Celia Sales

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Porto

Se presenta el Protocolo de investigación del proyecto “Violencia filioparental (VFP) en la adolescencia: detección, perfiles psicosociales y estrategias de actuación” (Plan Estatal 2021-2023). El primer objetivo general del proyecto es estudiar las características psicosociales que contribuyen a la aparición de conductas de VFP en la adolescencia....

Global concern about problematic usage of the internet (PUI), and its public health and societal costs, continues to grow, sharpened in focus under the privations of the COVID-19 pandemic. This narrative review reports the expert opinions of members of the largest international network of researchers on PUI in the framework of the European Cooperat...

Introduction: Screening instruments specifically developed to identify genetic testing applicants who may need professional psychosocial support are much needed. However, there are no screening instruments validated for the Portuguese language. This paper presents the translation, adaptation, and validation process of the Genetic Psychosocial Risk...

People from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) represent large portions of the world population, often occupy less favorable living conditions, and typically suffer greater health risks, yet frequently receive little research and global health attention. The present study reviews emerging evidence on problematic use of the internet (PUI) in L...

Individualised information in substance misuse treatment complements standardised outcome measures. However, few studies investigate the use of individualised measures and their robustness in terms of quantifying outcomes. In this study, we analysed the psychometrics and feasibility of two individualised outcome measures (PQ and PSYCHLOPS). We foll...

Objectives Healthy individuals from hereditary cancer families undergoing genetic testing for cancer susceptibility (GTC) report more distress when they perceive their social support as low and suppress their emotions. This study aimed to explore how suppressing emotions and perceiving others as unsupportive are related with cancer-risk distress....

Background Externalising behaviours are becoming a remarkably prevalent problem during adolescence, often precipitating both externalising and internalising disorders in later adulthood. Psychological treatments aim to increase the social functioning of adolescents in order for them to live a more balanced life and prevent these negative trajectori...

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accelerated spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus came jurisdictional limitations on mobility of citizens and distinct alterations in their daily routines. Confined to their homes, many people increased their overall internet use, with problematic use of the internet (PUI) becoming a potential reason for inc...

Various health settings have advocated for involving patients and members of the public (PPI) in research as a means to increase quality and relevance of the produced knowledge. However, youth PPI has been an understudied area. This protocol paper describes a new project that aims to summarize what is known about PPI with young people in mental hea...

Objective Few studies report the psychometric properties of individualized patient-reported outcome measures (I-PROMs) combining traditional analysis and Item Response Theory (IRT). Methods Pre- and posttreatment PSYCHLOPS data derived from six clinical samples (n = 939) were analyzed for validity, reliability, and responsiveness; caseness cutoffs...

Background: Personality disorders (PDs) are a severe health issue already prevalent among adolescents and young adults. Early detection and intervention offer the opportunity to reduce disease burden and chronicity of symptoms and to enhance long-term functional outcomes. While psychological treatments for PDs have been shown to be effective for yo...

Introduction Anxiety and depressive disorders are a significant problem that starts in childhood or adolescence and should be addressed early to avoid chronic mental conditions. There is strong evidence to demonstrate that psychological treatments are effective for these disorders, however, little is known on mediators and mechanisms of change of p...

Background: Personality disorders (PDs) are a severe health issue already prevalent among adolescents and young adults. Early detection and intervention offer the opportunity to reduce disease burden and chronicity of symptoms and to enhance long-term functional outcomes. While psychological treatments for personality disorders have been shown to b...

Objective: Symptom improvement is often examined as an indicator of a good outcome of accessing mental health services. However, there is little evidence of whether symptom improvement is associated with other indicators of a good outcome, such as a mutual agreement to end treatment. The aim of this study was to examine whether young people accessi...

Citizens and scientists can work together to improve the collective well-being, if citizens are inspired to help the advancement of science, and researchers motivated to listen to the voices of citizens. The benefits of such collaboration are increasingly recognized by both citizens and scientists, as reflected in the growing number of related publ...

