Today it is clear, that psychotherapy is an effective and efficient treatment for alleviating psychiatric problems. However, many questions remain: i. e., how can treatment efficacy and effectiveness be improved? What are the therapeutic ingredients and mechanisms of change? Answering these questions is of utmost importance for the efficient dissemination of psychotherapy.
Our research focuses on psychotherapy processes-outcome relations to help answer some of these questions: which ingredients of psychotherapy are effective for the outcome? Should we conceive of such ingredients as specific techniques, or rather as nonspecific common factors of intervention? We have started to conceptualize psychotherapy interventions by the 'Taxonomy project', assuming that specific and common factors are entangled when they generate therapeutic changes.
Furthermore, we have developed and evaluated specific psychoeducational and cognitive-behavioral therapy approaches for schizophrenia patients and now analyze the treatment process variables and components that effectively promote therapeutic change in patients with different characteristics. The identification of such so-called aptitude by treatment interactions is most important for the outline of a personalized psychotherapy approach that is precisely tailored to the preconditions and resources of the individual schizophrenia patient.
We also are involved in research on embodiment, i. e. the bidirectional exchanges between body and motor behavior on the one hand and cognitive and emotional variables on the other. This can be applied to psychotherapy in research on nonverbal synchrony, which may be based on body movement or on physiological time series (https://www.embodiment.ch).
Finally, we conduct studies on empirical aesthetics, where we analyze physiological and experiential responses of audiences in live concerts (project: Experimental Concert Research).
