Although psychotherapy has been and continues to be a face-to-face activity primarily, a growing minority of therapists are conducting text-based (i.e. e-mail) psychotherapy over the Internet. This study compared the session impact (measured by the Session Evaluation Questionnaire, SEQ; Stiles, Gordon, & Lani, 2002) and the client-therapist alliance (measured by the Agnew Relationship Measure, ARM; Agnew-Davies, Stiles, Hardy, Barkham, & Shapiro, 1998) of the exchanges between clients and therapists who are engaged in e-mail therapy with previously published results on face-to-face therapy. According to preliminary results, the online clients provided similar session impact and therapeutic alliance ratings compared to face-to-face clients. Although online therapists followed this general trend, they evaluated the depth, smoothness, and positivity aspects of session impact and confidence aspect of therapeutic alliance more highly than face-to-face therapists.

The links between 13 auditory and visual behavioral cues, measured intelligence, and observer judgments of intelligence in a zero-acquaintance context were examined in a lens model study. Auditory-plus-visual, auditory-only, and visual-only information conditions, in addition to a transcript-only control condition, were employed to determine whether auditory or visual cues encode measured intelligence more strongly and which are used more in judgments of intelligence. Five cues (of both types) accounted for nearly half the variance in measured intelligence, but it was much more strongly associated with auditory than visual cues. Observers' judgments of intelligence were also much more strongly related to auditory than visual cues. Visual cues may even depress accuracy; accuracy was higher in an auditoryonly condition than in an auditory-plus-visual condition.

The impact of exchanges and client-therapist alliance of online therapy text exchanges were compared to previously published results in face-to-face therapy, and the moderating effects of four participant factors found significant in previously published face-to-face studies were investigated using statistical mixed-effect modeling analytic techniques. Therapists (N=30) and clients (N=30) engaged in online therapy were recruited from private practitioner sites, e-clinics, online counseling centers, and mental-health-related discussion boards. In a naturalistic design, they each visited an online site weekly and completed the standard impact and alliance questionnaires for at least 6 weeks. Results indicated that the impact of exchanges and client-therapist alliance in text therapy was similar to, but in some respects more positive than, previous evaluations of face-to-face therapy. The significance of participant factors previously found to influence impact and alliance in face-to-face therapy (client symptom severity, social support, therapist theoretical orientation, and therapist experience) was not replicated, except that therapists with the more symptomatic clients rated their text exchanges as less smooth and comfortable. Although its small size and naturalistic design impose limitations on sensitivity and generalizability, this study provides some insights into treatment impact and the alliance in online therapy.

The physical and affective bases of the differences between architects’ and laypersons’ aesthetic evaluations of building facades were examined. Fifty-nine objective features of 42 large modern office buildings were related to ratings of the buildings’ emotional impact and global aesthetic quality made by architects and laypersons. Both groups strongly based their global assessments on elicited pleasure (and not on elicited arousal), but the two groups based their emotional assessments on almost entirely different sets of objective building features, which may help to explain why the aesthetic evaluations of architects and lay persons are virtually unrelated.

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