2025 Grant Recipient:
Gladis-Lee Pereira, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Universidad Europea de Madrid and her co-investigators; Tien Kuei (Power to Live Foundation) and Dr. Daniel Assaz are proud to be the recipients of the 2025 ACBS Robert J. Kohlenberg Research Grant to complete a research project: Mapping In-Session Change in Functional Analytic Psychotherapy from An Idiographic Molar Approach.
Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP) is a therapeutic approach that emphasizes in-session interactions as the key factor driving meaningful change in clients' lives. It is a type of therapy that focuses on explaining why people change rather than merely analyzing if they change. In this sense, research that connects specific in-session interactions with clinical improvement, while preserving the unique role of each therapeutic dyad, is one of FAP’s most important tasks and, perhaps, one of its greatest methodological challenges.
Therefore, this study aims to expand our understanding of the specific behaviors exhibited by psychotherapists that are associated with clinical change, seeking to use a methodology that better fits the nature of psychotherapy. We believe that by focusing on the therapeutic interaction during clinical sessions, while capturing the uniqueness of each case, this project will contribute to improving therapeutic effectiveness and refining training methodologies for clinicians practicing FAP. This, in turn, has the potential to inform future research and applications within Contextual Behavioral Science and ultimately alleviate human suffering.