João Salgado

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Instituto Superior da Maia

Self-multiplicity is a widely recognized phenomenon within psychology. The study of how self-continuity emerges amidst self-multiplicity remains a crucial issue, however. Dialogical approaches are widely viewed as suitable for developing this field of study but they demand coherent methods compatible with their theoretical bases. After reviewing th...

Method: Participants were 22 clients with mild to moderate depression drawn from a clinical trial comparing cognitive behavioral therapy with emotion-focused therapy. The direction of prediction between assimilation progress and changes in self-reported symptom intensity was assessed. Results: The assimilation progress was shown to be a better p...

The theory of the dialogical self, which is based upon the metaphor of the self as a dialogue between different voices and I-positions, conceptualizes the structure and functioning of the self as a product of communication and relational processes. The dynamics of the dialogical self imply an articulation between the individual self and the self in...

Recomendaciones para pólizas y prácticas de telepsicoterapia y e-mental health en Europa y más allá La pandemia de COVID-19 ha traído consigo una gran necesidad de utilizar telepsicoterapia y otras intervenciones utilizando teorías y técnicas psicológicas para apoyar la salud mental y física. E-mental health presenta una amplia gama de oportunidade...

Introduction While the general uptake of e-mental health interventions remained low over the past years, physical distancing and lockdown measures relating to the COVID-19 pandemic created a need and demand for online consultations in only a matter of weeks. Objective This study investigates the uptake of online consultations provided by mental he...

The Assimilation Model describes therapeutic change as a gradual integration of problematic experiences into the self. Previous studies associated higher assimilation levels with a reduction of depressive symptoms throughout therapy and better therapeutic outcomes at the end. We explored the relation between the assimilation of problematic experien...

Introduction Emotion dysregulation is a transdiagnostic characteristic that affects many people with many psychopathological problems. Two mechanisms that have been frequently associated with emotional regulation are immersion and distancing. Focusing is a task that combines these two mechanisms of emotion regulation through the phase of creating a...

Introduction Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy has had a long history and influence on the field of psychotherapy. By “clearing a space” and “focusing,” individuals can enhance their emotional awareness and improve their ability to self-regulate. These tasks are particularly relevant in the context of Psycho-Oncology, although the research on their p...

Treatment satisfaction has been found to have good therapeu- tic results in psychotherapy, and the 18-item version of the client satisfaction questionnaire (CSQ-18) is one of the most widely used measures to evaluate it. This study sought to carry out a pilot analysis of the psychometric’s properties and factorial structure, as well as validate the...

Introduction While online consultations have shown promise to be a means for the effective delivery of high-quality mental healthcare and the first implementations of these digital therapeutic contacts go back nearly two decades, uptake has remained limited over the years. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered this relative stands...

The aim of this exploratory and idiographic study was to explore the evolution of the therapist's expressed empathy, the client's emotional regulation and clinical symptoms during the therapeutic process in a good outcome case that was part of a randomized clinical trial for the treatment of depression. A further aim was to explore the longitudinal...

Objective: Prior research, mainly conducted on depression, observed that clients' improved capability to process their emotions predicted better therapeutic outcomes. The current comparative study aimed to investigate whether emotional processing was related to therapeutic change in complicated grief. Method: We analyzed two contrasting cases (g...

"Over the years, research has demonstrated that psychotherapy is an effective treatment in different psychopathological conditions. However, which are the mechanisms or processes involved in therapeutic change that could explain its efficacy are not yet clear. The Assimilation of Problematic Experiences Model describes change in therapy as a proces...

This study aimed to validate and explore the psychometric properties of the credibility/expectancy questionnaire (CEQ) for the Portuguese population in the context of routine practice. The sample includes 87 clients from a university psychotherapy clinic. All clients completed self-report measures to assess credibility and expectation (CEQ), as wel...

The assimilation model suggests that therapeutic change occurs through a gradual assimilation of problematic experiences. Previous case studies have suggested that both good-and poor-outcome cases exhibit a fluctuating pattern of assimilation progress, characterized by advances and setbacks. Our study examined more closely how this fluctuating patt...

