The goal of the study was to develop a computer-aided system that is able to identify key moments in transcripts from psychoanalytic sessions and to provide an adequate theory of change. The term key moment refers to 1 or more sessions of a treatment or to segments of a session that are seen as clinically important and often considered to be a turning point or breakthrough and that mirror points of insight as they occur in the course of the psychotherapeutic process. It will be shown that patterns built of combinations of the content analysis variable "emotion tone" and "abstraction" allow for describing therapeutic cycles including key moments. The method is shown successfully for a single case and for a sample of improved and not improved patients.

No abstract

The resonating minds theory will be introduced as a means to describe psychotherapeutic processes and change. It builds on the mind-brain interface with psychotherapeutic interventions causing change in the brain, an altered brain causes changes in the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral regulation, and this again will change the types of subsequent therapeutic interventions. For the empirical assessment of this theory the therapeutic cycles model will be used. It is based on computer assisted analysis of verbatim transcripts using emotional tone, abstraction and narrative style as language measures. Sample applications and studies are shortly presented in order to provide evidence for the applicability and face validity of this approach.

The objective of this study was to develop a computer assisted procedure to model the Referencial Activity scales as scored by raters. Referential Activity is defined as the function of connecting non-verbal experience with language. Using a large text corpus that had been rated by experienced and reliable judges, extreme samples from both ends of the Referential Activity Scales were selected. The Characteristic Vocabularies for each of these corpora, words that were significantly more frequent in each corpus as compared to the other, were then identified. A small set of 181 frequent words was derived that accounted for half of all words in the text corpora. These words were used as dictionaries for a Computerized Referential Activity measure based on computer assisted content analysis techniques. The new measure showed a correlation with judge-scored Referential Activity of around .50 across both the development and test corpora.

Research in psychotherapy has shown that the frequency of use of specific classes of words (such as terms with emotional valence) in descriptions of scenes of affective relevance is a possible indicator of psychological affective functioning. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we investigated the neural correlates of these linguistic markers in narrative texts depicting core aspects of emotional experience in human interaction, and their modulation by individual differences in the propensity to use these markers. Emotional words activated both lateral and medial aspects of the prefrontal cortex, as in previous studies of instructed emotion regulation and in consistence with recruitment of effortful control processes. However, individual differences in the spontaneous use of emotional terms in characterizing the stimulus material were prevalently associated with modulation of the signal in the perigenual cortex, in the retrosplenial cortex and precuneus, and the anterior insula/ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Modulation of signal by the presence of these textual markers or individual differences mostly involved areas deactivated by the main task, thus further differentiating neural correlates of these appraisal styles from those associated with effortful control. These findings are discussed in the context of reports in the literature of modulations of deactivations, which suggest their importance in orienting attention and generation of response in the presence of emotional information. These findings suggest that deactivations may play a functional role in emotional appraisal and may contribute to characterizing different appraisal styles.