Abstract
Our study examined in-session affect regulation as a self-regulatory process as well as a process of interpersonal regulation during the psychoanalytical therapeutic session. We used a novel approach for studying affective involvement by analyzing narrative perspective (NP) taken by client and analyst. In a longitudinal study of 18 months we observed the interaction of one client—therapist dyad during the psychoanalytic session in the early and working phases of psychotherapy. Transcribed sessions were segmented into intonation units, and participants’ use of NP was then coded for each intonation unit line based on six linguistic variables shown to signal affective involvement in earlier studies: verb tense, subject number and person, diegesis, focalization, and discourse level. We found that affective involvement on the part of both speakers was higher at the working phase. The client’s involvement was higher than the therapist’s. We describe an affect-regulation cycle characteristic of the interaction. Our approach proves to be useful in analyzing regulation of affective involvement and its long term change. Differences were detectable in the self and interactive regulatory strategies of affective involvement.
Highlights
Affect regulation in the psychotherapeutic setting has been linked to effective treatment outcomes (Bradley, 2003; Sloan & Kring, 2007; Watson, McMullen, Prosser, & Bedard, 2011) in various forms of psychotherapies
The goal of our study was to introduce a novel method for studying regulation of affective involvement in psychoanalytical psychotherapy, and show its usefulness of application by examining regulation of affective involvement in two psychoanalytic sessions taking place 1.5 years apart
We defined affect regulation as the capability to process, modulate, and express affective experience (Watson et al, 2011) and we argued that studying verbatim transcripts of therapeutic sessions allows for identification of narrative structures that have different levels of affective involvement; shifting between these levels reflects a regulation of affective involvement
Summary
Affect regulation in the psychotherapeutic setting has been linked to effective treatment outcomes (Bradley, 2003; Sloan & Kring, 2007; Watson, McMullen, Prosser, & Bedard, 2011) in various forms of psychotherapies. In-session affect regulation has been measured based on verbatim transcriptions of the therapeutic session–among other methods — showing that affectively rich and less emotional but rather abstract, Department of Developmental and Clinical Child Psychology, Pázmány Péter. Affective involvement and regulation strategies of client and therapist may change from the beginning of treatment over time, predicting, for example, emotional processing during working phases of therapy as well as outcome (Watson et al, 2011; Berking et al, 2008). We show how change in regulation of affective involvement can be assessed in the talk of one client-therapist dyad at two therapy sessions taking place 18 months apart, one from the beginning, and one from the working phase of treatment. We compare sessions by analyzing shifts in narrative perspective (NP) of the speakers
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