremely important point.  About twenty years ago Howard and colleagues (Howard, Moras, Brill, Martinovich, & Lutz, 1996) introduced a crucial new approach for improving our outcomes.  They wrote "Treatment-focused research is concerned with the establishment of the comparative efficacy and effectiveness of clinical interventions, aggregated over groups of patients.

I recently wrote a couple of blog posts - "Psychotherapy (and psychotherapist) outcomes are good but largely stagnant" and "Fascinatingly, therapists themselves vary considerably in their effectiveness".  In the second of these posts I commented "A paper published just last month (Green, Barkham et al.

I wrote a post yesterday on the good, but largely stagnant, outcomes currently being achieved in psychotherapy.  In today's post I highlight the fascinating finding that psychotherapists themselves vary considerably in their effectiveness.  If we can help those with poorer outcomes to begin matching those with better, great gains are possible and the log jam in trying to improve psychotherapy's effectiveness can be eased.  In later posts I will argue that this improvement looks eminently achievable.