Intimate partner violence results in extensive negative mental health outcomes including depression, posttraumatic stress, and anxiety. Moreover, victimized partners who experience cumulative episodes of abuse over time can also present severe affect dysregulation and interpersonal difficulties. Preliminary evidence for existing psychological treat...

BACKGROUND While the general uptake of e-mental health interventions remained low over the past years, physical distancing and quarantine measures relating to the COVID-19 pandemic created a need and demand for online consultations and telepsychology in only a matter of weeks. OBJECTIVE This study investigates the uptake of online consultations pr...

This paper is now published in Internet Interventions: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.invent.2021.100405

Objective: Recent studies on immersion (first-person perspective) and distancing (third-person perspective) in psychotherapy have shown the potential of both perspectives in the treatment of depression. High levels of change were associated with transitions between immersion and distancing, suggesting that a dynamic pattern between them may result...

Emotional processing is an empirically established predictor of pre–post therapy improvement in depression. However, its relationship to symptom alleviation over time requires clarification. To clarify the contribution of emotional processing to gradual symptom improvement, we explored both (1) the effect of emotional processing on pre–post therapy...

This consensus statement from the different members of the EFPA project group on E-health aims to provide general rules of thumb concerning the dissemination in and use of digital psychological interventions in practice.

A inclusão das novas tecnologias na psicoterapia é hoje uma realidade indiscutível. Apesar de já nos anos 60 e 70 se assistir à aplicação de novas tecnologias na prática psicológica, primeiro com sistemas de videoconferência (Wittson, Affleck, & Johnson, 1961) e posteriormente com a utilização do biofeedback (Legalos, 1973), a emergência e a acessi...

A depressão é uma das doenças mentais com maior prevalência a nível mundial (Lim, Tam, Lu, Ho, Zhang, & Ho, 2018; World Health Organization [WHO], 2017). O seu elevado impacto nas esferas individual, social e económica (Kessler & Bromet, 2013; Richards, 2011) tem motivado o crescente investimento a nível financeiro, científico e político-social de...

Background: The lack of knowledge regarding psychometric characteristics of brief scales for assessing the severity of symptoms of depression for the Portuguese population limits the ability of health professionals to signal clinically relevant situations, as well as the implementation of alternative forms of mental health care. The Patient Health...

The association between clients’ higher capability of emotional processing and good therapeutic outcome has been consistently observed in different therapeutic approaches. Despite previous studies that have reported an association between emotional processing and pre- to posttherapy change in symptoms, the session-by-session relation between emotio...

Dynamic systems theory suggests that instability can be a key element in the promotion of human change processes. Several studies have confirmed an association between unstable patterns and successful psychotherapeutic outcome. Somewhat similarly, the assimilation model of psychotherapeutic change argues that clinical change occurs through the inte...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) can be defined as a type of abuse experienced in the setting of a former or current relationship with a partner, and a form of repeated trauma with chronic, and acute phases, that results in extensive emotional and interpersonal difficulties. IPV is associated with several adverse physical and mental health outcomes,...

For Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), emotional processing involves several steps: a fully processed emotion needs to become aware and aroused, for enabling exploration, and creation of new meaning. This complex process is necessary in order to transform maladaptive emotions into adaptive ones. In depression, it is assumed that the clients’ ability to...

Objective: The potential benefit or harm of immersion (egocentric perspective) and distancing (observer perspective) on negative experiences are unclear and have not been empirically investigated in therapy. This is a first exploratory study aimed to analyze and compare the perspectives adopted on reflection (immersion and distancing) of negative...

This study aims to clarify the roles of immersion and distancing (that is, reflection on an experience from an egocentric point of view or as an observer, respectively) on therapeutic change analyzing i) the evolution of these two perspectives across the resolution of a clinical problem, and ii) the relationship between immersion/distancing with sy...

The innovative moments model was used in a pilot study that aimed to explore the change processes involved in everyday change outside psychotherapy. According to this model, the emergence and development of innovative moments (IMs) as exceptions to a problematic pattern are closely associated with psychological change. A longitudinal design coverin...

Previous laboratory studies have explored the importance of participants adopting an immersed or distanced perspective in the analysis of their experiences. These studies concluded that distancing allows analyzing emotions in a healthier way and immersion leads to higher vulnerability. However, in psychotherapy, the relationship between these persp...

