Microanalysis of Positive and Negative Content in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Expert Sessions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The models of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) differ in their primary focus: problem solving versus solution building. These theoretical differences imply dissimilar practices, including the content of the therapeutic dialogue. Specifically, CBT sessions should include more talk about negative topics in clients' lives such as problems and situational difficulties, whereas SFBT sessions should focus on positive topics in clients' lives such as strengths and resources. We tested whether expert practice reflects these differences in the models. A reliable microanalysis revealed that demonstration sessions by three experts in each model differed significantly in the expected directions: negative content was significantly higher in CBT than SFBT sessions, and positive content was significantly higher in SFBT than CBT sessions. There was also a significant tendency for clients to respond in kind (i.e., negative therapist content was followed by negative client content, and positive therapist content by positive client content).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".