Expectations

Patients' expectations have long been considered a contributory factor to successful psychotherapy. Expectations come in different guises, with outcome expectations centered on prognostic beliefs about the consequences of engaging in treatment. In this article, we define outcome expectations and present assessment methods and clinical examples of outcome expectations. Our research review includes a comprehensive meta‐analysis (N =8,016 patients across 46 independent samples) of the association between pretherapy or early‐therapy outcome expectations and posttreatment outcomes. The overall weighted effect size was d=.24, p