Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy in the Cross-Cultural Context: An Extension of the Standard Paradigm from Individual to Country/Culture Level—A Brief Introduction into a New Research Line

Cognitive-behavioral therapy is the golden standard for personalized evidence-based psychological interventions. The standard unit of analysis in CBT is the individual and/or small groups (e.g., couples, families, organizations). In a seminal book, Beck (Prisoners of Hate: The cognitive basis of anger, hostility, and violence, Harper Collins, New York, 2000) argued that the standard CBT paradigm should be extended to approach large societal problems (e.g., terrorism/violence). However, in this extension, most of the time, the unit of analysis is still the individual, but immersed in larger societal networks. In this article, we propose a major extension of the standard CBT paradigm in the cross-cultural context, using countries/cultures as units of analysis. In an era of globalization, when countries interact more and more with each other, and immigration has become a major world issue, such an extension can have an important practical and theoretical impact.