Power Management

Program Description

The Power Management Program (PM) is an online didactic, diagnostic, and therapeutic emotional education resource. Combining narrative and creative prompts, CBT tasks, and psychodynamic theory in a responsive web-based format, the program guides users to learn about themselves, gain insight into behavioral patterns, and initiate the process of meaningful growth. The program is titled Power Management because it is designed to help users improve how they deal with power, learning how to effectively manage emotional response patterns. PM cultivates creative thinking, empowering users to gain self-understanding by interpreting their own stories. PM’s real-time feedback assists users in deciphering their unique patterns, while also helping them identify how to change. PM is a useful intake measure for counseling clients, standalone mental health first aid, and emotional education tool in the classroom. It serves as a pragmatic case record for clinicians, educators, and facilitators. PM’s length is flexible, easily tailored to individual users or specific contexts. As the intervention is online, user-directed, and automatically scored, PM avoids the costs and time required for delivery and scoring of conventional assessment. PM automatically provides a nuanced case formulation and facilitates therapeutic benefits, jumpstarting the therapeutic process, propelling insight, growth, and deepening the therapeutic relationship.

Creativity

Power Management (PM) presents the first online client-led psychotherapeutic assessment. Without needing a clinician’s involvement, PM leads users through the diagnostic process, provides real-time supportive feedback, and facilitates the progression of personal growth. PM incorporates a diverse range of assessment and therapeutic modalities, including multiple-choice questionnaires, CBT-based tasks, narrative writing, expressive drawing, and psychodynamic guided self-analysis. Users are provided feedback that highlights relational and behavioral patterns and pinpoints areas of intensity. Unlike other intervention models, PM uses tools that offer both diagnostic precision and therapeutic benefit. PM jumpstarts the therapeutic process, bypassing the intake session, a time associated with highest client dropout. As PM is accessible online and does not need an attending assessor, it reduces intervention costs, while expanding services. As PM is wellness-based, it provides an empowering and non-stigmatizing resource for clinics, schools and the broader community.

Leadership

Based on 30 years of clinical research, PM was introduced online in 2015 and to date has been completed by more than 400 individuals. Last year it was first used in a hospital setting as a resource for oncology patients seeking additional mental health resources. PM now is offered in long, medium, and brief formats, and can easily be customized for specific audiences. In addition to offering technological innovation, PM presents a theoretical innovation, offering a new wellness-based psychotherapeutic model. PM premises that behavior can be better understood through examining syndromes rather than symptoms. Using physics to measure these patterns, PM evaluates the dialectics of dealing with stress, using diagnostic criteria based on patterns of conflict resolution. Shifting away from frequently stigmatizing illness-based diagnosis, PM helps people recognize their personal patterns and then guides them to start optimizing these patterns.

Sustainability

PM is based on easily adaptable software. Once customized for a specific audience, i.e., schools or hospitals, the program functions seamlessly, providing resources for users and professionals alike. As part of the continued development of PM, its theoretical and technological aspects are constantly being updated based upon research findings. As a way to refine PM’s theoretical orientation, larger and more sample sizes are necessary. As a way to improve PM’s technological efficacy, we plan to integrate more therapeutic tools and measure which ones now being used work best and for which audiences. We also plan to utilize new feedback mechanisms, using machine learning and bioinformatics to help users get the most possible out of the experience. A brief version is offered free online, in addition to the full-length paid version. Thus far PM has been funded through the Museum of the Creative Process, Rutland Hospital, and Boston University research grants.

Replicability

PM is accessible online and can easily be duplicated and modified for specific audiences. Depending on the needs of the intended audience, PM can be designed to be longer or shorter, offer more or less theoretical information, creativity exercises, feedback information, and outcome measures. Options are available to select forwarding email addresses and degrees of anonymity. The PM research team implements modifications and monitors the program, updating the service as necessary. Versions of PM have been designed and evaluated with elementary school students, business executives, school board facilitators, college students, and clinical clients, in addition to the broader public.

Results/Outcomes

Developed over 30 years of research (Levis, A., 1988), PM has been subject to robust psychometric analyses and RCT outcome studies (n = 47, n = 33, n = 120, n = 50). When evaluated over time, users rated PM as significantly more therapeutically useful (F(2,96) = 9.15, p < .000, partial η2 = .16) and diagnostically accurate (F(2,96) = 7.94, p = .001, partial η2 = .14) than other widely used client-led interventions (Levis, M., 2017). PM’s personality inventory, the Relational Modality Evaluation Scale (RMES), showed strong test-retest reliability (r = .84, p < .000) and construct validity with other assessments (BFI-10, IIP-CS). Unlike these other assessments, RMES is wellness-based, includes supportive feedback, and details change models. Users overwhelmingly rated PM’s creativity tasks as being personally relevant, insightful, and motivating changes. Users indicated that they particularly resonated with PM’s ease of use, meaningful orientation, detailed feedback, and non-stigmatizing emphasis.