Assessing the effectiveness of a prevention intervention for non-clinical groups using the CBA-OE test
Paolo Michielin, Giovanbattista Andreoli, Giacinta Pini
Over the past twenty years the practice of evaluating the outcome of psychological interventions has
become widespread, in order to both investigate their effectiveness and to account for their usefulness
and convenience, and consequently the number of academic publications has rapidly increased.
However, most of these studies have concerned clinical interventions conducted on groups of people
with a specific psychopathology, and only a few have investigated the effectiveness of psychological
interventions in non-clinical groups.
This study aim to evaluate the effectiveness of an 8-session cycle of Autogenic Training (AT) on
58 people with the desire to improve their own psychological wellbeing; none of whom revealed a
diagnosable psychopathology during initial assessment. Before treatment and during sessions 1,4,7
and 8 the Cognitive Behavioural Assessment-Outcome Evaluation (CBA-OE) was administered to monitor
changes. Analysis of the results highlighted significant improvements in all the areas investigated by
the CBA-OE, three of psychological distress and two of wellbeing, particularly when comparing the
first and the last session of AT. Therefore it is possible to assume that AT improves the psychological
condition of people without a psychopathology, that the CBA-OE is sensitive and suited to revealing
these changes.
Keywords
Effectiveness, Autogenic training, Positive psychology, CBA-OE, Test sensitivity.
