Paul M. Salkovskis, Magnus Blondahl Sighvatsson and Jon Fridrik Sigurdsson, Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy 51(6):595–615 — DOI-10.1017/S1352465823000590
What this is, verified
The brief asked for this pinned down, so here is what each source says.
- A journal article, not a book, an edited volume or an editorial. The
publisher labels it “MAIN” (a main article), and Crossref types it
journal-article. The book rule does not apply. - Journal: Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy (BCP), the journal of the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP), published by Cambridge University Press. Volume 51, issue 6, pages 595–615.
- DOI: 10.1017/S1352465823000590 (Crossref stores it lower-case).
- Authors: Paul M. Salkovskis (University of Oxford, Department of Experimental Psychology, and Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust); Magnus Blondahl Sighvatsson and Jon Fridrik Sigurdsson (both Reykjavik University and University of Iceland). Salkovskis is the corresponding author.
- Dates: received 14 August 2023, revised 28 November 2023, accepted 1
December 2023, first published online 5 January 2024. The issue is dated
November 2023, and the article’s own “Cite this article” line gives the
year as 2023.
published:carries the first-online date, which is the first appearance; the brief’s “2024” matches that date, while the citable volume year is 2023. - Special issue: issue 6 is “Volume 51, Special Issue 6: Disseminating CBT: 50 years and beyond”, marking fifty years of the BABCP (founded as the British Association for Behavioural Psychotherapy). Its editorial is Paul Salkovskis and Richard Thwaites, “CBT 50 years on: a celebration of empirically grounded and evidence-based psychological therapy”, BCP 51(6):509–511, DOI 10.1017/S1352465824000080, online 30 January 2024. The editorial describes Salkovskis as the current BCP Editor-in-Chief and refers to “either Editor-in-Chief”, which I read as Salkovskis for BCP and Thwaites for the sister journal the Cognitive Behaviour Therapist, whose own 50th-anniversary papers the editorial describes. The editorial does not use the phrase “guest editor”, and Cambridge’s page names no issue editors, so I do not name any.
- Conflict of interest, as the paper states it: Salkovskis is Editor of BCP and “was not involved in the review or editorial process for this paper”.
- Licence: open access, CC BY 4.0. Read from the publisher’s PDF on cambridge.org.
Key takeaways
- Common factors are not mechanisms of change. A mechanism should show up as a common factor, but a common factor need not be a mechanism: “therapists typically wear shoes in almost all therapy modalities”. The alliance may improve because the patient improves, rather than the other way round.
- A treatment’s success is not evidence for its theory, with one exception: if a treatment changes the factor a theory says is crucial and the problem does not improve, that disconfirms the theory.
- The proposed mechanism. People with mood problems “interpret their situation as being more negative or threat-based than it really is”. What they then do maintains that meaning, so they become “stuck”. Any effective therapy helps the person consider and test a less negative alternative account, which must fit their past experience and survive their future experience. The authors call this a type of psychological flexibility, and propose it as the mechanism “not only in CBT but also effective psychological therapies in general”.
- Even purely behavioural treatments are said to work this way. Exposure succeeds when the person comes to an implicit Theory B, and exposure framed as a belief-disconfirming behavioural experiment was “very markedly superior to exposure alone” in agoraphobia and social phobia (three cited studies, all co-authored by Salkovskis).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the read statement of a cognitive account of how psychological treatment works. Cognition is tagged because the proposed mechanism is a change of interpretation and meaning. Philosophy of science is tagged because a third of the paper is about what kind of evidence can show a mechanism: common factors versus mechanisms, the logic of treatment success as evidence, and Kazdin’s criteria for mediation. Emotion and affect is tagged because the account is a theory of emotional problems as driven by appraisal. It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice. The Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it (a grep of its literature.d, notes.d and theory.d for “Salkovskis” and the DOI found nothing).
It bears on the batch:
- Hofmann and Hayes (LIT-544) make the same diagnosis from the same Gordon Paul question: the field studied efficacy and not mechanism. They draw the opposite conclusion, a plurality of processes in a hierarchy, where this paper proposes one mechanism. Both put “flexibility” at the top. Neither cites the other.
- Borsboom (LIT-547): “stuck” in self-maintaining vicious circles is the cognitive version of a symptom network held in its disorder state by feedback. The paper names network analysis only as one statistical tool for mechanism research.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.