135 research outputs found
Managing distress over time in psychotherapy : guiding the client in and through intense emotional work
Clients who seek psychotherapeutic treatment have had personal experiences involving some form of distress. Although research has shown that the client's ability to experience and express painful emotions during therapy can have a therapeutic benefit, it has also been argued that displaying distress may convey a form of helplessness and vulnerability, and thus, clients may be reluctant to cast themselves in this light. Using the methods of conversation analysis, this paper explores how a client's upsetting experience is managed over the course of a single session of client-centered therapy. The main analytic focus will be on (1) the different therapist practices used to orient to the client's distress, (2) the varying forms of client opposition to the therapist's attempts to work with the distress, and (3) the context sensitivity of orienting to distress and how certain practices may be uniquely shaped by what had occurred in prior talk. It was found that, whereas certain types of therapist responses tended to be endorsed by the client, others were forcefully rejected as inappropriate displays of understanding or empathy. By focusing on repeated sequential episodes over time in which a client conveys distress, followed by the therapist's response, this paper sheds light on the interactional trajectory through which a client and therapist are able to resolve impasses to emotional exploration and to successfully secure extended and intense emotional work
Generic and rhetorical structures of texts : two sides of the same coin?
Two major approaches to textual macro-structures have been developed during the last decades: Register & Genre Theory (R>) and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Both stress that textual structures co-occur with contextual relations involving social action and subject matter, role structure and symbolic organization. The approaches, however, significantly differ in their conceptions of textual organization. Whereas R> conceives of texts as goal-oriented staged (i.e. linearly progressing, while still allowing for prosodic and recursive realizations of stages) interactions, RST conceptualises them as hierarchically structured entities in which certain elements are foregrounded (nuclei) and others are backgrounded (satellites); Based on empirical analyses of Viennese university students' essays, we will discuss in what ways generic and rhetorical organizations of texts relate to each other and what advances a combination of these two approaches may offer for text analysis and text linguistics. Through such a combinatory approach to analyzing texts, it becomes possible to identify systematic patterns of textual features in context (using R>) and culturally influenced, semantic coherence relations (using RST). Central to our discussion are issues involving the relation between hierarchical versus linear perspectives on text organization and the relation between cohesion and coherence
A longitudinal study of repair strategies in primary progressive aphasia using conversation analysis
Resisting wh-questions in business coaching
IntroductionThis study investigates clientsâ resisting practices when reacting to business coachesâ wh-questions. Neither the sequential organization of questions nor client resistance to questions have yet been (thoroughly) investigated for this helping professional format. Client resistance is understood as a sequentially structured, locally emerging practice that may be accomplished in more passive or active forms, that in some way withdraw from, oppose, withstand or circumvent various interactional constraints (e.g., topical, epistemic, deontic, affective) set up by the coachâs question.Procedure and methodsDrawing on a corpus of systemic, solution-oriented business coaching processes and applying Conversation Analysis (CA), the following research questions are addressed: How do clients display resistance to answering coachesâ wh-questions? How might these resistive actions be positioned along a passive/active, implicit/explicit or withdrawing/opposing continuum? Are certain linguistic/interactional features commonly used to accomplish resistance?.Results and discussionThe analysis of four dyadic coaching processes with a total of eleven sessions found various forms of client resistance on the active-passive continuum, though the more explicit, active, and agentive forms are at the center of our analysis. According to the existing resistance âaction terminologyâ (moving away vs. moving against), moving against or âopposingâ included ârefusing to answerâ, âcomplainingâ and âdisagreeing with the questionâs agenda and presuppositionsâ. However, alongside this, the analysis evinced clientsâ refocusing practices to actively (and sometimes productively) transform or deviate the course of action; a category which we have termed moving around
Discursive angles on the relationship in psychotherapy
Research on the psychotherapy relationship has been dominated by quantitative-statistical paradigms that focus on relationship elements and their (evidence-based) effectiveness regarding the psychotherapy process. In this mini review, we complement this existing line of research with a discursive-interactional view that focuses on how the relationship is accomplished between therapists and clients. Our review highlights some of the main studies that use micro-analytic, interactional methods to explore relationship construction of the following elements: Affiliation, cooperation (Alignment), empathy and Disaffiliation-Repair. We not only provide a summary of important discursive work that provides a unique lens on how the relationship may be established and maintained, but also suggest that this kind of micro-analytic approach can offer more nuanced conceptualizations of the relationship by showing how different elements work together in a synergistic manner
Empathic reflections by themselves are not effective: Meta-analysis and qualitative synthesis
Objective: We present a mixed methods systematic review of the effectiveness of therapist empathic reflections, which have been adopted by a range of approaches to communicate an understanding of client communications and experiences.
Methods: We begin with definitions and subtypes of empathic reflection, drawing on relevant research and theory, including conversation analysis. We distinguish between empathic reflections, reviewed here, and the relational quality of empathy (reviewed in previous meta-analyses). We look at how empathic reflections are assessed and present examples of successful and unsuccessful empathic reflections, also providing a framework of the different criteria used to assess their effectiveness (e.g., association with session or treatment outcome, or client next-turn good process).
Results: In our meta-analysis of 43 samples, we found virtually no relation between presence/absence of empathic reflection and effectiveness, both overall and separately within-session, post-session and post-treatment. Although not statistically significant, we did find weak support for reflections of change talk and summary reflections.
Conclusions: We argue for research looking more carefully at the quality of empathy sequences in which empathic reflections are ideally calibrated in response to empathic opportunities offered by clients and sensitively adjusted in response to client confirmation/disconfirmation. We conclude with training implications and recommended therapeutic practices
- âŠ