INTRODUCTION Approximately 75% of mental disorders emerge before the age of 25 years but less than half receive appropriate treatment. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying the therapeutic change of adolescents in psychotherapy. The ‘European Network of Individualised Psychotherapy Treatment of Young People with Mental Disorders’, funded...

Psychodrama is an effective psychotherapeutic model but interventions with adolescents require age-tailored techniques that maximize engagement and facilitate communication processes. This study describes a novel adaptation of a therapeutic mask technique to psychodrama with adolescents. Over the course of eight group sessions of psychodrama, five...

Fear of cancer recurrence (FCR) is a main concern for most cancer survivors and can bring significant distress impacting well-being and quality of life. Although other psychological approaches have been developed for dysfunctional FCR, based on previous research, Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) might also be a relevant intervention for treating this...

There has been an increasing call for service users to be more actively involved with the evaluation of treatment outcomes. One strategy to impove such involvement is to ask service users to contribute with their own criteria for evaluation by sharing their personal story and perspective about their clinical situation. In this cross-sectional study...

Background: There is a high prevalence of children and young people (CYP) experiencing mental health (MH) problems. Owing to accessibility, affordability, and scalability, an increasing number of digital health interventions (DHIs) have been developed and incorporated into MH treatment. Studies have shown the potential of DHIs to improve MH outcom...

As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments have introduced steps such as spatial distancing and “staying at home” to curb its spread and impact. The fear resulting from the disease, the ‘lockdown’ situation, high levels of uncertainty regarding the future, and financial insecurity raise the level of stress, anxiety, and depression exp...

Obesity coupled with binge eating disorder (BED) is an increasing problem. Incorporation of treatment strategies that address both problems in people with comorbid symptoms is of major interest. This study aimed to investigate the feasibility and preliminary long-term outcomes of a brief emotion-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (EF-CBT) program...

BACKGROUND There is a high prevalence of children and young people (CYP) experiencing mental health (MH) problems. Due to the accessibility, affordability and scalability, an increasing number of digital interventions (DIs) have been developed and are being incorporated into MH treatment for CYP. Studies show DI’s potential for improving MH outcome...

Career counseling has evolved to include practices that attribute a central importance to context variables and meaning‐making processes. Accordingly, there is a need for client assessment tools that consider the subjectivity and cultural specificity of clients and the interface between their work and life concerns. The idiographic assessment of ou...

EFT case study with a patient with severe fear of cancer recurrence

In Portugal, service user perspectives to outcome assessment have not yet been seriously considered. We present preliminary results of a small participatory research study involving the patients from Casa de Alba (CA – Residential Therapeutic Community in Mental Health), aiming to explore their views on the outcome measures that form part of the ro...

Fear of cancer recurrence (FCR) is a significant issue for most cancer survivors, with nearly half of cancer survivors reporting it at moderate to high levels of intensity. We aimed to further explore the experience of having FCR from the point of view of patients by systematically reviewing qualitative studies. Following PRISMA guidelines, 87 qual...

As routine outcome monitoring systems develop, questions emerge about how therapists incorporate feedback into their practice, and how this relates to therapeutic gains. A case of covert grief was monitored in each session with the Personal Questionnaire and the Helpful Aspects of Therapy instruments. At 4 months follow‐up, the Change Interview was...

The original theory of psychodrama proposed by Moreno in 1921 has been adjusted and re-interpreted by several authors over the last three decades. This resulted in the proliferation of techniques whose definitions and contexts of application are unclear and poorly documented in the literature. The purpose of this review was three-fold: (1) to ident...

The demand to implement routine outcome assessment in mental health care services calls for measures with clinical utility, i.e. feasible to therapists, acceptable to clients and generalizable to settings. An exploratory sequential research design was used to study the clinical utility of an individualized outcome measure, the Personal Questionnair...

