Predicting patients' responses to psychotherapy: Are some more predictablethan others?

Patient profiling predicts improvement across psychotherapy sessions on the basis of intake clinical characteristics. Patients completed questionnaire s before their Ist session and at other paints during treatment. After usin g hierarchical linear modeling to calculate expected courses of improvement , 1/2 of the sample was divided into 1 of 2 groups: those whose treatment r esponses across sessions matched or exceeded their expected courses (75% of the sample) and those whose responses failed to match expectations. A disc riminant function analysis indicated that the groups could be differentiate d on the basis of intake characteristics; that is, patients with higher dis criminant scores were more likely than those with low discriminant scores t o have responded to psychotherapy as predicted. Successful cross-validation of the predictor weights was performed with the other 1/2 of the sample.