Collaboration can provide benefits to the individual and the group across a variety of contexts. Even in simple perceptual tasks, the aggregation of individuals' personal information can enable enhanced group decision-making. However, in certain circumstances such collaboration can worsen performance, or even expose an individual to exploitation in economic tasks, and therefore a balance needs to be struck between a collaborative and a more egocentric disposition. Neurohumoral agents such as oxytocin are known to promote collaborative behaviours in economic tasks, but whether there are opponent agents, and whether these might even affect information aggregation without an economic component, is unknown. Here, we show that an androgen hormone, testosterone, acts as such an agent. Testosterone causally disrupted collaborative decision-making in a perceptual decision task, markedly reducing performance benefit individuals accrued from collaboration while leaving individual decision-making ability unaffected. This effect emerged because testosterone engendered more egocentric choices, manifest in an overweighting of one's own relative to others' judgements during joint decision-making. Our findings show that the biological control of social behaviour is dynamically regulated not only by modulators promoting, but also by those diminishing a propensity to collaborate.

Objectives Goal‐oriented practices are central to many contemporary psychotherapies. The aim of this study was to explore clients’ experiences of this work. Design Mixed methods, with a main qualitative part and a smaller quantitative component. Participants were 22 clients in integrative psychotherapy (15 females, 6 males, 1 other). Semi‐structured interviews after session 4 and at endpoint were analyzed thematically. On the basis of the identified themes, “goal attitude” scores were developed and their correlations with outcomes investigated. Results Goal‐oriented practices could help clients move from intention to action through increased awareness and focus, setting manageable tasks, and progress monitoring. However, they had the potential to hinder clients’ awareness of their intentions, feel irrelevant, disorientating, or demotivating. Effectiveness hinged on client's management of their expectations, flexible working, and time. Positive attitudes toward goal‐oriented practices were associated with improvement. Conclusions Goal‐oriented practices can enhance psychotherapeutic work but need to be individually tailored and implemented collaboratively.

Objective: The Relational Depth Frequency Scale (RDFS) was developed to measure the frequency of specific moments of profound contact and engagement in psychotherapy. Method:Following an initial process of item generation and rating, Three-Step Test Interviews were conducted with eight therapists and clients to further refine potential items. Sixteen relational depth items were then taken forward for psychometric assessment in an online sample of 336 therapists and 220 clients, each divided into separate ÒshorteningÓ and ÒcheckingÓ subsamples.Results: Following psychometric scale shortening involving confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and Rasch analysis, we formed a six item RDFS that could be used with both therapists and clients. The parameters of the shortened form replicated well in the independent checking subsamples with good internal consistency (CronbachÕs α = .85 and .93 in therapist and clients respectively), acceptable fit statistics in CFA and Rasch analysis, and moderate to high levels of convergent validity against the Working Alliance Inventory (Short Form, Revised) and Relational Depth Inventory (RDI-R2). Conclusion: As a brief self-report measure, the RDFS can be used to further assess the relationship between relational depth and therapeutic outcomes.Further research is needed to examine the validity of the RDFS in clinical settings.

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The main objective of this study is to evaluate the utility of a new qualitative scale development methodology—Three-Step Test-Interview (TSTI)—in its first application in the validation of a psychotherapy scale: The Relational Depth Frequency Scale (RDFS). The TSTI is a cognitive pretesting method designed to uncover potential problems in scale construction. The RDFS is a six-item unidimensional scale of in-depth therapeutic relating, designed for use in large-scale outcome studies. Following the creation of an item pool and “expert ratings,” a purposive sample of four therapists and four clients (five females, three males, mean age: 49 years) was recruited to take part in the TSTI with the view to refine the original 36-item RDFS prior to psychometric exploration. Structured observations pointed to problems in test-takers’ patterns of responses in relation to theoretical knowledge of the relational depth construct. Issues uncovered and addressed included some misinterpretations of instructions and items, redundant content, double-barreled items, and test-takers’ reactions to intimate content wording. The method supported the refinement of the RDFS including amendment to its instructions and the removal of problematic items. TSTI results produced knowledge on the scale which could not be captured with statistical methods.

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