I found the article a superb summary on all the possible defects of
psychotherapy outcome research.
I succumbs to many of the defects it summarizes by asserting that any of
the research method fixes actually fix anything.
They fail for two major reasons: 1) self-report measures (e.g. Beck
Depression Inventory), the backbone of all dependent
measures used in outcome research, are not independent observations or
measurements. Human participants are not
passive agents in the research study, providing objective assessments of
their mental state. 2) Humans are interactive as
they participate in the study. They form ideas about which treatment
they are experiencing. It is easy to tell when you are
in the control group. The IRB occasionally gets complaints from
subjects because they were assigned to the control
condition and they expected free treatment. This factor makes it
impossible to have a blinded study of psychotherapy.
This also applies to outcome studies of psychotropic medications. If you
have a dry mouth and constipation, you are in
the drug treatment group. There has never been a double-blind study of
psychotherapy outcome. For this reason, even
the "empirically validated" studies are not valid. I honestly don't
know how to solve these problems. The first step might
be to recognize that humans will never behave like passive laboratory
rats and just survey them concerning factors like
expectation bias. How large an effect on self-report measures does
expectation bias produce? It is as large as the effects
stated in the past as treatment effects?
Mike Williams
Drexel University
On 7/25/15 1:00 AM, Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) digest
wrote:
Subject: Lillienfield Article on Why Ineffective Therapies Appear to Work
From: Michael Britt<mich...@thepsychfiles.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2015 15:59:21 -0400
X-Message-Number: 2
Just finished discussing this article on my podcast:
Why Ineffective Psychotherapies Appear to Work: A Taxonomy of Causes of
Spurious Therapeutic Effectiveness
http://www.latzmanlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Lilienfeld-et-al-2014-CSTEs.pdf
<http://www.latzmanlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Lilienfeld-et-al-2014-CSTEs.pdf>
Really worth reading. I’d go so far as to say that it might be considered
required reading for grad students studying to be therapists. We all know how
many pseudo-scientific therapies there are out there. If we can’t conduct
good research on them then we might as well at least be aware of some of the
reasons why we think they work when they don’t.
Anyway, great article Scott and colleagues.
Michael
Michael A. Britt, Ph.D.
mich...@thepsychfiles.com
http://www.ThePsychFiles.com
Twitter: @mbritt
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