Studying the Therapeutic Process by Observing Clinicians' In-Session Behaviour.

This paper presents a further step in the use and validation of a systematic, functional-analytic method of describing psychologists' verbal behaviour during therapy. We observed recordings from 92 clinical sessions of 19 adults (14women and 5men of Caucasian origin, with ages ranging from 19 to 51 years) treated by nine cognitive-behavioural therapists (eight women and one man, Caucasian as well, with ages ranging from 25 to 48 years). The therapists' verbal behaviourwas codified and then classified according to its possible functionality. A cluster analysis of the data, followed by a discriminant analysis, showed that the therapists' verbal behaviour tended to aggregate around four types of session differentiated by their clinical objective (assessment, explanation, treatment and consolidation). These results confirm the validity of our method and enable us to further describe clinical phenomena by distinguishing psychologists' classes of clinically relevant activities. Specific learningmechanismsmay be responsible for clinical change within each class. These issues should be analysed more closely when explaining therapeutic phenomena and when developing more effective forms of clinical intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]