Emotion in humanistic psychotherapy.

Abstract

Humanistic therapies have often been characterized as proposing that getting in touch with one's feelings is the core element of psychological health and change. Although this characterization is an unwanted oversimplification, it is true that awareness of feelings has been a central feature of humanistic therapy. Rogers (1959), for example, defined feeling as an emotionally toned experience with its personal meanings and saw empathic responses to feelings as a central ingredient of therapy. For Rogers, feelings referred to the synthesis of emotion and cognition as they are experienced in the moment, and he proposed early on (Rogers, 1942) that the expression of feelings was therapeutic. He constructed two process measures related to feelings for rating in-session changes: the Feelings and Personal Meanings Scale and the Experiencing Scale. Therapeutic change on these dimensions involved movement from a process that is rigid, static, and unfeeling to one in which feelings are accepted and experienced in an immediate, fluid, and deep fashion (Rogers, 1961). Gendlin (1962, 1974, 1996) viewed feeling as a complex bodily felt sense associated with all meaningful acts. He distinguished between felt experience and "sheer" emotion, viewing emotional expression as clinically less productive than putting a bodily felt sense into words.Perls ( 1973) and the Gestalt psychotherapy movement saw emotion as the force that energized all action. Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman (1951) defined emotion as people's direct evaluative experience of the field that provides knowledge of the objects appropriate to their needs. Perls et al. saw emotion as the integrative awareness of a relation between people and their environment. In this view, emotion integrates bodily action, the 499

Superiority of group counseling to individual coaching for parents of children with learning disabilities

“…Outcomes We expected positive outcomes following both group counseling and individual coaching, based on literature which suggests that any treatment is better than no treatment at all (Flannery-Schroeder & Kendall, 2000;Shechtman, 2004), as well as research that has supported both types of treatment (Boutin, 2007;Elksnin & Elksnin, 2000;Flaherty, 1999;Greenberg, Korman, & Paivio, 2001;Johnson et al, 2005;Shechtman & Gilat, 2005). Differences between treatments were not expected, based on studies that compared individual and group interventions and found, overall, no difference between them (Fuhriman & Burlingame, 1994;Hoag & Burlingame, 1997;McRoberts et al, 1998;Shechtman, 2004).…”

Emotional processes in psychotherapy: evidence across therapeutic modalities

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Emotion in psychotherapy: A practice‐friendly research review

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