CV

Paulo P.P. Machado is Professor of Clinical Psychology and the President of the School of Psychology at the University of Minho in Portugal. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1993, and subsequently served on the faculties of University of Porto and the University of Minho. He has been Invited Professor at the University of Granada, Huelva and Santiago (Spain), Federal de Pernanbuco and Católica de Pelotas (Brazil); and Simon Fraser University (Canada).
His academic career has been devoted to studying the effectiveness of psychotherapy, refinement of methodologies in outcome treatment monitoring in mental health, and the development of tailored intervention and prevention program for eating disorders and obesity. His current research aims at developing (1) models to identify environmental, and psychosocial factors that are associated with treatment response; and the course of recovery; (2) ways of tailoring psychological interventions to the individual needs (e.g., stepped care approach); and, (3) strategies that go beyond the initial level of treatment and focus on post treatment care.
Dr Machado is the President of the Society for Psychotherapy, and was Editor of the Journal Psychotherapy Research. He is Fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders, Past-President of the Eating Disorder Research Society, and President of the Portuguese Society for the Study of Eating Disorders.

KEYNOTE ABSTRACT

Transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders
Transdiagnostic approaches to psychotherapeutic treatment of emotional disorders has clear advantages over diagnostic specific interventions. Previous research suggests that emotional disorders share underlying mechanisms possibly influencing the development and maintenance of emotional disorders across the life span.
One of such examples is The Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders (UP; Barlow, et al., 2011). This transdiagnostic protocol is an emotion-focused cognitive-behavioral treatment, targeting a wide range of depressive, anxiety and related disorders. The transdiagnostic framework was grounded on dimensional psychopathology conceptualization, which emphasize processual similarities, rather than specific differences across emotional disorders.
Treatment consisted of a maximum of 18, 60-minute individual treatment sessions. The UP consists of five core treatment modules that were designed to target key aspects of emotional processing and regulation of emotional experiences: (a) increasing present-focused emotion awareness, (b) increasing cognitive flexibility, (c) identifying and preventing patterns of emotion avoidance and maladaptive emotion-driven behaviors (EDBs), (d) increasing awareness and tolerance of emotion-related physical sensations, and (e) interoceptive and situation-based emotion-focused exposure.
In this keynote presentation we will describe the treatment protocol and provide data on is utilization at the University of Minho Psychotherapy Clinical Centre.