A total of 117 depressed clients, stratified for severity, completed 8 or 16 sessions of manualized treatment, either cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy (CB) or psychodynamic-interpersonal psychotherapy (PI). Each of 5 clinician-investigators treated clients in all 4 treatment conditions. On most measures, CB and PI were equally effective, irrespective of the severity of depression or the duration of treatment. However, there was evidence of some advantage to CB on the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961). There was no evidence that CB's effects were more rapid than those of PI, nor did the effects of each treatment method vary according to the severity of depression. There was no overall advantage to 16-session treatment over 8-session treatment. However, those presenting with relatively severe depression improved substantially more after 16 than after 8 sessions.

Three related studies are presented focusing on the development of a short 32-item version of the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP). Study 1 presents the procedures for item selection o n the IIP short version; Study 2 presents a confirmatory analysis of the IIP short version o n an independent sample; and Study 3 provides preliminary normative (general population and out-patient) data and additional evidence of the psychometric properties of the IIP short form. The results suggest that the short version sacrifices little compared to the original 127-item version in terms of its psychometric properties while being considerably more convenient for routine clinical practice.

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The GAF can be rated reliably after minimal training. It provides a valid summary of symptoms and social functioning among schizophrenic patients provided they are not assessed when suffering from acute psychotic episodes.

Manic patients, depressed bipolar patients, and normal controls were compared on measures of social cognition. Manic patients showed a normal self-serving bias on the Attributional Style Questionnaire, but depressed patients attributed negative events more than positive events to self. On an implicit test of attributional style, both patient groups attributed negative events more than positive events to self. Both patient groups showed slowed color naming for depression-related but not euphoria-related words. Manic patients, like normal controls, endorsed mainly positive words as true of self but, like the depressed patients, recalled mainly negative words. Findings from the implicit tests indicate a common form of psychological organization in manic and depressed patients, whereas the contrasts between the scores on the implicit and explicit measures are consistent with the hypothesis of a manic defense.

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Patients with BPD have difficulties in recalling specific autobiographical memories. These difficulties are related to their tendency to dissociate and may help them to avoid episodic information that would evoke acutely negative affect.

Therapist fidelity to the manuals for prescriptive and exploratory psychotherapies was assessed via the Sheffield Psychotherapy Rating Scale. Ratings on 220 sessions drawn from the Second Sheffield Psychotherapy Project showed adequate inter-rater reliabilities within and between treatments. Discriminant analysis showed that the treatments could be differentiated almost perfectly even though the same five therapists delivered both of them. Relationship enhancing skills, measured by a facilitative conditions scale, were held constant across treatments and contributed nothing to the discriminant function. There was no evidence that adherence varied with the severity of the clients' symptoms and only very limited evidence that it varied with the duration of treatment, despite there being adequate statistical power to detect small effects. Small variations in adherence with the stage of treatment were found but only for sessions of prescriptive therapy.