Abstract
While the evidence on the effectiveness of different psychotherapies is often strong, it is not settled whereby and how these therapies work. Knowledge on the causal factors and change mechanisms is of high clinical and public relevance, as it contributes to the empirically informed advancement of psychotherapeutic interventions. Here, digitalized research approaches might possess the potential to generate new insights into human behavior change, contributing to augmented interventions and mental healthcare practices with better treatment outcomes. In this perspective article, we describe recent findings of research into change mechanisms that were only feasible with digital tools and outline important future directions for this rather novel branch of research. Furthermore, we indicate several challenges and pitfalls that are to be solved, in order to advance digitalized psychotherapy process research, both methodologically and technologically.
Highlights
Despite decades of research efforts to unveil the working mechanisms in psychotherapies for common mental disorders, the evidence base on the causal factors and therapeutic processes in most of these interventions remains largely uncertain (Cuijpers et al, 2019)
We highlight that certain features of digitalization convey novel opportunities for psychotherapy process research, which hold the potential to lift this kind of research on another level and shed more light upon an enduring black box
Future research must disclose, which of these digital factors are active ingredients of technology-delivered interventions, and if they induce the same or separate working mechanisms when compared to conventional face-to-face psychotherapies
Summary
Despite decades of research efforts to unveil the working mechanisms in psychotherapies for common mental disorders, the evidence base on the causal factors and therapeutic processes in most of these interventions remains largely uncertain (Cuijpers et al, 2019). Future research must disclose, which of these digital factors are active ingredients of technology-delivered interventions (or are merely facilitating or obstructive moderating variables for genuine therapeutic processes), and if they induce the same or separate working mechanisms when compared to conventional face-to-face psychotherapies Albeit, these questions of comparative research are hardly to answer, as long as there are substantial differences between these two branches of research concerning recruitment strategies and sample characteristics (Torous and Firth, 2018). The consideration and advocacy of theory-driven explanatory research with falsifiable scientific models might be of particular relevance at the present time, so as to convey the scientific achievements and epistemological methodologies from decades of research efforts into an ever-increasing digitalized world, with the concomitant advancement of technologized psychological and medical research
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