Targeting Personality Traits in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Potent, Parsimonious, & Personalizable

Description

Presenter: Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala

Dr. Sauer-Zavala is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Kentucky (UK) and is the founding Director of Clinical Services at the UK Clinic for Emotional Health. She is also the Director of Compass Mental Health Consultation, LLC, an organization with a mission to train mental health providers and organizations in cutting-edge evidence-based interventions. Dr. Sauer-Zavala received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from UK in 2011; she completed her predoctoral internship at Duke University Medical Center and her postdoctoral fellowship at Boston University. She then spent seven years on the faculty in BU’s Department of Psychological and Brain Science before returning home to UK in 2019. Her research is focused on exploring personality-based mechanisms that maintain psychological symptoms and using this information to develop more targeted, easily-disseminated intervention strategies. Her research has been supported by NIMH, NIAAA, Templeton Foundation, the Center for Implementation and Improvement Sciences, and the Canadian Institute of Health Research. Dr. Sauer-Zavala has co-authored over 140 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and books. In particular, she is a co-developer of the Unified Protocol and, more recently, BPD Compass. Email Dr. Sauer-Zavala at ssz@personality-compass.com and follow her on Twitter/X at @SauerZavala or Instagram at @self.made.personality.

 Overview:         

Millions of people with a mental health condition will not receive care each year (SAMHSA, 2017) and of those who do, only 30% will receive evidence-based treatment (Radomsky & Otto, 2001). Although efficacious interventions for many mental disorders have been developed, uptake of these treatments in routine clinical practice has been poor. Single disorder protocols for each categorical DSM diagnosis may be burdensome for clinicians and may not adequately address the needs of patients with co-occurring disorders (McHugh & Barlow, Year). By contrast, transdiagnostic interventions designed to target the limited number of shared mechanisms that account for symptoms across a range of psychopathology have the potential to reduce burden on clinicians (i.e., fewer treatments to learn) and can elegantly address comorbid conditions. Dimensional models of psychopathology, including the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP; Kotov et al., 2017) and the Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD; APA, 2013) point to a limited number of personality-based mechanisms that confer risk for a wide swath of psychopathology (Michellini, YEAR). This webinar will describe the advantages of a transdiagnostic, personality-based system of psychotherapy (Sauer-Zavala et al., 2023a) describe the development, efficacy, and major components of two personality-focused transdiagnostic interventions (i.e., the Unified Protocol [Barlow et al., 2018], COMPASS [Sauer-Zavala et al., 2023b) that have the potential to make treatment more parsimonious, potent, and personalizable.

Learning Objectives: Intended Audience: Intermediate

1. Describe the clinical utility of a system of psychotherapy based on a dimensional, personality-based classification system
2. Apply a transdiagnostic, personality-focused case conceptualization to common mental health conditions
3. Describe the components of two transdiagnostic personality-focused interventions: Unified Protocol and BPD Compass

Attendees must attend the entirety of the program and complete the Evaluation sent after the program.  Evaluations will be sent via email shortly after the Live webinar.  CE Certificates will be processed and emailed within 5 – 10 business days from Live Webinar.