Affective relationship patterns and psychotherapeutic change

Bänninger-Huber, Eva; Widmer, Christine

doi:10.1093/ptr/9.1.74

Cited by 24 publications

(23 citation statements)

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“…Depressive patients use this communicative action less frequently during the initial phase of therapy, although they apply it more during the final phase. This result is consistent with the assumption that therapeutic work on specific contents is not only connected with certain emotional expressions and the construction of new meanings, but also with the patients' feeling of being understood by their therapists (Bänninger-Huber & Widmer, 1999;Popp-Baier, 2001). In other words, it is not enough to work on new perspectives using complex interventions during the therapeutic conversation, because patients increasingly demand moments of meeting or empathic understanding (Ávila, 2005;Gabbard et al, 1994;Mitchell & Black, 2004;Rubino, Barker, Roth, & Fearon, 2000;Stern, 2004), in which the use of verbalizations in order to attune may reflect a depressive patient's need of the emotional empathy required for working at a therapeutically deeper level -to have a more relevant impact on therapeutic outcome, which is also strong enough to persist for a longer period than in interventions that only involve the cognitive domain (Orlinsky & Howard, 1987).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Verbal expressions used by anaclitic and introjective patients with depressive symptomatology: Analysis of change and stuck episodes within therapeutic sessions

Valdés

Krause

2015

Clínica y Salud

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A person's speech makes it possible to identify significant indicators which reflect certain characteristics of his/her personality organization, but also can vary depending on the relevance of specific moments of the session and the symptoms type. The present study analyzed 10 completed and successful therapeutic processes using a mixed methodology. The therapies were video-and audio-taped, as well as observed through a one-way mirror by trained observers. All the sessions of each therapy were considered (N = 230) in order to identify, delimit, transcribe, and analyze Change Episodes (CEs = 24) and Stuck Episodes (SEs = 26). Each episode was made up by patients' speech segments (N = 1,282), which were considered as the sampling unit. The Therapeutic Activity Coding System (TACS-1.0) was used to manually code each patient's verbalizations, nested within episodes and individuals, in order to analyze them using Hierarchical Linear Modelling (HLM). The findings suggest that anaclitic patients tend to use more verbalizations in order to ask for feedback or to be understood by their therapists (attune), whereas introjective patients tend to use more verbalizations in order to construct new meanings (resignify) during therapeutic conversation, but especially during SEs. Clinical implications to enrich the therapeutic practice are discussed.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Verbal expressions used by anaclitic and introjective patients with depressive symptomatology: Analysis of change and stuck episodes within therapeutic sessions

Valdés

Krause

2015

Clínica y Salud

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“…It is conceivable that certain kinds of psychopathology are, in fact, associated with certain patterns (e.g., general reductions) of facial expressivity, but that these effects are too subtle to be noticed by lay observers, like the ones that were used in the present study. However, such patterns may still influence interpersonal interactions without the interacting persons being aware of it (Bänninger‐Huber & Widmer, 1999; Benecke et al, 2005).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A longitudinal study of emotional experience, expressivity, and psychopathology in psychotherapy inpatients and psychologically healthy persons

2010

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The authors investigated changes of emotional experience and expressivity in 34 inpatients undergoing psychodynamic therapy and in 29 healthy persons who were assessed at parallel time intervals. Participants completed 2 measures of psychopathology (Symptom Checklist-90 Revised and Inventory of Interpersonal Problems-64) and took part in relationship episode interviews. The emotional experiences they reported and their nonverbal emotional expressivity during the interviews were assessed by independent raters. Regardless of when they were assessed, the patients reported a greater number of emotions and a greater variety of emotions. Psychopathology in the patient group decreased in the course of treatment, but there were no systematic changes in the emotional domain. The findings challenge the common notion of psychopathology being associated with impaired awareness and expression of emotions.

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“…Fuchs and Koch () described how body movements appear to be connected to emotions and to the relational situation, and noted how this may become visible in psychotherapy. Bänninger‐Huber and Widmer () examined repetitive affective relationship patterns in the context of specific emotions (of guilt) enacted in ongoing psychoanalytic therapy. They developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) of Ekman and Friesen ().…”

Section: Rhythmic Attunement In Psychotherapymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Embodied Attunement of Therapists and a Couple within Dialogical Psychotherapy: An Introduction to the Relational Mind Research Project

et al. 2015

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In dialogical practice, therapists seek to respond to the utterances of clients by including in their own response what the client said. No research so far exists on how, in dialogs, therapists and clients attune themselves to each other with their entire bodies. The research program The Relational Mind is the first to look at dialog in terms of both the outer and the inner dialogs of participants (clients and therapists), observed in parallel with autonomic nervous system (ANS) measurements. In the ANS, the response occurs immediately, even before conscious thought, making it possible to follow how participants in a multiactor dialog synchronize their reactions and attune themselves to each other. The couple therapy case presented in this article demonstrates how attunement is often not a simple "all at the same time" phenomenon, but rather a complex, dyadic or triadic phenomenon which changes over time. In the case presented, there was strong synchrony between one therapist and one client in terms of their arousal level throughout the therapy session. It was also observed that high stress could occur when someone else was talking about something related to the participant, or if that person mirrored the participant's words. Overall, it seems that in evaluating the rhythmic attunement between therapists and clients it is not enough to look at single variables; instead, integrated information from several channels is needed when one is seeking to make sense of the embodiment.

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Affective relationship patterns and psychotherapeutic change

Cited by 24 publications

References 0 publications

Verbal expressions used by anaclitic and introjective patients with depressive symptomatology: Analysis of change and stuck episodes within therapeutic sessions

Verbal expressions used by anaclitic and introjective patients with depressive symptomatology: Analysis of change and stuck episodes within therapeutic sessions

A longitudinal study of emotional experience, expressivity, and psychopathology in psychotherapy inpatients and psychologically healthy persons

The Embodied Attunement of Therapists and a Couple within Dialogical Psychotherapy: An Introduction to the Relational Mind Research Project

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