Abstract
Research on nonverbal synchrony (movement coordination) in psychotherapy has recently attracted increased attention. Nonverbal synchrony has been shown to relate to the therapeutic alliance and outcome. However, research on nonverbal synchrony in couple therapy remains scarce. In this study, we examined the therapy process of one couple in detail and created a coding scheme to depict posture and movement synchrony. In this case study, we found that the relationship between nonverbal synchrony and the therapeutic alliance was complex. During the therapy process, the amount of nonverbal synchrony varied, as did the participants’ evaluations of the alliance. In couple therapy nonverbal synchrony could affect both the persons involved in it and the persons observing it. In one of the sessions, almost all the synchronies occurred between the female client and one of the therapists, and all except the female client evaluated the alliance to be weaker. In this case study, there were two therapists present, and the co-therapists’ synchrony was found to be important for the male client’s evaluations of the alliance. When there was more synchrony between the therapists, he evaluated the alliance to be stronger. Interestingly, the co-therapists’ synchrony seemed to peak in sessions that succeeded sessions with a weaker alliance, as if the therapists were implicitly making a joint effort to strengthen the alliance. A short episode from one session is given to illustrate the findings. Our coding scheme enables studying nonverbal synchrony (posture and movement synchrony) in couple therapy and combining the research results to other temporally precise data obtained from the sessions. More research is needed to validate the method.
Highlights
Nonverbal synchrony is the tendency of participants to implicitly synchronize their behaviors to each other during interaction
The relationship between posture and movement synchrony to the therapeutic alliance was calculated by calculating bootstrapped confidence intervals (95%) for the nonparametric correlations between the nonverbal synchrony behaviors per subject and alliance measurements of the session (SRS)
Our interest was to see whether these nonverbal synchrony behaviors, which have been shown to have an impact on relationships, affected the participants’ evaluations of the therapeutic alliance in couple therapy
Summary
Nonverbal synchrony is the tendency of participants to implicitly synchronize their behaviors to each other during interaction. The Gerontology Research Center, Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland. Faculty of Social Sciences/Psychology, University of Tampere, 33014 Tampere, Finland synchrony, interpersonal synchrony, mimicry, matching, alignment, etc.), and in different contexts, including psychotherapy (Altmann et al 2019; Ramseyer and Tschacher 2011). Nonverbal synchrony has been shown to be related to the therapeutic outcome: the more synchrony there is between therapist and patient, the better the outcome (Ramseyer and Tschacher 2011). Earlier research has shown that there is more nonverbal synchrony in sessions that the therapists or an outside expert evaluate to be of high quality (Nagaoka and Komori 2008)
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