ArticleBMC medicine2020
A complex systems approach to the study of change in psychotherapy.
Article in BMC medicine, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers.
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Who cites it
50 citing papers in PubMed.
- Identifying predictors of long-term treatment outcomes using narratives from written exposure therapy and cognitive processing therapy for PTSD.Psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy · 2025Trial
- Trajectories of parent criticism across treatment for youth self-harm.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Trial
- Initial evaluation of a personalized advantage index to determine which individuals may benefit from mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for suicide prevention.Behaviour research and therapy · 2024Trial
- Within-patient association between emotion regulation and outcome in prolonged exposure for posttraumatic stress disorder.Journal of consulting and clinical psychology · 2024Trial
- Implications of the Network Theory for the Treatment of Mental Disorders: A Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA psychiatry · 2023Trial
- Using Client Narratives to Identify Predictors of Outcome in Written Exposure Therapy and Cognitive Processing Therapy.Behavior therapy · 2023Trial
- Dream processes and affect regulation in psychotherapy: a longitudinal clinical case study.Research in psychotherapy (Milano) · 2026Article
- Semantically Constrained Detection of Systemic Archetype-Inspired Patterns in Idiographic Case Formulations: A Rule-Based Framework Using FCM-FRHP Functional Semantics.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2026Article
- Quantifying the stability landscapes of psychological networks.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- The Multifaceted Pathophysiology of Major Depressive Disorder: Integrating Neurobiology, Genetics, and Systems-level Perspectives.Current neurovascular research · 2026Review
- Toward the automation of family semantic grids: a pilot exploration of text mining for evidence-informed systemic-relational psychotherapy.Frontiers in child and adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- The Smart Therapy Model: a Fourth Wave framework for assessment-driven, integrative multimodal biopsychosocial psychotherapy.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Analyzing the item-level effects of emotion regulation through a complex systems approach.Journal of education and health promotion · 2026Article
- Systems-based psychiatry: insights from psychedelic research on mechanisms of healing.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Mapping suicidal behaviour within transdiagnostic emotional systems: a network analysis of at-risk adolescents.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Methodological challenges and opportunities when studying the course of autism.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2025Article
- A complex systems view on physical activity with actionable insights for behaviour change.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- The Potential of Personalized Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Networks.Psychiatry and clinical psychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Dynamic changes in network structure of depressive symptoms: a two-year naturalistic follow-up study.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- Individual-Specific Animated Profiles of Mental Health.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundA growing body of research highlights the limitations of traditional methods for studying the process of change in psychotherapy. The science of complex systems offers a useful paradigm for studying patterns of psychopathology and the development of more functional patterns in psychotherapy. Some basic principles of change are presented from subdisciplines of complexity science that are particularly relevant to psychotherapy: dynamical systems theory, synergetics, and network theory. Two early warning signs of system transition that have been identified across sciences (critical fluctuations and critical slowing) are also described. The network destabilization and transition (NDT) model of therapeutic change is presented as a conceptual framework to import these principles to psychotherapy research and to suggest future research directions. DISCUSSION: A complex systems approach has a number of implications for psychotherapy research. We describe important design considerations, targets for research, and analytic tools that can be used to conduct this type of research.
conclusionsA complex systems approach to psychotherapy research is both viable and necessary to more fully capture the dynamics of human change processes. Research to date suggests that the process of change in psychotherapy can be nonlinear and that periods of increased variability and critical slowing might be early warning signals of transition in psychotherapy, as they are in other systems in nature. Psychotherapy research has been limited by small samples and infrequent assessment, but ambulatory and electronic methods now allow researchers to more fully realize the potential of concepts and methods from complexity science.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.