Re-enforcement and changes in loquacity in group psychotherapy.

Abstract

Recent studies using the concept of verbal conditioning appear to indicate that the talking which one person does can be influenced in particular ways by the responses made to his remarks by another individual. These responses apparently can either increase the frequency of various classes of verbal behavior or decrease them. If verbal conditioning principles are effective in group psychotherapy with seriously dismrbed patients, then they may not only help explain why some persons in a therapy group are more talkative and others more taciturn but may also be useful when employed deliberately to assist patients toward a more desirable level of communication. Two hypotheses were tested in this study. ( 1 ) Patients in group therapy who have received friendly immediate responses to their statements in the first half of any given session, on the average, will talk more in the second half of the same session than do other members who have received less friendly and/or fewer immediate friendly responses earlier. ( 2 ) Friendly or accepting responses by the therapist to patient verbalizations will be more positively re-enforcing than patient responses to other patient verbalizations. Twenty-eight psychotherapy groups from the Denver and Fort Lyon V. A. hospitals2 were observed during a single session by two trained judges using specially devised techniques to assess the friendliness-hostile dimension of the verbalizations and also to assess loquacity of the group members. Seventeen groups yielded reliable interjudge data. These groups conrained 133 patients and 28 therapists ( M of 8 patients per g roup) . Nine judges made observations and ratings. Neither therapists nor patienu were aware of the purpose of the experiment. When data obtained during the first half of the therapy sessions were compared with data obtained during the remainder of the sessions on both dimensions mentioned above as well as the change scores on the stated dimensions, neither hypothesis was confirmed. It was concluded that verbal conditioning techniques may well have serious limitations when utilized over a short time span with seriously disturbed patients in group psychotherapy.