The aim of this work was to adapt and develop a Portuguese manual for the Observer Measure of Affect Regulation (O-MAR; Watson & Prosser, 2006), an observational measure of clients' emotion regulation in psychotherapy. Since the scale has not yet been adapted to Portuguese, initially a translation was performed. Then, to elaborate the manual, the m...

Objective: The Assimilation model argues that therapists should work responsively within the client's therapeutic zone of proximal development (TZPD). This study analyzed the association between the collaborative processes assessed by the Therapeutic Collaboration Coding System (TCCS) and advances in assimilation, as assessed by the Assimilation o...

Objective: Some studies have suggested that a decrease in immersion (egocentric perspective on personal experiences) and an increase in distancing (observer perspective on personal experiences) are associated with the resolution of clinical problems and positive outcome in psychotherapy for depression. To help clarify how this change in perspective...

A violência na intimidade tem um impacto nocivo sobre a saúde física das vítimas e acarreta o risco de intensificação dos maus-tratos. A nível da saúde mental, a literatura destaca, sobretudo, sintomatologia clínica relacionada com a perturbação de stress pós-traumático (PTSD), a depressão e a ansiedade. A acrescer, a vitimação por parte de parceir...

The assimilation model describes the change process in psychotherapy. In this study we analyzed the relation of assimilation with changes in symptom intensity, measured session by session, and changes in emotional valence, measured for each emotional episode, in the case of a 33-year-old woman treated for depression with cognitive-behavioral therap...

Objective: Research on the assimilation model has suggested that psychological change takes place in a sequence of stages punctuated by setbacks, that is, by transient reversals in the developmental course. This study analyzed such setbacks in one good outcome case and one poor outcome case of Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) for depression. Method:...

The present study focuses on the analysis of novelty emergence in classic Gloria Films with Rogers, Perls, and Ellis to understand how the same client formulated her own problem and if and how change occurred in those three sessions. The Innovative Moments Coding System was applied to track innovative moments (IMs) and their themes. The session wit...

Background: Systematic studies of the efficacy of Narrative Therapy (NT) for depression are sparse. Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of individual NT for moderate depression in adults compared to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Method: Sixty-three depressed clients were assigned to either NT or CBT. The Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI...

Despite the popularity of narrative approaches to the change in psychotherapy, a better understanding of how narrative transformation facilitates therapeutic change is needed. Research on innovative moments (IMs) has explored how IMs in psychotherapy evolve over time. We expand on past studies by exploring how IMs become aggregated in narrative thr...

Cómo Referenciar este artículo/How to reference this article: Basto, I. y Salgado, J. (2014). La investigación sobre el proceso de cambio en psicoterapia y los diferentes enfoques terapéuticos: un análisis de los mecanismos cognitivos y emocionales. Revista de Psicoterapia, 25(99), 31-47. Resumen Actualmente, la investigación sobre la efectividad d...

Drawing on philosophy, the history of psychology and the natural sciences, this book proposes a new theoretical foundation for the psychology of the life course. It features the study of unique individual life courses in their social and cultural environment, combining the perspectives of developmental and sociocultural psychology, psychotherapy, l...

Dialogism is presented as a relational paradigm in which intersubjective and communicational relationship is considered the most appropriate to further explore and understand selfhood. In abandoning the paradigm of self-awareness for the comprehension of selfhood, dialogism attempts to elaborate on the importance of the intersubjective relationship...

The authors argue that dialogical philosophy, and particularly the work of the Bakhtin circle, offers psychology a way to conceptualize and study human experience such that the notion of psyche is preserved and enriched. The authors first introduce the work of the Bakhtin circle and then briefly outline some of the most influential theories of self...

The analysis of the different articles in this special issue gives a rather promising but complex image of a dialogical approach to psychology. Mikael Leiman proposed utterances as the object of study for psychotherapy research, semiotic mediation as the explanatory principle, and semiotic position as the unit of analysis. Frank Richardson cautione...

How do clients change is still a demanding question in psychotherapy research. Within the dialogical studies, there have been varied contributions on how the metaphor of the self as a multiplicity of voices can help our understanding of clients’ problems and changes. In this study, the case of “Lisa”, a successful case of emotion-­focused therapy,...

