Outcome Expectations in Psychotherapy: Validation of the Therapy Single Category Implicit Association Test (Therapy SC-IAT)

Abstract

Background Former studies demonstrated that negative outcome expectations (OE) toward psychotherapy predict unfavorable psychotherapy outcomes. Critically, the measurement of OE is limited to direct measures that could be subject to self-presentational distortions. This study aimed to validate an online single category implicit association test (SC-IAT) to measure OE toward psychotherapy indirectly. Methods We conducted three direct measures of OE, the Therapy SC-IAT, and a (control) Flower SC-IAT in a large sample (N = 705). Results The Therapy SC-IAT correlated with most direct measures of OE (convergent validity) but not with measures of flower associations (discriminant validity). In exploratory analyses, we found that direct and indirect measurements of OE were related to prior experiences with psychotherapy. Conclusion We discuss ways to improve the indirect-direct correlations and suggest that our newly developed indirect measure could complement the assessment of expectations in research and clinical practice.

Editorial: Assessments and measures in psychotherapy research: going beyond self-report data

“…However, additional information about patients can also be obtained via more active assessment methods such as experimental tasks. Psychological tasks can, for example, include implicit association tests as an indirect measure of pathological attitudes and cognitions or change processes such as outcome expectations ( 13 ). In this Research Topic, one paper applied an experimental task.…”