What is it about?
Therapeutic alliance regards the consensus about goals and tasks of treatment, as well as the emotional bond between therapist and patient. This has been found an important predictor of outcome in psychotherapy. We have shown that increased alliance leads to better emotion regulation, which in turn leads to decreases in depressive symptoms, in internet-delivered treatments for adolescent depression.
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Why is it important?
We separate stable parts of the alliance, that can be influenced by background factors such as personality, from fluctuating parts of alliance, that in theory are more likely to be influenced by the treatment. By only looking at the parts that fluctuate within a patient, we show that these fluctuations are important for outcome in treatment. Furthermore, we shed light on one of the reasons why alliance is important - through its influence on emotion regulation. Learning more about the process of psychological treatment can help us increase its efficacy in the long run.
Perspectives
I think this is particularly interesting as it shows these relationships in internet-delivered treatment, showing that relationship factors play an important role even though the communication is entirely text-based. I think the findings are very intuitive, and it was really interesting to find that we could find support for these pathways. There is a lot of research showing THAT psychological treatments of different kinds work, but there are still a lot of questions regarding HOW they work remaining - this is one piece of the puzzle!
Karin Lindqvist
Stockholm University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Therapeutic alliance is calming and curing—The interplay between alliance and emotion regulation as predictors of outcome in Internet-based treatments for adolescent depression., Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, May 2023, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/ccp0000815.
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