A study was designed with the aim of characterizing life style and the relation between eating habits and physical activity in children and adolescents in a geographical area of Portugal going through a transition from a rural to a more urban system. It was also analyzed the association between those variables and the body mass index (BMI). A total...

This study aims to further the understanding of how innovative moments (IMs), which are exceptions to a client's problematic self-narrative in the therapy dialogue, progress to the construction of a new self-narrative, leading to successful psychotherapy. The authors' research strategy involved tracking IMs, and the themes expressed therein (or pro...

Change processes have been studied from a variety of clinical and theoretical approaches. Within the dialogical studies, this question has become the following: how do clients position themselves in ways that lead to change? A promising research path towards a deeper understanding of these processes is to assume a microanalytic focus on the course...

his commentary focuses on Cross’s (2010, this issue) work as an opportunity to elaborate upon how to study narrative- dialogical processes from the perspective of complexity. We start by elaborating on the notion that narrative development is a multidimensional activity that extends through several organizational levels and on the limitations of co...

Haye's article "Living being and speaking being" highlights a confusion that the traditional cognitive science has been making between cognition and representation, reducing semantics (meaning) to the syntax (computation with symbols). This traditional view cannot fully grasp the dependence of meaning on the relational context, opening space for th...

This book brings to social scientists a new look at how human beings are striving towards understanding others-- and through that effort--making sense of themselves. It brings together researchers from all over the World who have suggested a set of new approaches to the basic research issue of how human beings are social beings, while being unique...

It is intuitively felt that ambiguity plays a crucial role in human beings' everyday life and in psychologists' theoretical and applied work. However, ambiguity remains essentially non-problematised in psychological science since its foundation. This article analyses positivist and social constructionist perspectives on ambiguity in the context of...

Narrative therapies assume themselves as an alternative movement to the traditional psychological models. Instead of insight, narrative appears as the main organizing concept of the therapeutic process. The main purpose of this kind of therapies is the deconstruction of taken for granted discourses that are perpetuating the problem. These therapies...

To become a psychotherapist is a self-organizing challenge for anyone who assumes that role, involving a dynamic dialogical interplay between social expectations and personal features. This involves subjective and intersubjective processes in which self-image (or “internal I-position”) emerges as co-relative others’ images (or “external I-positions...

In this commentary we discuss our reactions towards the six contributions on our article “The psychotherapist’s social role under a dialogical perspective: A study of the personal construction of «I as psychotherapist»” (in this issue). These commentaries discuss a multiplicity of problems and potentials, providing us with a meaningful space for di...

Psychology has been increasingly recognising the multiplicity of the self. However, this recognition raises the problem of explaining how a sense of self-identity is achieved within a multiplicity of selves. Two theoretical orientations playing a major role in the study of the plurality of the self: the social-cognitive perspective, in which self i...

The aim of this study it's to try to learn more about the behaviour changing processes. We know that for prevention we need to inform people. On the other hand, knowing the facts is not enough to change behaviours. So, in primary health care, an important prevention field, what are the best ways to promote the adoption of healthy behaviours? Using...

In this commentary we offer a critique of the task devised by Hermans (2001): the PPR (Personal Position Repertoire). We first emphasize the important contributions made by Hermans and collaborators toward improving our understanding of the dialogical self, and then analyze several problems raised by this new method of studying the self. The issues...

In this commentary we offer a critique of the task devised by Hermans (2001): the PPR (Personal Position Repertoire). We first emphasize the important contributions made by Hermans and collaborators toward improving our understanding of the dialogical self, and then analyze several problems raised by this new method of studying the self. The issues...

Resumo A questão da identidade pessoal tem sido alvo de diversas abordagens, pelo que neste trabalho se descreve a forma como questões de índole epistémica subjazem a diferentes concepções e respostas a esta questão por diferentes modelos teóricos da psicologia. Grande parte deste problema deve-se a uma imagem da natureza do conhecimento como sendo...

O presente trabalho visa construir as escalas de afectos com índices psicométricos de validade satisfatórios relativamente ao Método de Autoconfrontação (MAC), no âmbito de um projecto que pretende adaptar o mesmo à população portuguesa. Assim, foi utilizada uma matriz de 16 afectos sujeita a dois estudos: validade concorrente e análise factorial d...