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The team of the Psychotherapy and Change Research Program (Programa de Investigación en Psicoterapia y Cambio) includes psychologists and psychiatrists with experience in research and clinical practice, plus one other defining characteristic: all the members of the team draw on different professional backgrounds and employ a range of theoretical perspectives in their work.

The program was founded in 2002 under the leadership of Mariane Krause, PhD, whose contributions to research in Chile and Germany on change in the subjective theories of patients during the psychotherapeutic process inspired this group of researchers to come together. Beginning with initial studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, based on retrospective reconstructions of therapeutic processes from the perspective of the clients and the therapists, an Evolving Model of Psychotherapeutic Change was created.

During its first years of work, the team established a hierarchy of Generic Change Indicators, which has been used to support several different studies in psychotherapy. These advances have allowed us to define stages and phases in the therapeutic processes, identifying episodes of change as well as periods of stagnation in the process. In recent years, we have developed a Therapeutic Activity Coding System (TACS-1.0, after the Spanish-language original, Sistema de Codificación de la Actividad Terapéutica), which is used in the study of therapeutic communication between the therapist and the patients in these different phases of the therapeutic process.

Over time, new researchers have joined our team, and today, we are developing many different lines of research in psychotherapy, including change and stagnation in the therapeutic process, communicative acts in interaction, emotional expression and therapeutic alliance, dialogic perspective, the role of the voice, mutual coordination and regulation in psychotherapy, etc. These psychotherapy studies have enjoyed the financial support of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile's National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FONDECYT) and the Chilean Millennium Scientific Initiative (ICM).

On this Website, you will find information on the individual researchers and our lines of research. You can also access knowledge and tools for use in the study of therapeutic processes.