SPR 2015

The theme for the 46th Annual International Meeting of SPR in Philadelphia is:
"Psychotherapy: improving adaptation from the inner life to the outer world.”
People seek psychotherapy when some aspect of their lives brings distress to themselves or others. Psychotherapy directs attention to the sources of this distress. The aim is to improve psychological adaptation and relieve emotional suffering. A central focus of all psychotherapies is helping individuals adapt more effectively. This happens on many levels. The innermost level includes the psychological experiences and processes by which the individual adapts to internal and external stressors and conflict. These are assessed using measures like defense and coping mechanisms, beliefs, cognitive errors, emotion and self-esteem regulation, and the like. Inner adaptive mechanisms in turn affect how the individual adapts to the world, in ways of relating to others, society and the environment, measured by quality of life, satisfaction, psychosocial functioning, interpersonal functioning, creative accomplishment and the like. Helping to improve adaptation operates in many modalities and formats: individual, couple, family, group, and newer versions adapted to the digitally inter-connected world; durations that are brief/ short, medium-term, long-term, open-ended; frequencies that include infrequent, intermittent, monthly, weekly, intensive; with training and implementation that includes manual-based, supervised, unsupervised, experience-based, and non-traditional types. All of this occurs within a cultural context, influenced by societal factors, third-party payers, and both cost and cost-effectiveness considerations. The Society for Psychotherapy Research is the “big tent” that encompasses the empirical study of all of these. SPR’s aim is to facilitate the exchange of ideas and knowledge, connect students and researchers around the world, and encourage new developments and collaborations. We are looking forward to doing all of this once again, at this coming year’s annual international meeting in Philadelphia, a city which has been the venue for many transformative developments over the past several centuries.

With this introduction, the Program Committee would like to encourage you to consider proposals that explore how and under what circumstances psychotherapy improves some aspects of adaptation. As always we welcome research from multiple perspectives including patients/clients, therapists, researchers, health care systems, and society. We hope that participants will draw on the rich history of research and scholarship in psychotherapy process and outcome, build on the lessons learned to inform current theoretical issues and problems facing the field, and point to future directions for research and practice. As always, we want to stimulate discussion among colleagues from around the world as well as across the generations of psychotherapy researchers. We would like to encourage presentations, panels, discussions, and posters from a broad spectrum of psychotherapy researchers and clinicians drawn from diverse disciplines, theoretical orientations, modalities, methodologies, and cultures. In addition to the specific conference theme, SPR’s Program Committee invites submissions on all areas of psychotherapy research, practice, and training. We welcome the full range of contributions to the field of psychotherapy, including reports of innovative research methods and empirical studies of varied treatment modalities (individual, couple, family, group, and milieu therapies), diverse patient populations (children, adolescents, adults, and seniors), a wide range of diagnostic and problem categories (e.g., various psychological/ psychosomatic disorders as well as the effects of cultural, political or economic oppression and migration), and a broad spectrum of theoretical approaches (e.g., CBT, behavioral, existential humanistic, interpersonal, psychodynamic, family systems, etc.). As in all previous calls for submissions to SPR conferences, we invite qualitative as well as quantitative studies, single case research, process and outcome studies, meta-analyses, methodological contributions, research on psychotherapy measures, literature reviews and so forth.

In addition to the above, this year the Program Committee would also like to invite presentations in two new initiative areas:
1) economic aspects of psychotherapy including cost-effectiveness studies; and
2) psychotherapy in medical contexts and/or directed at medically related problems.
Both have significant public health implications.