Empirical Guidelines for Group Therapy: Pretraining, Cohesion, and Modeling

Abstract
Group therapy has traditionally been viewed as more an art than a science. This paper suggests that the field is reaching a level of empirical sophistication which permits the development of clinical models from empirical data. Pretherapy -training, cohesion, and modeling are suggested as significant parameters of effective group treatment. The evidence defining the properties and effects of those variables is reviewed and their theoretical and practical implications are discussed.