EXTENDING BEHAVIORAL MARITAL THERAPY

在美国，离婚的发生率高得惊人。

Divoices are occurring at an alamingly high rate in the United States. Behavioral marital therapy (BMT) has been shown to be effective in helping distressed married couples. The current investigator recently completed a 4-year marital therapy outome study (n=72 couples) which establishes the usefulness of each major component of a BMT treatment program. Investigators have begun to call for expanding marital treatment to include other components, such as teaching a couple to examine their cognitions and attitudes, and express their emotions. The overall goal of the current investigation is to assist distressed couples through an even more effective marital treatment strategy by supplementing the previously validated BMT program (a) cognitive restructuring and (b) emotional expressiveness training. Cognitive restructuring techniques, developed within the field of cognitive behavior therapy, have been found to be effective in alleviating various types of emotional distress. A program for teaching emotional expressiveness training has been found to be effective in improving the quality of several types of dyadic relationships. In the currently proposed psychotherapy outcome study, 60 maritallydistressed couples will be randomly assigned to one of three therapists and one of the following five treatment conditions: (a) BMT Alone; (b) Cognitive Restructuring Plus BMT; (c) BMT Plus Emotional Expressiveness Training; (d) Cognitive Restructuring Plus BMT Plus Emotional Expressiveness Training; (e) Waiting list. Treatment will consist of 12 weekly sessions lasting 1 1/2 hours each. Outcome measures wil include self-reports and behavioral observations gathered at pretest and posttest, and self-reports for one year after therapy is terminated. The study will attempt to: (a) determine the relative effectiveness of BMT Alone compared to BMT plus the other treatment components, noting specific changes produced by eah treatment component; (b) establish the effectiveness of the therapy conditions compared to a waiting list condition; (c) determine long-term effectivenessof the treatments by examining one-year followup data; (d) determine effects of treatment of individual psychological functional and marital interaction; (e) isolate characteristics of individuals that predict treatment success.