a Department of Psychology , University of Haifa , Haifa , Israel.
Psychother Res. 2019 Aug;29(6):693-708. doi: 10.1080/10503307.2018.1429691. Epub 2018 Feb 7.
Significant progress has been achieved in the last decades in studying two central questions in psychotherapy research: what treatment works for which patient and why does treatment work. This paper delineates central developments in the methods used to study each of these questions. Through targeted examples, the paper discusses several phenomena and trends in psychotherapy research. Regarding the question of what works for whom, the discussion focuses on the progress from the search for one moderator to guide clinical decision-making to the search for a set of such moderators and their interactive effects, to best answer this question. To answer the question why treatment is effective, the paper reviews the progress from a single snapshot of a process variable to approaching causality, that is, temporal relationships, higher dependability, and closer attention to the dynamics of change in process variables. Finally, methodological developments made it possible to combine these two questions so as to better capture the richness and complexity of therapeutic work. Two central products of this integration are discussed and demonstrated through the case of the working alliance.
在过去几十年中，人们在研究心理治疗研究中的两个核心问题方面取得了重大进展：哪种治疗方法对哪种患者有效，以及为什么治疗有效。本文概述了用于研究这些问题的方法的核心发展。通过有针对性的示例，本文讨论了心理治疗研究中的几种现象和趋势。关于哪种治疗方法对哪种患者有效的问题，讨论重点从寻找一个指导临床决策的单一调节变量，发展到寻找一组此类调节变量及其相互作用，以最好地回答这个问题。为了回答治疗为何有效的问题，本文回顾了从过程变量的单一快照到接近因果关系（即时间关系、更高的可靠性和更密切关注过程变量变化的动态）的进展。最后，方法学的发展使得能够将这两个问题结合起来，从而更好地捕捉治疗工作的丰富性和复杂性。本文通过工作联盟的案例讨论并展示了这种整合的两个核心产物。
