Analysis of Verbal Emotional Expression in Change Episodes and Throughout the Psychotherapeutic Process: Main Communicative Patterns Used to Work on Emotional Contents

Abstract

Three main Communicative Patterns (CPs) are used to work on emotional content during Change Episodes: Affective exploration, Affective attunement and Affective resignification. Each of these patterns reveals a particular formal structure used to express a communicative purpose about such emotional contents (Valdés, Tomicic, Krause, & Espinosa, 2011b). Objective: To analyze the trajectory of the main CPs within Change Episodes, and throughout the different phases of the psychotherapeutic process. Method: The Therapeutic Activity Coding System (TACS-1.0) was used to analyze both patients´ and therapists´ verbal expressions in Change and Stuck Episodes identified within two individual psychodynamic psychotherapies. The results showed significant differences in the trajectory of the different patterns depending, not only on the role of the participant and the episode type, but also depending on the stage of the episode and the phase of the psychotherapeutic process.