Summary of CMS Seminar Club presentation on Saturday, January 28, 2023
Title: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Process-Based Therapy, and the Future of Psychological Interventions
Speaker: Prof. Steven C. Hayes, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
On Saturday, January 28, Prof. Hayes gave a presentation at Fujita Health University. He explained about psychotherapy and the need for it in general, and about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Process-Based Therapy (PBT) in particular.
Recording: For members of Fujita University, a recording of the meeting (without the discussion part) will be available at our Manabi system. Unfortunately, we cannot open the recording for a wider audience.
There were 44 participants who enjoyed the meeting. Besides providing information, Professor Hayes also let us go through different emotions so that we would better understand the principles of ACT. I learned a lot from those exercises, and so probably did many others.
Some of the reactions, each from a different participant, that I was told or were written in the chat box during the meeting were “That was the greatest seminar club!,” “I thoroughly enjoyed myself,” “You made me glad that I came to the lab early Sat morning,” “I was somehow familiar with the ACT concepts, but I never expected to listen to the founder of ACT directly in an exclusive seminar club,” and “Love this session! TQVM. Great speaker. Mindfulness is the way to go!”
After Prof. Hayes’ presentation, the discussion was quite active and the audience asked questions across the spectrum. How he answered the different questions—intellectually astute but very understandable and human/down-to-earth at the same time—impressed me a lot. I am grateful for his energy and sincerity during the meeting.
Because I find correctly and properly summarizing the contents of the event quite difficult, for most of it I just refer to the recording (for members of Fujita Health University) or other presence of Prof. Hayes and ACT on internet (for example here).
I just like to highlight one thing, which I hope to interpret correctly, and what also excites me from biomedical science perspective. Prof. Hayes and others performed a huge meta-analysis on all 54,633 single randomized trial studies ever done on a psychosocial intervention that claimed to have properly identified a process of change (“mediational analysis”) (Hayes et al. 2022; Hayes 2022). They analyzed which factor was the most important for being able to make positive change, and it turned out that by far the biggest factor is “psychological flexibility” and not, for example, having a stable social network (Fig. 2). The term “psychological flexibility” is not so easy to understand, and I also don’t know how it was defined exactly in this meta-analysis, but it has to do with us being able to change our mind depending on context (thus, not keep feeling/thinking the same thing regardless what is outside of you). That psychological flexibility plays such important role appears to agree with some findings for pharmacotherapy treatment of mental disorders. For example, many pharmacotherapy treatments of mental disorders involve the potentiating of serotonin, and that typically only helps after a few weeks because—as is often assumed—it works predominantly through enhancing neural plasticity (a possibility for behavioral change at the neural level). Likewise, the use of several psychedelics within psychotherapy has been found to be beneficial, probably also by enhancing the possible variation in the activation/creation of new neurocircuits (new behaviors).
In this context—if I interpret his words correctly—Prof. Hayes explained the importance of psychological flexibility by referring to an evolution model, saying that you need variation in order to be able to select. He also mentioned that we and our wisdom traditions already know all these things. Like I remember when we were young we were told to do a variety of different things (e.g., hobbies; so to not become psychologically vulnerable), and in our schools we give our children not only information but also let them experience music, sports, and so much more. If it is really that simple, that if we increase someone’s variation at the experiencing and/or neurological level he/she may find it easier (maybe together with a therapist) to find a way out of psychological distress, that probably is fantastic. Namely, that seems to be such an addressable parameter.
All in all, I thought it was a fantastic meeting, from which I took a lot. As for science, if the ability to make changes (psychological flexibility and neural plasticity) is really the most decisive factor for improving mental distress conditions, it may not be too hard for the psychological and biomedical sciences to meet on this.
