Paulo P.P. Machado is Professor
of Clinical Psychology and the President of the
School of Psychology at the University of Minho
in Portugal. He received his Ph.D. from the
University of California, Santa Barbara in 1993,
and subsequently served on the faculties of
University of Porto and the University of
Minho. He has been Invited Professor at
the University of Granada, Huelva and Santiago
(Spain), Federal de Pernanbuco and Católica de
Pelotas (Brazil); and Simon Fraser University
(Canada).
His academic career has been devoted to studying
the effectiveness of psychotherapy, refinement
of methodologies in outcome treatment monitoring
in mental health, and the development of
tailored intervention and prevention program for
eating disorders and obesity. His current
research aims at developing (1) models to
identify environmental, and psychosocial factors
that are associated with treatment response; and
the course of recovery; (2) ways of tailoring
psychological interventions to the individual
needs (e.g., stepped care approach); and, (3)
strategies that go beyond the initial level of
treatment and focus on post treatment care.
Dr Machado is the President of the Society for
Psychotherapy, and was Editor of the Journal
Psychotherapy Research. He is Fellow of the
Academy for Eating Disorders, Past-President of
the Eating Disorder Research Society, and
President of the Portuguese Society for the
Study of Eating Disorders.
KEYNOTE ABSTRACT
Transdiagnostic treatment of emotional
disorders
Transdiagnostic approaches to psychotherapeutic
treatment of emotional disorders has clear
advantages over diagnostic specific
interventions. Previous research suggests that
emotional disorders share underlying mechanisms
possibly influencing the development and
maintenance of emotional disorders across the
life span.
One of such examples is The Unified Protocol for
Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders
(UP; Barlow, et al., 2011). This transdiagnostic
protocol is an emotion-focused
cognitive-behavioral treatment, targeting a wide
range of depressive, anxiety and related
disorders. The transdiagnostic framework was
grounded on dimensional psychopathology
conceptualization, which emphasize processual
similarities, rather than specific differences
across emotional disorders.
Treatment consisted of a maximum of 18,
60-minute individual treatment sessions. The UP
consists of five core treatment modules that
were designed to target key aspects of emotional
processing and regulation of emotional
experiences: (a) increasing present-focused
emotion awareness, (b) increasing cognitive
flexibility, (c) identifying and preventing
patterns of emotion avoidance and maladaptive
emotion-driven behaviors (EDBs), (d) increasing
awareness and tolerance of emotion-related
physical sensations, and (e) interoceptive and
situation-based emotion-focused exposure.
In this keynote presentation we will describe
the treatment protocol and provide data on is
utilization at the University of Minho
Psychotherapy Clinical Centre.
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