Alliance

The alliance highlights the qualities of coordination, sincerity, and trust that run through the various (CBT) interventions. This commemoration of Dr. Aaron T. Beck’s contribution to the field focuses on the alliance that emerges as one of the best-studied process characteristics in psychotherapy, with hundreds of studies on different orientations, treatment conditions, and mental health services. Overall, there is a robust meta-analytic predictive relation between alliance during therapy and therapy outcome (Cohen's d = .58). However, socio-cultural aspects such as the existence of substance use disorder or ethnic minorities partly moderates this relation. In addition, therapist effects are likely. Clinical implications are discussed based on the excellent meta-analytic empirical evidence.