MRC Clinician Scientist Fellow University of Oxford, UK Oxford, England, United Kingdom
Abstract Body While many studies of psychological therapies focus on what should be done within therapy sessions and how this can be optimised, much less research has examined the time intervals between sessions. These intervals are important because they are the patient’s opportunity to take what they have learned in sessions and apply it to everyday life.
CBT and other therapies encourage patients to make good use of between-session time, but this can be a demanding task. For example, to successfully navigate the gap from one session to the next, patients need to extract key learning points, remember them, bring them to mind when needed, notice opportunities to complete homework tasks, and process their learning from these. These processes draw on a range of cognitive skills which might be impaired by problems such as anxiety or depression.
This presentation will present a new framework for considering the between-session interval in CBT, highlighting how cognitive processes such as memory and attention may be critical for progressing treatment at these times. It will outline the results of experimental studies investigating the extraction and memory of CBT material and the extent to which this is affected by anxiety and depression symptoms. Lastly, I will present preliminary findings from the GAP-CBT study, a large-scale exploratory study of the between-session interval involving over 2000 participants. This study maps patients’ reports of between-session experiences early in treatment onto their subsequent clinical outcomes. It aims to identify the key between-session processes linked to clinical progress that will help guide the development of targeted support for patients in these intervals.
