The 20th Congress of Psychotherapy Research was arranged in Jyväskylä in March 13-14, 2024. The main theme for the anniversary event was "Alliance in psychotherapy". It gathered over 80 psychotherapy researchers and practitioners around Finland to present and discuss current research topics in the field.
The keynote speech on the first day by Professor Raimo Lappalainen from the University of Jyväskylä was focusing on how to develop the mental health service system, and on the second day Professor J. Christopher Muran from the Adelphi University, USA, gave a speech on "The wicked and the wonderful in the study of rupture repair" introducing repairing alliance ruptures as a critical change process in psychotherapy, and perspectives on its empirical study, based on the approach of Alliance Focused Training (AFT).
Postdoctoral researcher from the CLIPI group, Vera Gergov, held a presentation titled "Therapeutic alliance: Congruence between the evaluations of adolescents and therapists in relation to the effectiveness of treatment" providing results from a clinical outcome and predictor study conducted at the Helsinki University Hospital.