This article presents the emergent approach of personalized assessment in mental health care, which combines standardized patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) with individual-ized measures (I-PROMs). Each patient has a unique clinical condition, with a set of problems and presentations specific to his or her personand presentations specific to...

Background: There is increasing interest in individualized patient-reported outcome measures (I-PROMS), where patients themselves indicate the specific problems they want to address in therapy and these problems are used as items within the outcome measurement tool. Objective: This paper examined the extent to which 279 items reported in an I-PR...

Vascular access-related problems are responsible for 50% of the hospitalizations of dialysis patients, and can contribute at least in part, for the high morbidity and mortality rates found in these patients. Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) is a multidimensional concept that includes patient’s perspective on physical, mental, and social domai...

There are a growing number of authors stating that outcome measurement in treatment for substance use disorders should go beyond substance use and include other bio-psycho-social variables of interest. However, little is known about which topics tend to be covered by outcome measures and whether they reflect the typical concerns of this patient gro...

Background The involvement of service users in health care provision in general, and specifically in substance use disorder treatment, is of growing importance. This paper explores the views of patients in a therapeutic community for alcohol dependence about clinical assessment, including general aspects about the evaluation process, and the specif...

The present review relies on qualitative data about fear of cancer recurrence experience. Preliminary results are presented.

There has been an increasing interest in patient-centered assessment of psychological treatments. This article reviews the existing patient-generated measures (PGMs) that have been used by clinicians and psychotherapy researchers to collect evaluation data from the patient perspective. A systematic review of literature was performed to identify PGM...

There has been an increasing interest in patient-centered assessment of psychological treatments. This article reviews the existing patient-generated measures (PGMs) that have been used by clinicians and psychotherapy researchers to collect evaluation data from the patient perspective. A systematic review of literature was performed to identify PGM...

Individualized measures are relevant for the assessment of therapeutic results and allow patients to identify the aspects that they value the most in assessing their clinical improvement. PSYCHLOPS, as an individualized measure, invite the patient to create their own items. The items created by the patients were compared with the contents of standa...

The main goal of this study is to develop a system of categorizing what clients find helpful and hindering in psychodrama sessions using a patient-generated process measure, the Helpful Aspects of Therapy (HAT; Elliott, Helpful Aspects of Therapy Form. http://www.experiential-researchers.org/instruments/elliott/hat.html, 1993). An existing system,...

No primeiro ano de funcionamento, foi usado um protocolo-piloto de avaliação, integrado no projeto Personalized Outcome Measurement in Hospital-Based Psychological Treatments (Sales et al., 2014) Neste estudo pretendemos conhecer o que pensam e sentem os residentes em relação ao protocolo Primeiro passo para desenhar um protocolo de avaliação da...

The main goal of this study is to develop a system of categorizing what clients find helpful and hindering in psychodrama sessions using a patient-generated process measure, the Helpful Aspects of Therapy (HAT; Elliott, Helpful Aspects of Therapy Form. http:// www. experiential-researchers. org/ instruments/ elliott/ hat. html, 1993). An existing s...

A Casa de Alba é uma CT democrática em Saúde Mental da Fundação Romão de Sousa, que envolve os pacientes nos processos de tomada de decisão, incluindo a avaliação da qualidade do serviço. Por isso, no seu protocolo de avaliação da intervenção, a Casa de Alba inclui medidas individualizadas, que permitem avaliar a mudança de acordo com os problemas...

Este trabajo investiga el impacto del proceso de entrenamiento militar de resistencia psicológica en la resiliencia de los reclutas, considerando el papel moderador de la cohesión de grupo militar, de la autoestima y de la predisposición para la ansiedad. Una muestra de conveniencia de 104 militares fue evaluada antes y después del Curso de Formaci...

We present a range of evidence for the reliability and validity of data generated by the Personal Questionnaire (PQ), a client-generated individualized outcome measure, using five data sets from three countries. Overall pre-therapy mean internal consistency (alpha) across clients was .80; within-client alphas averaged .77; clients typically had one...

