Saturday, November 16 | 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

Lifetime Achievement Award Address: Improving CBT from Molecules to Models

Stefan G. Hofmann, Ph.D., Philipps University of Marburg, Germany

Participants earn 1 continuing education credit

Categories: Adult Anxiety, Translational, Treatment-CBT

Keywords: Anxiety, Neuroscience, Therapy Process

All levels of familiarity with the material.

Stefan G. Hofmann is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Translational Clinical Psychology and the LOEWE top professor at the Philipps University of Marburg in Germany. He was born in a little town near Stuttgart in Germany, which may explain his thick German accent. He studied psychology at the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, where he received his B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. A brief dissertation fellowship to spend some time at Stanford University turned into a longer research career in the United States.

He was professor at Boston University between 1996 and 2023 and received an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship to return to his alma mater, the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, in 2021. He now lives in Frankfurt, Germany, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Dr. Hofmann has an actively funded research program studying various aspects of emotional disorders with a particular emphasis on mood and anxiety disorders, cognitive behavioral therapy, and neuroscience. He is co-developer of Process-based Therapy.

He has won many prestigious professional awards, including the 2021 Alexander von Humboldt Professorship and the 2015 Aaron T. Beck Award for Significant and Enduring Contributions to the Field of Cognitive Therapy by the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. He was president of various national and international professional societies, including ABCT and the International Association for Cognitive Psychotherapy. He was an advisor to the DSM-5 Development Process and a member of the DSM-5 Anxiety Disorder Sub-Work Group. Since 2016, he has been identified as a Highly Cited Researcher. Dr. Hofmann has been the editor in chief of Cognitive Therapy and Research since 2012. He has published more than 500 peer-reviewed journal articles and 20 books. At leisure, he enjoys traveling to immerse himself into new cultures, make new friends, and reconnect with old ones. When time permits, he occasionally gets out his flute.

CBT is one of the great success stories of psychiatry. However, we have reached a crisis point because treatment efficacy has not been improving over the last few decades. To overcome this crisis, I will discuss 3 strategies to improve our CBT approach, primarily focused on mood and anxiety disorders. First, insights from translational research and neuroscience can augment existing strategies, even on the molecular level. Second, theory-informed novel therapeutic strategies can enhance treatment success. Third, and perhaps most importantly, we need to revisit and improve some of our basic models and paradigms that serve as the basis for CBT. This may require a radical departure from the latent disease model of the current psychiatric nosology of the DSM/ICD and the absurd proliferation of the protocols-for-syndrome approach. Such a paradigm shift is currently underway, moving toward process-based therapy (PBT). PBT focuses on how to best target and change core biopsychosocial processes in a specific situation for given goals with a given client.

This approach recognizes that psychotherapy typically involves non-linear (rather than linear), bidirectional (rather than unidirectional), and dynamic changes of many (rather than only a few) interconnected variables. Effective therapy leads to changes of the entire system toward a stable and adaptive state. This requires gathering high-density longitudinal idiographic data to capture the complexity of psychopathology using a dynamic network approach within the general framework of evolutionary science. I will conclude that CBT can be improved through translational research while embracing an evolutionary model toward psychopathology and treatment change.

Outline:

• The success and limitations of contemporary cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) will be described.
• Specific strategies will be discussed to overcome these limitations.
• These strategies include: (1) improving CBT based on insights from translational research and neuroscience; (2) enhancing treatment efficacy with theory-informed strategies; and (3) improving the basic models and paradigms that inform CBT.
• These strategies will a departure from the traditional latent disease model and will guide research toward and individualized and a process-based approach to clinical science.

At the end of this session, the learner will be able to:

1. Describe the limitations of contemporary CBT.
2. List the 3 strategies to enhance the theory and practice of CBT.
3. Discuss alternatives to the latent disease model of mental disorders.

Phelps, E. A. & Hofmann, S. G. (2019). Memory editing: From science fiction to clinical practice. Nature, 572, 43-50. doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1433-7.

Hofmann, S. G., & Hayes, S. C. (2019). The future of intervention science: Process-based therapy. Clinical Psychological Science, 7, 37–50. doi: 10.1177/2167702618772296

Hofmann, S. G., Curtiss, J., & McNally, R. J. (2016). A complex network perspective on clinical science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 597-605. doi: 10.1177/1745691616639283