Like hiking off the well-traveled trail, attempting to bridge foreign
do- mains of research and practice entails certain risks. This volume
repre- sents an effort to explore the relatively uncharted territory of
cognitive and social-cognitive processes embedded in child
psychotherapy. The territory is largely uncharted, not because of a lack
of interest in children and cognition, but because child psychotherapy
has been chronically neglected by clinical researchers. For example,
recent meta-analyses of the effectiveness of child psychotherapy draw on
less than 30 non- behavioral studies of child psychotherapy conducted
over a 30-year period. The average of one study per year pales in
comparison to the volume of research on adult psychotherapy. Moreover,
research exam- ining cognitive, affective, and language processes in
child psycho- therapy is virtually nonexistent. Consequently, the
contributions to this volume should not be seen as reviews of an extant,
clinical-research literature. Instead, they represent attempts to expand
the more familiar and well-researched province of developmental
psychology into the rel- atively uncharted domain of child psychotherapy
process. In addition to bridging the literature on child psychotherapy
with research perspectives on children's cognitive and social-cognitive
devel- opment, this volume attempts to cross a second gap. Recent
surveys of the utilization of psychotherapy research by practicing
psychotherapists indicate the distance between these two domains is
substantial. Only a small minority of practitioners find psychotherapy
research to be a useful source of information for their practice.
