Vol. 8 – September 2003
COUPLES THERAPY
Riehl-Emde, A.; Thomas, V. & Willi, J. (2003) Love: An important dimension in marital research and
therapy. Family Process, 42 (2), 253-268.
How do men and women describe and assess their relationship? What themes are decisive for its
quality and stability? To answer such questions, we investigated a random sample of 204 married
couples (reference sample) and 31 married couples undergoing psychotherapy (clinical sample)
using a newly developed questionnaire. The participating couples were asked to evaluate a total of
19 themes with respect to their importance for the couple’s connectedness. Although only rarely
directly addressed in couple therapy and investigated in couple research, the theme ‘Love’ proved to
be the decisive factor for quality and stability. The results of the present study, therefore, indicate
that ‘Love’ should be investigated more thoroughly in couple research and included more actively in
diagnostic and therapeutic procedures.
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Epstein, N. (2001) Cognitive-Behavioural therapy with couples: empirical status. Journal of Cognitive
Psychotherapy, 15 (2), 299-310.
This article briefly summarises the behavioural, cognitive, and affective factors that have been
implicated in couples’ relationship problems, describes representative interventions for those factors,
and reviews the current status of outcome research on cognitive-behavioural therapy for couples.
Although the initial studies have provided encouraging findings concerning the effectiveness of
cognitive-behavioural treatment for distressed couples, limitations in the number and scope of the
studies leave many unanswered questions. In particular, studies have not assessed the impact of
cognitive-behavioural couples therapy as it is conducted in clinical practice. Additional research is
needed to address issues such as the relative efficacy of different cognitive restructuring
interventions and