Prototypical Affective Microsequences in Psychotherapeutic Interaction

Client Attitudinal Stance and Therapist-Client Affiliation: A View from Grammar and Social Interaction

“…Thus, when the client talks through her experiences in this way, it is part of a process of negotiation, a 'back and forth' interaction that involves the therapist's responses as key elements in the expansion of talk. Furthermore, these responses do not necessarily add to the attitudinal content of the talk-they may be minimal or even non-verbal in nature and thus work primarily as affiliative devices; non-verbal displays have also been shown to be especially significant in the psychotherapy context (Bänninger-Huber, 1992, 1996, particularly with respect to achieving strong affectual bonds between therapist and client.…”

“…Some work is already being prepared for publication . Finally, although we have already considered many of the linguistic and non-verbal resources (e.g., nodding) that play a deciding role in stance construction and securing affiliation around stance, we plan to devote our attention to other resources such as facial expressions and vocalizations such as laughter (see Bänninger-Huber, 1992;Ruusuvuori & Peräkylä, 2009). Our general aims for this work are to further our understanding about important aspects of the therapist-client relationship and, on a more practical note, to help therapists to reflect on their practices in terms of how certain actions (verbal and nonverbal)-in certain contexts at specific locations within the interaction-may be more successful at achieving affiliation with their clients.…”

Affective Relationship Patterns and Psychotherapeutic Change

“…For the interpretation of these observations, theoretical and empirical knowledge from psychoanalysis and emotion psychology is combined. The result of the application of this method is a sophisticated "process-model" of the affective regulatory processes occurring in the investigated sequences (Banninger-Huber, 1992;Banninger-Huber & v. Salisch, 1994). The analyzed sequences usually last about 10 to 30 seconds.…”

Working to keep aligned in psychotherapy

“…This type of transcription includes a specific description of the prosodic details of speech (i.e., hesitations, laughter, voice quality, intonation) that are important for a thorough and revealing analysis of the manner in which utterances are realized and the sequential placements of utterances. 'Extra-linguistic' information (i.e., silence, gesture, gaze, nodding, body movement, facial expression), which is an essential resource for communication and social alignment (Bänninger-Huber 1992;Kendon 2004;Stivers 2008;Muntigl & Hadic Zabala 2008), was included in the transcription to display how alignment or disalignment was interactionally managed between the speakers; focus was placed on providing a detailed description of both the location of the extra-linguistic feature in the interactional sequence and its individual quality. The variation in nodding quality is described by drawing from a set of semiotic criteria to portray the manner in which a nod is produced.…”

“…In psychotherapy contexts, the sequential organization of laughter and facial expressions has been shown to play an important role in affective regulation (Bänninger-Huber 1992). Other non-verbal resources such as nodding have been shown to perform valuable interpersonal work in everyday conversations and in storytelling contexts (Kita & Ide 2007;Stivers 2008).…”