Three Aspects of the Therapeutic Conversation in Couples Therapy

Abstract

Feminist scholars have revealed the importance of examining the influence of gender on the therapeutic process. Gender differences in the treatment of clients may reveal inequitable or traditionally Stereotypie treatment of clients by therapists. This study examined gender differences in three conversational strategies widely used by therapists: expressions of empathy or understanding, compliments or praise, and challenges or requests for change. Fourteen tapes of live therapy sessions conducted by “master” therapists were examined using an exploratory, qualitative methodology based on Conversation Analysis. Results of this exploration revealed that therapists who are not self identified as “feminist challenged female clients more than male clients, and complimented male clients more than female clients. Feminist therapists challenged male clients more than female clients, and complimented female clients more than male clients. Feminist therapists used more challenges designed to facilitate non-stereo-typic gender behavior in both male and female clients. Only male therapists used disrespectful challenges of female clients, and were more often disrespectful to female clients than to male clients. Implications for the therapist-client relationship and the feminist critique are provided.     

Relational Conversation: Meaningful Communication as a Therapeutic Intervention

The author makes a distinction between communication that deepens a relationship and communication that resolves conflict. An approach to therapy, relational conversation, is presented in which meaningful conversation is designed to increase relational fortitude and promote a consistent level of intentional and loving connection. The approach is based on the body of literature that supports the theory that good communication is important to good relating.     

Conversation,relevance, and argumentation

This paper deals with the explanation the maxim of relevance provides for the way utterances in argumentative discourse follow each other in an orderly and coherent fashion. Several senses are distinguished in which utterances can be considered relevant. It is argued that an utterance can be considered relevant as an interactional act, as an illocutionary act, as a propositional act, and as an elocutionary act. These four kinds of relevance manifest the rational organization of discourse, which is aimed at bringing about mutual alignment between the participants, enabling them jointly to work out certain interactional outcomes that are acceptable to both of them.     

Conversation,speech acts,and memory

Speakers frequently have specific intentions that they want others to recognize (Grice, 1957). These specific intentions can be viewed as speech acts (Searle, 1969), and I argue that they play a role in long-term memory for conversation utterances. Five experiments were conducted to examine this idea. Participants in all experiments read scenarios ending with either a target utterance that performed a specific speech act (brag, beg, etc.) or a carefully matched control. Participants were more likely to falsely recall and recognize speech act verbs after having read the speech act version than after having read the control version, and the speech act verbs served as better recall cues for the speech act utterances than for the controls. Experiment 5 documented individual differences in the encoding of speech act verbs. The results suggest that people recognize and retain the actions that people perform with their utterances and that this is one of the organizing principles of conversation memory.     

链接权力关系——马库思·米尔森与尚塔尔·墨菲的对话

2006年12月,伦敦的建筑师、作家马库思·米尔森拜访了政治理论家、政治理论教授尚塔尔·墨菲.在威斯敏斯特的一系列谈话中,他运用他最近的研究--"作为一种替代的空间实践形式(spatial practice)的冲突性与非共识性参与"--作为他的出发点,询问墨菲关于民主生活以及她对她所谓的"矛盾性共识"的理解.     

Conversation,responsibility, and autism spectrum disorder

In this paper, I present a challenge for Michael McKenna’s conversational theory of moral responsibility. On his view, to be a responsible agent is to be able to engage in a type of moral conversation. I argue that individuals with autism spectrum disorder present a considerable problem for the conversational theory because empirical evidence on the disorder seems to suggest that there are individuals in the world who meet all of the conditions for responsible agency that the theory lays out but who are nevertheless not responsible agents. Attending to the moral psychology of such individuals will, I think, help shed light on an important gap in the conversational theory.     

Conversation analysis,cyberpsychology and online interaction

In this paper, I explore how conversation analysis (CA) can be used as a method for analysing online interaction. As the number and quantity of online communication platforms have proliferated, there has been a growing interest in social psychology about the impact and effectiveness of online, text‐based communication. A number of theories have been used and developed to explain how online communication might impact upon relationships and effective communication. However, this paper argues that in order to explore the differences between online and offline interaction an analysis of online behaviour is needed. CA allows for an in‐depth, sequential and discursive analysis of real‐life online interactions. It can explore the ways in which the affordances of the interactional platforms are oriented to or made relevant in the interaction. The utility of CA is demonstrated through a number of examples, highlighting how this method can be used to broaden our understanding of how online communication works in practise.     

A Conversation between Theory,Methods, and Data

The 10 year anniversary of the COGITO Study provides an opportunity to revisit the ideas behind the Cattell data box. Three dimensions of the persons × variables × time data box are discussed in the context of three categories of researchers each wanting to answer their own categorically different question. The example of the well-known speed-accuracy tradeoff is used to illustrate why these are three different categories of statistical question. The 200 persons by 100 variables by 100 occasions of measurement COGITO data cube presents a challenge to integrate theories and methods across the dimensions of the data box. A conceptual model is presented for the speed-accuracy tradeoff example that could account for cross-sectional between persons effects, short-term dynamics, and long-term learning effects. Thus, two fundamental differences between the time axis and the other two axes of the data box include ordering and time scaling. In addition, nonstationarity in human systems is a pervasive problem along the time dimension of the data box. To illustrate, the difference in nonstationarity between dancing and conversation is discussed in the context of the interaction between theory, methods, and data. An information theoretic argument is presented that the theory-methods-data interaction is better understood when viewed as a conversation than as a dance. Entropy changes in the development of a theory-methods-data conversation provide one metric for evaluating scientific progress.     

