Increasingly, clinical psychology literature points to a relationship between therapists’ self-regulation and their capacity to effectively treat patients. Indeed, theorists have suggested that therapists’ self-regulation – including their capacity to be self-reflective and mindful with patients – tends to facilitate therapeutic empathy (Buechler, 2008), rupture resolution (Safran & Muran, 2000), and mutual recognition (Benjamin, 2018). […]
Online psychotherapy is not new. Group therapy using videoconferencing is not new. What is new, however, is having to start online treatment for the first time in the midst of a global pandemic. Usually, before COVID-19, therapists who provided telehealth services had gone through a planned and thoughtful process of figuring out online work, including […]
Scandals involving psychological research have been making the headlines since World War II (see Adair, 2001, for review). These public critiques make individuals skeptical of the veracity of psychological science. Recently, participants from Phillip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973) were interviewed and revealed potential ethical violations, including feeling they were obligated […]
Recently in one of my courses, I lectured on ethics in forensic psychological assessment. A case example was provided involving a psychologist who provided testimony citing non-existent risk and risk assessment literature in a death penalty case, which later resulted in the case being overturned. One of my students inquired about the repercussions of psychologists […]
The process of psychotherapy is relationship based. As such, how psychotherapists conduct themselves in these relationships has significant clinical and ethical implications. The Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (APA Ethics Code, APA, 2010) makes clear the ethical obligations relevant to boundaries and multiple relationships that are likely to be well known by […]
I was recently at a lecture where an audience member asked the speaker, psychologist Dr. Richard Schwartz, about his stance on the role of therapist self-disclosure. Dr. Schwartz paused for a moment before responding that he often urges supervisees to bring to mind the acronym WAIT before engaging in self-disclosure in a session (personal communication, […]