The literature suggests that working alliance is an important predictor of clinical supervision outcomes. However, little is known about the individual factors that influence the development and maintenance of the working alliance. This study aims to explore the role of supervisor and trainee personality traits in the development of early working…

It is increasingly recognised that single-case analysis makes a valuable contribution to the evidence base for psychotherapy, alongside other methodologies. Such analyses make it possible to investigate the unfolding process of change in therapy, and develop an understanding of change factors that contribute to outcome. One of the key challenges…

Objective: The ability to form a strong therapeutic alliance is considered a foundational skill across psychotherapies. Patient-rated measures of the alliance are now being used to make judgments about a therapist's tendency to build alliances with their patients. However, whether a patient-rated alliance measure provides a useful index of a…

Objective: Previous research has found that therapist adherence to concrete, problem-focused cognitive therapy (CT) techniques predicts depressive symptom change (e.g., Feeley, DeRubeis, & Gelfand, 1999). More recently, Strunk, DeRubeis, Chui, and Alvarez (2007) demonstrated that in-session evidence of patients' use of CT skills was related to…

Objective: Transference interpretation is considered as a core active ingredient in dynamic psychotherapy. In common clinical theory, it is maintained that more mature relationships, as well as a strong therapeutic alliance, may be prerequisites for successful transference work. In this study, the interaction between quality of object relations,…

Objective: A strong therapeutic alliance has been found to predict psychotherapeutic treatment success across a variety of therapeutic modalities and patient populations. However, only a few studies have examined therapeutic alliance as a predictor of psychotherapy outcome among cancer survivors, and none have examined this relation in…

The current study retrospectively examined the relationship between female clients' perceptions of microaggressions directed toward women, working alliance, and therapeutic outcomes (N = 121). A measure, the Microaggressions Against Women Scale (MAWS), was developed specifically for this study, based on a content review of the literature, focus…

A sample of university counseling center students was investigated to determine whether student clients who attended short term individual counseling at a university counseling center show progress as evidenced by perceived client and counselor outcomes, and to explore how client motivation to change and working alliance affected counseling…

Feminist therapy has revolutionized clinical practice and offered a model of empowerment for all therapy approaches. However, the long-assumed claim that feminist therapists are more likely to engage in power-sharing behaviors with their clients has not been supported by published quantitative research. In the current study, 42 female therapists…

This study investigates the nature of therapist-client interactions within and across seven actual psychotherapy cases to investigate the assertion within interactional theories that positive therapeutic outcome is the result of a transition from relational incongruence to relational congruence. Counselor/client verbal utterances were coded using…

Few contemporary developments in psychology rival the impact of working alliance theory. This construct can predict psychotherapy outcomes to an extent unknown previously. Yet despite the importance of working alliance theory to effective psychotherapy, only a few articles on this topic have appeared in resources commonly read by professional…