Gender,Conversation Analysis,and the Anatomy of Membership Categorization Practices

This paper describes and illustrates recent developments in the study of identity using membership categorization and conversation analysis. It focuses particularly on identifying and unpacking some practices through which people construct gender-based categorial phrases and formulations, and how these practices are put to use to accomplish social actions including accounting, complaining, or denying. Drawing on data from a variety of interactional sites, I show how speakers build different categorial practices from particular component features, within or across a sequence of turns, and how they work to formulate idiomatic-style phrases that ‘package’ cultural knowledge (e.g., “that’s lads for you”, “I would never hit a woman”). When speakers produce such phrases, they invite recipients to display recognition of, or collaboratively develop, the construction of a cultures categories, as the basis for moving through courses of action.     

Conversation and conditionals

I outline and motivate a way of implementing a closest world theory of indicatives, appealing to Stalnaker’s framework of open conversational possibilities. Stalnakerian conversational dynamics helps us resolve two outstanding puzzles for a such a theory of indicative conditionals. The first puzzle—concerning so-called ‘reverse Sobel sequences’—can be resolved by conversation dynamics in a theory-neutral way: the explanation works as much for Lewisian counterfactuals as for the account of indicatives developed here. Resolving the second puzzle, by contrast, relies on the interplay between the particular theory of indicative conditionals developed here and Stalnakerian dynamics. The upshot is an attractive resolution of the so-called “Gibbard phenomenon” for indicative conditionals.     

Conversation, gaze coordination, and beliefs about visual context

Conversation is supported by the beliefs that people have in common and the perceptual experience that they share. The visual context of a conversation has two aspects: the information that is available to each conversant, and their beliefs about what is present for each other. In our experiment, we separated these factors for the first time and examined their impact on a spontaneous conversation. We manipulated the fact that a visual scene was shared or not and the belief that a visual scene was shared or not. Participants watched videos of actors talking about a controversial topic, then discussed their own views while looking at either a blank screen or the actors. Each believed (correctly or not) that their partner was either looking at a blank screen or the same images. We recorded conversants' eye movements, quantified how they were coordinated, and analyzed their speech patterns. Gaze coordination has been shown to be causally related to the knowledge people share before a conversation, and the information they later recall. Here, we found that both the presence of the visual scene, and beliefs about its presence for another, influenced language use and gaze coordination.     

Discerning the Relations Between Conversation and Cognition

Although hailing from cognate analytical schools, the contributors to Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter’s edited volume Conversation and Cognition hold a remarkable diversity of views on the nature of “mental states” and their import for the purposes of analyzing naturally occurring interaction. I offer a critical analysis of some of the contributors’ discussions of cognition in social interaction in an effort to clarify some obstinate issues with respect to the meanings of words in our cognitive vocabulary (e.g. “thought” and “realization”) and their identification in analyses of conversation.     

On the Dynamics of Conversation

There is a longstanding debate in the literature about static versus dynamic approaches to meaning and conversation. A formal result due to van Benthem ( 1986 , 1996 ) is often thought to be important for understanding what, conceptually speaking, is at issue in the debate. We introduce the concept of a conversation system, and we use it to clarify the import of van Benthem's result. We then distinguish two classes of conversation systems, corresponding to two concepts of staticness. The first class corresponds to a generalization of the class of systems that van Benthem's result concerns. These are the strongly static conversation systems. The second class is broader, and allows for a certain commonly recognized form of context sensitivity. These are the weakly static conversation systems. In the vein of van Benthem's result, we supply representation theorems which independently characterize these two varieties of conversation system. We observe that some canonically dynamic semantic systems correspond to weakly static conversation systems. We close by discussing some hazards that arise in trying to bring our formal results to bear on natural language phenomena, and on the debate about whether the compositional semantics for natural language should take a dynamic shape.     

Rescuing the Baby from the Bathwater: Continuing the Conversation on Gender, Risk, and Religiosity

In this short response, we selectively address some of the key issues and criticisms raised by our esteemed commenters. First, we clarify our standpoint vis à vis "biological" arguments, underscoring that our article is not to be read as hostile to all forms of explanations that incorporate biology into the explanation of religious behavior and belief, but only against those explanations that attempt to imply that socialization plays no role ("the it's all biology" argument). Second, we defend the explanatory scope of our proposal by showing that our argument is not vulnerable to the "simpler" counterexplanation proposed by Hoffmann. Finally, we contextualize where our contributions fit in terms of more encompassing arguments regarding the operation of gender and gendering processes as multicausal, multilevel phenomena, as well as explicitly stating our perspective on the role that "risk" should play in the explanation of religious behavior and belief.     

Teaching What I'm Not: Embodiment,Race, and Theological Conversation in the Classroom

This article examines the theoretical and practical concerns of a White professor who teaches a course on African American religious thought. It begins with a discussion of what it means to be embodied White, and how that affects the teaching of another embodied reality. From there it moves to the major assignment of the course, the evolutionary essay, and how this assignment facilitates student reflection upon their own embodied existence, particularly in terms of race. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the continuing challenges the author faces when teaching such a course.     

Cooperativity and Selectivity in Conversation

Conversing with others is a mundane, daily activity of nearly all humans, yet it is an extraordinary feat of social collaboration that depends on cooperation, social learning, and collective coordination across an array of caring relationships. This article briefly considers the cooperative and selective nature of language and something of its contributions to the structural, social, and developmental character of human action and cognition. In doing so, it introduces 3 other articles that form a special section of this issue that is a continuation of an earlier special issue (Fowler & Hodges, 2015). The evidence reviewed here points to the possibility that the integrated, synergistic, cooperative character of language may prove to be a particular strength of ecological approaches to cognition and action rather than a liability.