Psychotherapy skills and methods: Introduction to the special issue.

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue of Psychotherapy on evidence-based skills and methods and concomitantly, outlines the purposes and processes of the Interorganizational Task Force that guided the work. We provide the rationale for reviewing psychotherapy skills and methods, define and contrast skills and methods with other components of psychotherapy, describe how to assess skills, methods, and outcomes (immediate in-session, intermediate, and distal), how to link skills and methods with outcomes, and how to summarize the extant research on those skills and methods. Finally, we describe how the research reviews of skills and methods lead to training implications and therapeutic practices.

Skills and methods that work in psychotherapy: Observations and conclusions from the special issue.

“…On the other end of the spectrum, no therapy skill or method was determined to be demonstrably effective for immediate outcomes, and these were rarely analyzed by quantitative meta-analyses because it was not possible. As noted in the introductory article (Hill & Norcross, in press), it is easier to study distal outcomes (which are typically based on patient self-report of symptom changes) than immediate in-session outcomes (which typically require labor-intensive coding of microprocesses by trained judges).…”