The impact of integrating emotion focused components into psychological therapy: A randomized controlled trial.

OBJECTIVES: This paper presents a randomized controlled trial on assimilative integration, which is aimed at integrating elements from other orientations within one approach to enrich its conceptual and practical repertoire. Elements from Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) were integrated into a form of cognitive behavior therapy: Psychological Therapy (PT). In one treatment condition, EFT was added to PT (+EFT) with the intent to enhance therapists' working with emotions. In the other condition, concepts and interventions based on the socialpsychological self-regulation approach were added to PT (+SR). Our assumption was that the +EFT would lead to greater and deeper change, particularly in the follow-up assessments. METHOD: Patients (n = 104) with anxiety, depression, or adjustment disorders were randomized to the two conditions and treated by 38 therapists who self-selected between the conditions. Primary outcome was symptom severity at 12-month follow-up; secondary outcomes included several measures such as interpersonal problems and quality of life. Variables were assessed at baseline, after 8 and 16 sessions, at posttreatment, and at 6- and 12-month follow-up. RESULTS: Contrary to our hypothesis, no significant between-group effects were found. CONCLUSION: The findings first suggest the difficulty of topping an already very effective approach to psychotherapy. Alternative interpretations were that the EFT training, while corresponding to regular practice in AI, was not sufficient to make a difference in outcome, or that while profiting from the enhancement of abilities for working with emotions, this was outbalanced by negative effects of difficulties related to the implementation of the new elements.

Emotion categories and patterns of change in experiential therapy for depression.

OBJECTIVE: This investigation examined the relationship between in-session types of emotional experience operationalized by the emotion category coding system and the reduction of depressive symptoms in emotion-focused therapy (EFT). METHOD: Segments of videotaped sessions were coded and the different emotion categories were related to reduction in depressive symptoms in a sample of 30 clients who received EFT for depression. RESULTS: Both fewer secondary and more primary adaptive emotions, in the working phases of therapy, were found to significantly predict outcome. Moderate levels of primary maladaptive emotion in the middle working session were associated with outcome and the frequency with which clients moved from primary maladaptive to primary adaptive emotions in this session-predicted outcome. CONCLUSIONS: Results of this study support a transformational model of changing emotion with emotion.

Client emotional productivity-optimal client in-session emotional processing in experiential therapy.

OBJECTIVE: The goal of this investigation was to examine the predictive validity of Client Emotional Productivity (CEP), an operationalization of optimal client in-session emotional processing, possessing seven features: Attending, symbolization, congruence, acceptance, regulation, agency and differentiation. METHOD: CEP was related to improvement in depressive and general symptoms, in 74 clients (66% female, 34% male) who received experiential therapy of depression and this was compared to the relationship between client high expressed emotional (CHEEA) arousal and the working alliance (WAI) and outcome. RESULTS: Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that working phase CEP predicted significant reduction of depressive and general symptoms over and above that predicted by beginning phase CEP, the working alliance and working phase CHEEA. Working phase CEP emerged as the sole, independent predictor of outcome for both depressive and general symptoms. CONCLUSION: Productive emotional processing, thus, mediates the relationship between the alliance and outcome and seems to go beyond mere activation and expression of emotional experience. It rather seems to involve an increase in the ability to process activated primary emotion in a productive manner specified by CEP.