Positive Affect Treatment for Adolescents with Early Life Adversity

PAT includes 15 weekly, 1-hour sessions. The treatment is composed of three modules targeting behaviors (Sessions 1-7), cognitions (Sessions 8 -10), and compassion (Sessions 11-14), with skills being reinforced in a cumulative manner in subsequent sessions. The final session in the original treatment (Session 15) addressed relapse prevention, which will be adapted to focus on further reinforcing and generalizing learned skills. The treatment includes guided activities that target different aspects of positive affectivity such as reward approach-motivation, reward learning, and reward attainment.

Supportive psychotherapy provides a time, attention, and social support control that is similar to a placebo but likely to be perceived as relevant to this population.