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Abstract: The physical spaces in which we conduct psychotherapy are an important yet underacknowledged aspect of psychotherapeutic work. Although a few contemporary publications have provided suggestions for the creation of welcoming, comfortable, and efficient practice spaces, considerations of what it means to transform a room into a therapeutic space have remained largely absent from recent literature. This paper reviews the existing literature on this subject and describes the ways in which the therapist's office is intimately tied to several processes of the therapy itself, by way of creating an adaptive environment that is able to meet the needs of both therapist and client over the course of their work together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on the application of role playing, as a research technique, in a test of Sarbin's self role congruency theory. The present study attempts to provide further confirmation of Sarbin's congruency theory, in this case within a setting analogous to psychotherapy. It was believed that by using Ss who were playing the roles of therapist and clients it would be possible to obtain information relevant to the effects of self-role congruency and incongruency in the psychotherapeutic interaction. A secondary purpose of the study was to provide data on the validity of pencil and paper tests that purport to measure role-playing aptitude. Forty nine male Ss from various undergraduate classes volunteered to role play either a therapist or a client in a half-hour role-playing session designed to simulate psychotherapy.

This article focuses on the usefulness of reception and recall checks in the development and implementation of client pretherapy orientation procedures. Although high scores on such measures do not indicate that the ideas presented in the orientation have been fully grasped or internalized, they do demonstrate that clients have been able to attend to and, in a basic sense, to understand, or receive, the material. Retention of the information can be assessed by readministration at a later point. It is hoped that the employment of manipulation checks of this kind can facilitate the identification of processes through which orientations work.

Abstract: I contend that painting, like psychoanalytic psychotherapy, is an intersubjective process able to connect hearts and minds of painters and viewers alike, because the creative process of making a painting brings painters into more complex and more animated relationship with themselves. My own painting process is largely nonverbal. Interactions between me and my evolving artwork‐in‐process reveal experiences, thoughts, and feelings not yet formulated in words, and so, not available explicitly to conscious awareness until visual representation allows questions of meaning and intention to be thought about and elaborated in the usual, verbal sense. I describe how my particular painting practice provides an experiential frame for the creative process of self‐articulation that goes on in psychotherapy, as well as how the physical and mostly nonverbal dialogue experienced in the painting studio served as a source of listening attitudes and self‐regulation in my work with a patient's inhibited self‐expression and thwarted artistic ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three ideas are discussed from the vantage point of accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP): Quantum changes operate not only in trauma, but also in healing; attachment plays a major role in whether fear or excitement is the response to novelty; experientially exploring the experience of transformation can itself lead to quantum change. Vignettes from an AEDP session show a patient's grappling with the startling novelty of experience that the transformational process, particularly when occurring in quantum leaps, evokes, and illustrate the phenomenology of cascading transformations. They illustrate how the therapist's emotional engagement and attachment orientation, experiential techniques, and metatherapeutic processing activate state transformations and entrain adaptive healing processes. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: In Session 62: 569–583, 2006. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the process and outcome research on emotion in psychotherapy. Four distinct types of emotion processes are identified in the literature as useful in therapy, depending on a client's presenting concerns: emotional awareness and arousal; emotional regulation, active reflection on emotion (meaning making), and emotional transformation. Research findings are summarized to highlight the practical implications of these different emotion processes to psychotherapy. A range of selected treatments from different therapeutic orientations are addressed collectively as different types of emotion-focused, experiential therapies and are compared on the basis of how they work with emotion in session. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: In Session 62: 611–630, 2006. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are very few less contentious issues than the role of attachment in psychotherapy. Concepts such as the therapeutic alliance speak directly to the importance of activating the attachment system, normally in relation to the therapist in individual therapy and in relation to other family members in family-based intervention, if therapeutic progress is to be made. In group therapy the attachment process may be activated by group membership. The past decade of neuroscientific research has helped us to understand some key processes that attachment entails at brain level. The article outlines this progress and links it to recent findings on the relationship between the neural systems underpinning attachment and other processes such as making of social judgments, theory of mind, and access to long-term memory. These findings allow intriguing speculations, which are currently undergoing empirical tests on the neural basis of individual differences in attachment as well as the nature of psychological disturbances associated with profound disturbances of the attachment system. In this article, we explore the crucial paradoxical brain state created by psychotherapy with powerful clinical implications for the maximization of therapeutic benefit from the talking cure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the numerous conceptual, methodological, and ethical problems that are associated with placebo conditions in psychotherapy research, their use should be abandoned, and more powerful therapy outcome designs (dismantling, additive, parametric, and catalytic) that can contribute to basic knowledge through their ability to isolate specific cause-and-effect relationships are recommended. On the other hand, if indeed the placebo effect is a reliable phenomenon, it would be wise to pursue its causal mechanisms, and some research strategies for initiating such pursuit are briefly described. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol 61: 805–818, 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A given type of psychotherapy (e.g., psychodynamic) is associated with a set of specific change techniques (e.g., interpreting defenses, identifying relationship themes). Different change techniques can be conceived of as influencing different parts of personality (e.g., interpreting defense increases conscious awareness). An integrated model of personality is presented. Then, change techniques from different theoretical perspectives are assigned by judges to areas of personality the techniques are believed to influence. The results suggest that specific change techniques can be reliably sorted into the areas of personality. Thinking across theoretical perspectives leads to important new opportunities for assessment, therapy outcome research, and communication with patients concerning personality change. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a special issue on technological developments and applications in clinical psychology and psychotherapy. The question of why it is important to deal with such developments is raised. An overview of the individual topics and articles in the issue is given, and additional aspects are discussed. This is followed by an overview of possible advantages and disadvantages of technological developments as well as problems to be solved. Overall, the developments are still largely underresearched, but—if utilized—hold considerable promise in changing the field of clinical psychology and psychotherapy as well as training in the field. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes to take ELIZA, a computer simulation of psychotherapy, seriously in order to see whether any therapeutic movement can be achieved by interaction with ELIZA. With or without the covariance correction, there remain a surprising number of significant differences. Quite frankly, the writers expected very few differences other than chance, given the normal subjects, highly artificial setting, and the most peculiar method of therapy. ELIZA does seem to have an effect upon subjects. It is fascinating to note that references to family and friends, and references to dreams, are among the least frequent responses on the part of the subjects.

