Empirically Supported Treatments
How do psychologists decide which treatments count as empirically supported and which ones do not?
5 Matching Annotations
- Aug 2025
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reatments that have been shown to work in this way are called empirically supported treatments.
What stood out to me is that treatments need to be tested scientifically before we can call them effective. This made me realize that not every therapy people talk about is actually proven to work.
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Scientists—especially psychologists—understand that they are just as susceptible as anyone else to intuitive but incorrect beliefs.
This stood out to me because it reminds me that even trained experts can fall into the same traps as anyone else, which is why skepticism, evidence, and peer review are such an important part of psychology.
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This is called confirmation bias.
I learned that confirmation bias explains why people often stick to their beliefs even when they are wrong. It made me realize how easy it is to only notice evidence that supports what we already think and ignore information that challenges us.
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Scientific research, however, has shown that this approach tends to leave people feeling more angry, not less (Bushman, 2002)[1].
I thought it was interesting that venting anger actually makes people angrier instead of calming them down.
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