This paper presents the Metric-Frequency Calculator (MF Calculator), an online ap-plication to analyze similarity. The MF Calculator implements the MF similarity al-gorithm developed by Sales and Wakker (2009) for the quantitative assessment of sim-ilarity in ill-structured data sets. It is widely applicable as it can be used when there is little p...

This paper presents the metric-frequency calculator (MF Calculator), an online application to analyze similarity. The MF Calculator implements a metric-frequency similarity algorithm for the quantitative assessment of similarity in ill-structured data sets. It is widely applicable as it can be used with nominal, ordinal, or interval data when there...

The quality management of health services is currently a crucial component of care provision. Evaluating the quality of care involves looking at several features and, recently, the perspective of patients has grown in importance. This trend has resulted in the emerged of numerous instruments to collect the patient’ experiences in treatment, which a...

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Background: Involving patients in treatment is becoming increasingly popular in mental health [Sales & Alves: Personalized evaluation of psychological treatments: A review of tools and research designs, submitted]. However, in substance misuse treatment settings, the patient perspective about treatment tends to be overlooked. This has been cited a...

Patient-focused psychotherapy research refers to the monitoring, prediction, and evaluation of patient progress in therapy. This is traditionally based on repeated standardized measurement and followed by the provision of nomothetic feedback to both therapists and patients based on those measures. Patient progress throughout therapy can also use id...

Background: The Clinical Outcome Routine Evaluation - Outcome Measure (CORE-OM) is a European self-report measure of psychological well-being in adults, which is already adapted for more than 20 countries. The CORE-OM is applicable in primary care settings, in occupational health and educational contexts, as well as for evaluations of mental health...

Similarity measures have been studied extensively in many domains, but usually with well-structured data sets. In many psychological applications, however, such data sets are not available. It often cannot even be predicted how many items will be observed, or what exactly they will entail. This paper introduces a similarity measure, called the metr...

Resumo O papel da escola é educar pessoas. O sucesso da educação dependerá em larga medida da qualidade do serviço oferecido pela escola, desde que estejam garantidas condições como as necessidades básicas de alimentação e saúde das crianças, condições e regras familiares favoráveis, etc. Significa que a aprendizagem, a assiduidade, a disciplina e...

What are the major methodological approaches in psychotherapy research? What have been the most significant constraints and stimulus for their development? What are their advantages and limits? In face of the innumerous methodological lines within psychotherapy research, this article draws an historical overview toward a comprehension of what is no...

¿Cómo han surgido y evolucionado los principales formatos de investigación de la psicoterapia? ¿Cuáles son las principales líneas de investigación actuales? ¿Cuáles son sus ventajas y sus límites? Delante de las incontables líneas de investigación de la psicoterapia, este artículo proporciona un panorama histórico que ayuda a comprender lo qué se e...

This article reports an effectiveness case study of the individual systemic therapy of a 22-year-old Portuguese woman with a diagnosis of paranoid personality disorder, conducted in a university-based clinic in Lisbon, Portugal. Data were analysed using the hermeneutic single-case efficacy design, a non-experimental interpretive approach that aims...

Provides an account of developing issues in Psychological therapies

Little is known about clients who, although in need of a treatment and having the opportunity to take treatment, do not start it. To explore this topic, we conducted a retrospective study comparing 37 prior dropouts with 28 clients who underwent treatment (family therapy). Results showed that prior dropout clients presented symptoms for a longer pe...

Poco se sabe sobre los pacientes que, necesitando determinado tratamiento y habiendo solicitado su incorporación a la intervención, no logran empezarlo. Para explorar este tema, hemos realizado un estudio retrospectivo comparando 37 pacientes que abandonaron prematuramente el tratamiento con 28 pacientes que se incorporaron al mismo (terapia famili...