From the Brain to Clinical Practice: Bridging the Gap between Psychotherapy Research and Affective Neuroscience

Dear Colleagues,

Although the efficacy of psychotherapy has been largely demonstrated, the understanding of therapeutic change mechanisms has been only partially achieved by psychotherapy research. Affective neuroscience may importantly contribute to the clarification of mechanisms of change through the investigation of neurobiological changes associated with psychotherapy and with the description of the neural correlates of clinically relevant phenomena such as emotion regulation. However, a missing integration between clinical psychology and neuroscience often limits the clinical value of affective neuroscience research.

This Special Issue is dedicated to bridging the existing gap between psychotherapy research and affective neuroscience, in order to promote the progress of affective neuroscience and concretely contribute to patients’ treatments.

Based on this aim, in the present Special Issue we present a collection of the following categories of high-quality articles: (a) theoretical articles that address key aspects of the integration between the considered fields, presenting also the perspectives and opinions of clinical researchers; (b) research articles about the neural effects of psychological treatments; (c) research articles which consider clinical theories in the interpretations of their findings and/or have direct clinical implications of their results.

We will consider research articles, opinion/perspective articles, and review articles (systematic reviews, meta-analyses) for publication in this Special Issue.

Dr. Irene Messina
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Brain Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• psychotherapy
• clinical implications
• clinically relevant phenomena
• integration
• translational neuroscience