Therapist's Autonomy Support and Patient's Self-Criticism Predict Motivation during Brief Treatments for Depression

Zuroff et al. (2007) showed that autonomous motivation, defined as the extent to which patients experience participation in treatment as a personally meaningful choice, predicted outcome in a study of 95 depressed outpatients who were randomly assigned to one of three 16-week manualized treatments. Further analyses were undertaken to test hypotheses derived from Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2008a, 2008b). Autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, perceived therapist autonomy support, and depressive severity were assessed at Sessions 3, 8, 13, and posttreatment. Autonomous and controlled motivation displayed both trait and contextual influences and were only moderately correlated with one another. Multilevel modeling was used to separate the predictive influences of within-person and between-person differences. Better treatment response (i.e., lower depressive severity) was predicted positively by between-person and within-person differences in autonomous motivation and inversely by bet...