Book Description
Researchers seeking to improve outcomes for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) have investigated pre-treatment patient characteristics with the goal of identifying treatments or treatment components that might be more effective for some patients than others. Other studies have focused on improving the effectiveness of existing interventions by evaluating the relation of treatment components to outcomes both directly and indirectly via their association with putative therapeutic mechanisms. In the context of cognitive behavioral therapy (also called cognitive therapy (CT)), cognitive and behavioral change procedures and associated cognitive and behavioral changes have been the subjects of a growing body of research (Lorenzo et al., 2014). In the current study, I examined whether cognitive and behavioral change procedures were associated with specific changes in patients' cognitive and behavioral skills. Previous studies have examined the extent that particular components within CT are more effective than others in modifying cognitive and behavioral vulnerabilities but have not found consistent evidence to support the specificity of these changes to CT or components in CT (Jacobson et al., 1996). To our knowledge, this study is the first to evaluate skill specificity in the context of the cognitive and behavioral components from CT. In addition, I evaluated pre-treatment skills to predict for whom the cognitive and behavioral treatment procedures would be more effective in reducing symptoms and increasing skillfulness.
