Session Alliance Research Articles

Mapping Good Therapy Sessions: A Pilot Study of Within-Session Client Affect

The purpose of the present study was to measure client affect over small timescales within therapy sessions, in order to identify affective patterns that might distinguish good versus poor sessions. Toward this end, patterns of affect were observed across 15-s intervals throughout one therapy session for each of four different clients being treated for generalized anxiety disorder using cognitive-behavioral therapy. The primary hypothesis was that during “good” therapy sessions (as defined by high session alliance scores and good therapy outcomes), clients would exhibit a pattern of positive–negative–positive (PNP) affect during the course of the session, reflecting prolonged periods of negative affect consistent with productive therapeutic work, situated between periods of positive feeling. Clients in “poor” sessions were not expected to show this pattern. The findings were consistent with predictions. There was also a non-significant trend suggesting that clients in good sessions demonstrated a greater frequency of very small PNPs—as brief as 45 s—suggesting a potentially greater number of “micro-episodes” of therapeutic work. Implications of the findings are discussed.

"A Special Kind of Courtesy": Action at a Bluegrass Festival Jam Session

Live musical communication is action, and it can be as truly dramatic as any other mode of performance. The bond of music, musicians, and onlookers to each other and to the immediate environment distinguishes live music from mechanically reproduced sound. And when it comes to bluegrass, many connoisseurs assert that recorded bluegrass is hardly bluegrass. Only when the music is acoustic-meaning not even miked-can you get the pure bluegrass experience. Only then can you feel that fiddle goin' right into your ear, as one onlooker once put it. Bluegrass jam sessions provide an opportunity to look at that area of performance which falls between stage performance, where audience and performers are clearly separated, and private rehearsal. Unlike a rehearsal, the jam session is an end in itself, and unlike stage performers, jammers focus on performing with and for each other. While much learning goes on in the jam session setting, the emphasis is on enjoying the music sociably. Though many people come to bluegrass festivals primarily to see the amplified stage show, others use the show as a good excuse to have informal jam sessions in the campground or parking lot. Many from this segment of the festival-going public, both players and listeners, agree, as I was told in Lexington, Kentucky in I984, that jam sessions are about the only reason I come to these. Why do some connoisseurs say that the music is more real at a jam session? Partly because there is a special energy that comes from the anticipation of the unexpected and the unrepeatable within the temporary jam session alliance. Jammers implicitly follow an interactional etiquette which helps to channel this energy into the music. This etiquette is manifested in the conventions that help strangers come together to make music, and it is expressed microcosmically in the choices made while playing. In the jam session context, ethics and musical aesthetics are fused as jammers lear to negotiate guidelines for interaction in order to reach a heightened musical and social communion.