A 20-session dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT)-informed skills training is a promising adjunct intervention for patients with borderline personality disorder, in particular for reducing problems related to social role. Increases in assertive anger mediate the effects of DBT-informed skills training, whereas rejecting anger remains unchanged over the course of treatment. Short-term objectives for intervention might involve the specific increase of assertive anger in BPD, by using DBT-informed skills training; long-term objectives for intervention might involve a specific decrease of rejecting anger in BPD.

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The therapeutic relationship as a process is usually studied in individual therapy, and less in group therapy. One reason for this paucity of research may be the complex methodology necessary to do process research on group therapy. One of the therapeutic approaches using the group as part of the therapy is Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).The purpose of the present study is to develop a group version of a process measure which has been successfully used in individual therapy, the Motive-Oriented Therapeutic Relationship (MOTR) scale, based on individualised case conceptualisations using the Plan Analysis approach. To do this, ten sessions of a DBT skills group therapy were analysed from a comprehensive dataset within a randomized controlled trial. Included were therapy completers: 3 patients and 2 therapists. The therapists were unaware of MOTR.The results revealed that the adaptation of the MOTR to DBT skills group was feasible. Its adaptation showed differences of the therapists in their use of MOTR when comparing the different patients: Therapist presented with higher degrees of MOTR towards one patient, compared to another. Overall results suggest that effective therapists in DBT skills training intervene with rather low mean levels of MOTR, and great intra-session variability of MOTR.We conclude that the adaptation of the MOTR-instrument to group therapy is feasible and yields meaningful results. Therefore, this scale may be used in process research in group therapy, in particular when one wishes to have an individualized measure of the therapeutic relationship.

SUMMARYInsurance companies sell contracts of various types each of them having a specific probability of return. Insurers may also own, at the same time, several insurance contracts which evolve through time. In this context, expectation and variance of the free reserves appear as functions of the number of customers in different classes as well as their evolution. Assuming that the customer system can be formulated as an open Markov one characterized by free entry, it is interesting to seek the optimal new customer distribution over the different customer classes j , which permits the minimization of the variance of free reserves for a desired average level of free reserves at a given time horizon. It is shown that. under some conditions, the customer system converges to an optimal growth steady state.

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