New publication on the plasticity of compassion, positive affect, and their potential benefits for psychotherapy

Patients with mental disorders who do not respond to cognitive therapy often report that although they can attenuate negative and also practice new positive or neutral thoughts in everyday life, they still feel like the negative thoughts are true. In our new opinion article Exploiting the plasticity of compassion to improve psychotherapy, which is part of the Special Issue Positive Affect in the journal Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Katharina Förster and Philipp Kanske integrate neurobiological and psychological findings to explain why it would be useful to embed the social emotion "compassion" more into the psychotherapy of these patients.

Förster, K., & Kanske, P. (2021). Exploiting the plasticity of compassion to improve psychotherapy. In Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences (Vol. 39, pp. 64–71).