This article focuses on models of therapeutic intervention for the black population. Ethnic minority psychologists sometimes have argued that because of important cultural differences between blacks and whites, traditional methods of psychotherapy are inadequate for black clients. Epidemiological studies that record numbers of patients, types of disorders, and method and length of treatment; analogue studies that consist of more-or-less controlled laboratory investigations of same and differing race interviewer-interviewee interactions; and a small number of outcome studies of actual psychotherapy.

This article presents information on measuring martial happiness. This study was an attempt to explore the influence of dynamic conflict, as conceptualized and measured within a multivariate framework on a measure of expressed marital happiness. The present authors are inclined to view avowed marital happiness as one component of the general phenomenon of avowed happiness. In a review of the measurement and correlates of avowed happiness. The area of objectively measured dynamic conflict as a potential antecedent of expressed happiness is, to our knowledge, a new line of investigation. In as much as a major goal of counseling and psychotherapy has been the uncovering and relief of repressed conflict and some techniques in the service of reduction of such conflict have been developed.

The article presents an ordinal scale developed by the author that has proven useful to assess the expressiveness of both client and psychotherapist. The scale contains seven annotated points with one designated as the least expressive and seven as the most expressive. Behavioral criteria to define scale points were derived from category systems for vocal and lexical expressive styles, while the ordering of points within the scale was done both on the basis of face validity and the empirical findings. Ratings are made from tape recordings of therapy sessions, and both client and therapist responses are rated on the same scale.

The article focuses on the phenomenon of psychotherapy sabotage. Our recent self-disclosure findings have indicated that among clients who were receiving psychotherapy at an interuniversity counseling center there was a tendency to avoid sustained client self-revelation until the final minutes of initial therapy sessions. The therapy upon which this investigation was based was conducted at a large interuniversity college psychological and counseling center that functions as a service, training and research facility. These data revealed that in the middle stages of short-term therapy for a university population clients continue to engage in the highest proportion of self-disclosure during the latter half of the therapy hour.