Three recent meta-analyses have made the claim, albeit with some caveats, that cognitive-behavioral treatments (CBT) are superior to other psychotherapies, in general or for specific disorders (e.g., social phobia).
The purpose of the present article was to examine four issues in meta-analysis that mitigate claims of CBT superiority: (a) effect size, power, and statistical significance, (b) focusing on disorder-specific symptom measures and ignoring other important indicators of psychological functioning, (c) problems inherent in classifying treatments provided in primary studies into classes of treatments, and (d) the inclusion of problematic trials, which biases the results, and the exclusion of trials that fail to find differences among treatments.
When these issues are examined, the effects demonstrating the superiority of CBT are small, nonsignificant for the most part, limited to targeted symptoms, or are due to flawed primary studies.
Meta-analytic evidence for the superiority of CBT in the three meta-analysis are nonexistent or weak.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 31. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 12 December 2025.
All research outputs
#1,543,887
of 32,221,736 outputs
Outputs from Psychotherapy Research
#36
of 856 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#23,674
of 437,168 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Psychotherapy Research
#3
of 18 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 32,221,736 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 95th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 856 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 8.7. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 95% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 437,168 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 94% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 18 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 83% of its contemporaries.
