Evaluations of Psychotherapies – Dr Martin Fracker

Cognitive Behavior Therapy is the Best Intervention for Social Anxiety Disorder

Mayo-Wilson and colleagues performed a meta-analysis across 41 interventions for patients with social anxiety disorder including cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, psychopharmacological therapy, and others. Based on the results from 101 clinical trials including over 13,000 participants, including various control groups, they concluded that cognitive-behavior therapy was best for most patients. For patients for whom cognitive-behavior therapy was not appropriate, they recommended psychopharmacological therapy as the next best treatment.

Recommendations for Improving Communication of Empirical Support for Clinical Interventions

Helping clinical psychologists select the best form of psychotherapy for a particular client with a particular problem requires a way to communicate to them the results of comparisons of clinical interventions. In this article, David Tolin and his associates take a detailed look at where communication needs to be improved, and they recommend actions to take now while the field undertakes a long-range process to develop better standards.

Noisy Data Makes Comparisons of Psychotherapies More Challenging

In this article, David Tolin looks at why some studies do not find cognitive-behavior therapies to be better than other forms of therapy. He identifies several sources of error variance (in other words, noisy data) that may hide any differences between the effectiveness of candidate psychotherapies. He then suggests ways to improve comparisons of such psychotherapeutic evaluations.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy Works Better than Other Psychotherapies

David Tolin has spent years comparing the effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapies to other forms of psychotherapy. In this article, he publishes the results of a meta-analytic review across 26 other studies. (You can learn more about meta-analysis from the Association for Psychological Science website.) His basic finding was that cognitive behavior therapy was more effective than other forms of therapy in treating patients with anxiety and depression disorders.