The impact of resistance on empathy in CBT for generalized anxiety disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Client resistance has been shown to relate to poorer therapy outcomes, thus making it important to better understand the mechanisms underlying this association. Given observational research suggesting that therapist empathy decreases during moments of resistance, the present study examined client-rated therapist empathy as a potential mediator of the resistance-outcome association. METHOD: Participants included 44 therapist-client dyads receiving cognitive-behavioral therapy for generalized anxiety disorder. Trained observers rated an early therapy session for the level of client resistance, and clients completed a corresponding postsession measure of therapist empathy. Posttreatment outcome was measured via client-rated worry severity. RESULTS: Higher client resistance was significantly associated with poorer treatment outcome and lower client postsession ratings of therapist empathy; however, therapist empathy was not observed to mediate the relationship between resistance and treatment outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: As empathy did not mediate the association between resistance and outcome, future research is needed to uncover other potential mechanisms of this association. However, the current results underscore an important link between resistance and client perceived therapist empathy. As empathy has been shown to relate positively to therapy outcomes, our result highlights the need to enhance therapist in-session responsivity to resistance in psychotherapy research and training.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".