Development of the Transdiagnostic Skills Scale (T2S)

Abstract

Introduction

Psychotherapy has proved its efficacy for treating a wide range of psychological disorders. Most types of psychotherapy have been developed to treat specific disorders and validated through controlled-randomized trials. In recent years, researchers have developed a new way to conceptualize patients’ difficulties, focusing on processes instead of diagnoses. However, there is no simple scale that evaluates transdiagnostic processes, and the development of such a tool is thus the aim of this study.

Method

We identified 12 processes that can be targeted in cognitive behavior therapy and created the Transdiagnostic Skills Scale (T2S) to evaluate them. We measured its internal consistency, factor structure and convergent validity in clinical and non-clinical samples.

Results

We found a 6-factor structure composed of emotion regulation, behavioral activation/planning, emotional identification, assertiveness, problem solving and emotional confrontation. The T2S has high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.95). We found negative associations between skills and symptoms of anxiety, depression and eating disorders. We found no association between these processes and symptoms of either alcohol or cannabis use disorder.

Conclusions

The T2S is a useful and valid tool to identify the skills that clinicians should work on with their patients. It offers a complementary way to understand patients’ difficulties when categorical assessment is complicated.

Keywords:

• Transdiagnostic
• CBT
• psychological skills
• psychiatric disorders
• emotion regulation

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the CHRU and the University of Tours for the material support.

Ethical approval and consent to participate

The experiment and informed consent procedures were approved by the ethics committee of the University (Comité d’Ethique de la Recherche Tours-Poitiers, n°2020-06-04).

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. All authors gathered the data. The first two authors performed statistical analysis. The first author drafted the manuscript and all authors commented on the initial version. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests related to this work.

Data availability statement

The datasets used and/or analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies from the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.