A meditation on the nature of self‐healing and personality change in psychotherapy based on Gendlin's theory of experiencing

Abstract

From a humanistic point of view psychotherapy is a creative transformational process in which therapists assist clients’ intrinsic self‐healing tendencies. However the nature of the self‐healing process is poorly understood. I briefly consider two theories of self‐healing, Rogers’ self‐actualization theory and dialectical theory, but focus on Gendlin's theory of experiencing as providing a more complete explanation. I consider the fundamentally implicational nature of change and portray personal change as “paradigm evolution” rather than paradigm revolution. I conclude with an examination of the self‐healing process in therapies that provide minimal prosthetic assistance to the client: client‐centered therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and focusing‐oriented therapy. I conclude that the self‐healing/self‐change process occurs when intellectual, “top‐down” cognitive and self‐critical activity is interrupted, and when clients adopt a receptive, listening attitude towards inner experience.     

Transformational leadership and task cohesion in sport: The mediating role of intrateam communication

ObjectivesLittle is known about the mechanisms that might mediate the relationship between transformational leadership behaviors and follower outcomes in the sporting domain. The purpose of this study was to examine whether intrateam communication mediated the effects of transformational leadership behaviors on task cohesion.Design/MethodsA cross-sectional study of university level ultimate frisbee players (N = 199). Participants completed a measure assessing their perceptions of their captain's transformational leadership behaviors. Post-competition, participants completed measures assessing perceptions of intrateam communication and task cohesion within their own team.ResultsMultilevel analyses revealed intrateam communication to partially mediate the relationships between two of the transformational leadership behaviors and task cohesion.ConclusionsIntrateam communication is seen to be a mechanism that explains the relationship between transformational leadership and task cohesion. Overall, the results support and add to the range of positive effects associated with transformational leadership in sport, and are suggestive of interventions that may raise levels of team cohesion.     

Character in learning for life: a virtue-ethical rationale for recent research on moral and values education

This article has three broad aims. The first is to draw attention what is probably the largest empirical study of moral, values and character education in the United Kingdom to the present date. The second is to outline – sufficient for present purposes – a plausible conceptual or theoretical case for placing a particular virtue-ethical concept of character at the centre of contemporary scholarship and research into moral and values education. The third is to suggest, in the light of these empirical findings and theoretical considerations, a number of practical ways in which character education might be developed or pursued in formal or informal school curricula or in the wider community.     

Speech recall under heavy load conditions: Age,predictability, and limits on dual-task interference

An experiment is reported in which young and elderly subjects listened to and recalled spoken passages that ranged from highly predictable to low in predictability, under both single-task conditions and dual-task conditions in which passages were presented concurrently with a speeded matching task. Age differences in memory for the passages were shown to vary according to both the predictability of the text, and the level of importance of information. Although the elderly recalled less than the young, they showed similar patterns of recall for major ideas. At the level of details, however, age differences were larger as passages became less predictable. Age differences in memory were not magnified by the requirement to divide attention, regardless of whether an easy or more difficult concurrent task was presented. These findings suggest that although speech-processing ability in old age shows considerable resilience to conditions of heavy load, including divided attention, age-related changes may be observed at lower levels of information.     

Appearance feedback in intimate relationships: The role of self-verification and self-enhancement

To better understand how body image operates within the context of intimate relationships, we investigated women's responses to appearance feedback from an intimate partner. Participants (N = 192) imagined receiving feedback from their partner that was either consistent with their own appearance self-view (i.e., self-verifying), more positive (i.e., self-enhancing), or less positive (i.e., devaluing), and then provided their affective and cognitive reactions. As expected, women's perceptions of their own appearance moderated their reactions. Women with more negative self-views felt happier with enhancing feedback, but thought that it meant their partner understood them less well. They also felt less happy when they received verifying feedback, but felt more understood by their partners. Thus, women with body image dissatisfaction may find themselves stuck in the “cognitive-affective crossfire” reacting ambivalently whether their partner enhances their appearance or confirms their negative self-views. Further examination of partners’ actual feedback is needed.     

Spatial interference between attended items engenders serial visual processing

A pair of experiments investigated the architecture of visual processing, parallel versus serial, across high and low levels of spatial interference in a divided attention task. Subjects made speeded judgments that required them to attend to a pair of color-cued objects among gray filler items, with the spatial proximity between the attended items varied to manipulate the strength of interference between attended items. Systems factorial analysis (Townsend & Nozawa, Journal of Mathematical Psychology 39:321-359, 1995) was used to identify processing architecture. Experiment 1, using moderately dense displays, found evidence of parallel processing whether attended objects were in low or high proximity to one another. Experiment 2, using higher-density displays, found evidence of parallel selection when attended stimuli were widely separated but serial processing when they were in high proximity. Divided visual attention can operate in parallel under conditions of low or moderate spatial interference between selected items, but strong interference engenders serial processing.     

The relative influences of movement kinematics and extrinsic object characteristics on the perception of lifted weight

Humans are able to perceive unique types of biological motion presented as point-light displays (PLDs). Thirty years ago, Runeson and Frykholm (Human Perception and Performance, 7(4), 733, 1981, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 112(4), 585, 1983) studied observers’ perceptions of weights lifted by actors and identified that the kinematic information in a PLD is sufficient for an observer to form an accurate perception of the object weight. However, research has also shown that extrinsic object size characteristics also influence the perception of object weight (Gordon, Forssberg, Johansson, & Westling in Experimental Brain Research, 83(3), 477–482, 1991). This study addresses the relative contributions of these two types of visual information to observers’ perceptions of lifted weight, through an experiment in which participants viewed an actor lifting boxes of various sizes (small, medium, or large) and weights (25, 50, or 75 lb) under four PLD conditions—box-at-rest, moving-box, actor-only, and actor-and-box—and one full-vision video condition, and then provided a weight estimate for each box lifted. The results indicated that lift kinematics and box size contributed independently to weight perception. Interestingly, the most robust weight differentiations were elicited in the conditions in which both types of information were presented concurrently, despite their converse natures. Furthermore, full-vision video presentation, which contained visual information beyond kinematics and object information, elicited the best estimates.     

Past Disclosure and Conversational Experience: Effects on Cardiovascular Functioning While Women Talk

A sense of self arises through social interaction and discourse, and this process of self-construction might have physiological correlates. We argue that cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) during communication is related to the salience of subjectivity and self-construction processes. We expected that the context in which a conversation occurs, the extent of disclosure during talk, and speakers' conversational histories (past conversational experience and past tendency to disclose) would be related to CVR. Women ( N = 44) engaged in talk to either a friend or a stranger about a personally relevant topic. Among low disclosers, extent of disclosure was positively related to CVR, while this effect was reversed for high disclosers. Low disclosers who tend not to disclose much but who usually feel comfortable conversing exhibited the largest cardiovascular responses. The findings highlight the importance of past social behavior and language use for physiological processes.