摘要
The increasing number and sophistication of available psychotherapies suggests that a critical appraisal of the methodological issues of psychotherapy studies is highly needed. Several key questions regarding the efficacy of a given intervention, the understanding of whether positive effects observed following the delivery of a psychotherapeutic intervention are specifcally attribut-able to the intervention itself or to other “non specifc” factors, such as beneft expectations, therapist attention and support, and the possibility of improving psycho-therapy research need an answer. This, in turn, could provide clinicians with more rigorous information about psychotherapy outcomes and could properly address several shortcomings that are frequently observed in current psychotherapy studies. Accordingly, in this edi-torial I will highlight some of the most important critical issues that a well designed psychotherapy study should take into account, including the need for appropriate control groups, appropriate randomization and blinding procedures, and the importance of performing appro-priately powered studies that include a suffciently long follow-up period. Finally, I will build on my expertise in the feld of mindfulness based interventions, in particu-lar mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness based cognitive therapy, to show how such issues have been and can be successfully implemented in the design of future psychotherapy studies.
