Advanced Clinician Seminar Series: Creating Clinical Experiences that Count: Enhancing Adaptive Learning from Experiential Interventions (Exposure Therapy and Activity Assignments)
Advanced Clinician Seminar 1 - Advanced Clinician Seminar Series: Creating Clinical Experiences That Count: Enhancing Adaptive Learning from Experiential Interventions (Exposure Therapy and Activity Assignments)
Sunday, November 23, 2025
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM CST
Location: Strand 10 A&B, Level 2
Earn 1.5 Credit
Keywords: Exposure, Behavioral Activation , CBT Level of Familiarity: Moderate to Advanced Recommended Readings: Benito, K., Pittig, A., Abramowitz, J., Arch, J., Chavira, D., de Kleine, R., De Nadai, A., Hermans, D., Hofmann, S.G., Hoyer, J., Huppert, J.D., Kircanski, K., McEvoy, P.M., Meyer, H., Monfils, M.H., Papini, S., Rief, W., Rosenfield, D., Storch, E.A., Telch, M.J., Otto, M.W., Smits, J.A., for the Exposure Therapy Consortium (2024). Mechanisms of Change in Exposure Therapy for Anxiety and Related Disorders: A Research Agenda. Clinical Psychological Science. 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026241240727, Kube, T., Kirchner, L., Lemmer, G., & Glombiewski, J. A. (2021). How the Discrepancy Between Prior Expectations and New Information Influences Expectation Updating in Depression—The Greater, the Better? Clinical Psychological Science, 10(3), 430-449. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026211024644 (Original work published 2022)., Smits, J. A. J., Powers, M. B., & Otto, M.W. (2019) Personalized Exposure Therapy: A Person-Centered Transdiagnostic Approach. New York: Oxford University Press. , Taylor, C. T., Rosenfield, D., Dowd, S. M., Dutcher, C. D., Hofmann, S. G., Otto, M. W., Pollack, M. H., & Smits, J. A. J. (2023). What good are positive emotions for treatment? A replication test of whether trait positive emotionality predicts response to exposure therapy for social anxiety disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, Dec;171:104436.,
Professor Boston University Boston, MA, United States
In active cognitive-behavioral treatments, clinicians are routinely constructing and assigning clinical experiences to aid adaptive learning. This process has been most formalized in activity assignment and exposure therapy strategies for the treatment for anxiety-related and mood disorders. Yet, relatively little has been written about the nuances of creating these experiences and attending, in particular, to the patient’s responses to these experiences in the anticipatory, in-the-moment, and post event processing phases of an experiential assignment. In this Advanced Clinician Seminar, a memory-centric perspective (considering what is learned from an experiential intervention and how to enhance the retention of that learning) is taken for considering strategies to enhance the imact of these experiental assignments. Individual topics will include consideration of the right level of “expectancy violations” that aids effective learning and the contextual conditions (positive, affect, hope, optimism) that may influence the success and staying power of an experiential assignment. Attention will also be placed on both obvious and subtle defensive (safety) behaviors that can derail active learning, with emphasis on finding an “everyday behavior” standard to guide behavioral responding to experiential assignments. Active discussion of cases provided by participants will be a central feature of this seminar.
Outline: Participants should consider drinking some coffee before this clinical session because active participation is encouraged. For this presentation, a “call and response” format will be used to try to facilitate active engagement among participants through a series of clinical questions, including such questions as: • What are the similarities and differences between Exposure and Behavioral Activation assignments? • Is exposure an active or passive learning process; is it new learning or the weakening of old learning? • Does it matter what you do in response to an exposure or do you just have to show up? • Are you exposing people to a situational fear or the emotions associated with the situational fear? • How long is the core consolidation period (setting in the memory) following an experiential assignement? • What is the primacy of behavioral responses (vs. emotional responses) in fear conditioning; is ERP relevant to every exposure? • Why might moderate expectancy violations be the best for adaptive learning? • Does your patient routinely re-activate fear and exposure memories before their sessions? • What kind of adaptive memory consolidation practices do you put into place following exposure or activity assignments? • What are some of the core beliefs you often target in the treatment of anxiety- and mood-related disorders. As part of addressing these questions, the presenter will review recent research that informs answers to these questions in relation to clinical strategies designed to enhance outcomes to experiential assignments.
Learning Objectives:
At the end of this session, the learner will be able to:
Discuss a memory-centric perspective on experiential learning in CBT.
Explain post-event processing strategies to help get the most out of experiential learning assignments in or between sessions.
List contextual factors that may influence the degree of adaptive learning from experiential interventions in CBT.
Long-term Goal: Aside from a memory-centric view of experiential assignments, two core “takeaway” items will be consideration of the role of (1) exposure to aid emotional processing (interoceptive exposure) as a routine lead-in to treatment of anxiety and related disorders.
Long-term Goal: and (2) an “ERP for Everyone” perspective that emphasizes the importance of programming the responses to exposure to enhance exposure therapy and activity assignment outcomes.
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