Sverre Johnson

Sverre Urnes Johnson is a clinical psychologist whose work focuses on how psychological treatments can be made more effective and why change occurs in psychotherapy. He is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, and leads the research group Complexity in Treatment Outcome in Psychopathology and Epidemiology (COPE). His research centers on the treatment of anxiety disorders and depression, metacognitive therapy, the relationship between mechanisms and outcome in psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioural therapy, applications of complex systems theory to mental disorders, and the development of actionable clinical theories. He has a strong interest in quantitative methods and expertise in multilevel modelling and network analysis, and serves as main or co-supervisor on PhD projects examining treatment outcomes and mechanisms from a network perspective in areas such as personalised treatment using EMA, medically unexplained physical symptoms (MUPS), scalable interventions in mental health, and comparisons of the effectiveness of group versus individual treatment for anxiety disorders.

Professor Johnson has led and leads several large-scale, externally funded research projects on common mental disorders, often in collaboration with international partners. He founded and directed national longitudinal studies on mental health during the COVID‑19 pandemic and other societal crises. His work has been recognized with awards such as the Bjørn Christensen Memorial Prize from the Norwegian Psychological Association and the Gordon Johnsen Memorial Lecture Recognition from Modum Bad. Clinically, he is an accredited supervisor in cognitive therapy and a level 2 therapist in metacognitive therapy. His overarching goal is to develop more precise, mechanism-focused and personalised psychological treatments for common mental disorders, informed by rigorous clinical research and innovative statistical methods.