Center for Psychotherapy Research

The Center for Psychotherapy Research consists of researchers from the Department of Psychology and the Psychology Research Institute at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno. It is dedicated to the implementation of research projects, as well as connecting the world of research and practice in the field of psychotherapy and counselling.

More about the Center

News

9 Oct

Active inference and therapeutic change

Active inference is a theoretical framework from the realm of cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational psychiatry that helps in modelling perception, decision making, and learning. It portrays a person as someone who is not just a passive recipient of information, but whose internal (or generative) model actively shapes how they perceive and interpret the world around them. Clients' mental difficulties or psychopathologies are then seen as the result of an inappropriately "configured" (or suboptimal) generative model. We were interested whether therapeutic change itself can be explained within this theoretical framework. Our review study offers an answer: We identified a total of 22 studies that use the language of active inference to describe the psychotherapeutic process.

16 Sep

We hosted the 6th Joint European & UK SPR Chapters Conference

On September 12-14, the Faculty of Social Studies hosted the 6th Joint European & UK SPR Chapters Conference. Although the atmosphere of the conference was affected by the flood situation, overall it was a very successful event with almost 200 participants from 27 countries. A big thank you to all the volunteers from the Department of Psychology for ensuring the smooth running of the event, to Matyho chálka for the excellent catering and to the VIDA! science centre for providing the venue for the closing banquet.

3 Sep

How do psychotherapists work with faith and religion?

In our qualitative meta-analysis of 52 primary studies, we found that spirituality and religiosity influence not only the therapeutic process but also therapists' professional identity, and are also reflected in the broader context of the therapeutic profession, including training. The psychotherapists in the primary studies differed in the way they linked or, conversely, separated spirituality and religiosity from the psychotherapy profession. While for some these were two inseparable and harmoniously related aspects of life, for others faith and religion were incompatible with their therapeutic work, and for others they represented resources that could be integrated into therapy to varying degrees as needed. Also, in the therapeutic process itself, faith and religion manifested themselves in many different ways, some of which appeared to help the therapeutic process, while others appeared to hinder it.

19 Aug

The importance of qualitative research for the formulation of clinical guidelines

Clinical guidelines in psychotherapy are usually formulated on the basis of experimental studies. While these may demonstrate the effectiveness of a particular approach, they do not allow for the exploration of many important aspects of treatment, such as clients' subjective experience of the therapeutic process, the clinical decision-making process of therapists, or the optimal way of tailoring the therapeutic approach to the needs of a given client. Qualitative research can make a crucial contribution to all of this. We have contributed to an article that clearly summarizes the arguments for considering the results of qualitative studies in the development of clinical guidelines.