Taxonomy of Helpful Impacts

Howard E. A. Tinsley

Psychologists have made systematic efforts to identify the relation of events that occur during therapy to the beneficial outcomes clients report. This critical topic is addressed by every theory of psychotherapy, and well over a thousand studies of the efficacy of therapeutic interventions have been published during the last seven decades. Recently, psychologists have undertaken systematic analyses of that evidence to identify the common factors that—regardless of therapeutic approach—account for much of the success of psychotherapy. Robert Elliott analyzed data from 24 single-session interviews in 1985 and identified 86 helpful therapist responses that he clustered into eight types of helpful events. He further grouped these helpful events into two “superclusters.” Four helpful events formed the task supercluster because they involved direct work or progress on the client's presenting problem. They are as follows: New perspective: asking information-gathering questions to Problem ...

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