Core Transformation Research

In the 2026 study, the research team compared Core Transformation's results with findings from three recent meta-analyses covering 82 studies and 5,399 participants. These transdiagnostic treatments required 8-40 hours of treatment. Treatment time was substantially shorter for CT, which used either one 45-120 minute session or two 90-minute sessions.

Among the approaches included in the three meta-analyses, the Unified Protocol (UP), a transdiagnostic cognitive behavioral therapy approach, performed the best. Despite requiring fewer sessions, CT compared favorably with the UP. Let’s look at the details:

For positive and negative affect, the results of CT after 1-2 sessions were comparable to the results reported for the Unified Protocol after 15 sessions. 

For depression and anxiety, the results of 1-2 CT sessions were not as large as the results reported for the Unified Protocol after 15 sessions. Important to note here is that the CT study participants were community samples, and the 2026 study specifically asked participants to choose  a "mild" to "medium" issue to work with. This means the baseline depression and anxiety scores were already relatively low in the CT studies–meaning less room for improvement. The comparator studies included clinical populations with specific anxiety-spectrum complaints, leaving more room for improvement on depression and anxiety measures.

This difference in populations prompted the 2026 researchers to look at the subgroup of 44 participants from the 2019 study who were likely to qualify for a clinical diagnosis before treatment. This sub-group got significantly better results than the group as a whole, with much larger effect sizes on all measures. This indicates that Core Transformation is likely to perform much better with clinical populations.

Across the published studies, Core Transformation has consistently produced significant reductions in symptom measures like depression, anxiety, and stress, and significant improvements in well-being measures.

Of particular importance is the 2026 study, which shows that the manualized CT process can be transferred to other practitioners–not practitioners selected for their high level of skill, but the full cohort trained that year. The 2026 results indicate that CT is a highly transferable skill, and further studies (2021-2024) still unpublished, show similar results.

This matters because of what psychological research calls the "replication crisis:" a new method often produces an impressive pilot study that generates excitement, but larger follow-up studies — using more practitioners with more people — fail to reproduce the results.

One explanation: the pilot was delivered by someone unusually skilled — often the method's own charismatic developer. If the method itself is what works, though, other practitioners should get similar results once trained. When they don't, it suggests the original provider's effectiveness didn't transfer. (Another possibility: the pilot's results were a fluke of its small sample size.)