Facilitating the client's experience of relational depth in counselling and psychotherapy: A thematic review

Aim

There is increasing interest in relational depth and its relevance and benefits for clients receiving therapy in a number of different therapeutic orientations. This research set out to draw together the available evidence from a wide range of therapies about clients' experiences of relational depth. The aim was to identify approaches that create the conditions where relational depth is more likely to be facilitated. The research focused on clients' views, given the increasing emphasis on their experiences in therapy.

Methodology

A systematic search of papers published in English between January 1996 and September 2022 was conducted using EBSCO Host, Google Scholar and citation chaining. Twenty-seven papers met the inclusion criteria, and a thematic analysis was conducted on these papers.

Findings

Six themes were identified: (1) establishing dialogue with the client's inner world, (2) working with attachment in therapy, (3) responding sensitively to the client's beliefs and values, (4) deepening the client's understanding of the therapist, (5) addressing ruptures in therapy and (6) the client's role in meeting at relational depth.

Conclusion

Facilitating the client's experience of relational depth can support and enhance many aspects of therapeutic practice and in itself may contribute to healing. Therapists who offer warmth and genuine engagement are more able to build confidence and trust, as long as these conditions are received by their clients. It is the clients who ultimately decide whether or not to share their deepest feelings.     

Why behavior analysts should study emotion: the example of anxiety.

Historically, anxiety has been a dominant subject in mainstream psychology but an incidental or even insignificant one in behavior analysis. We discuss several reasons for this discrepancy. We follow with a behavior-analytic conceptualization of anxiety that could just as easily be applied to emotion in general. Its primary points are (a) that language-able humans have an extraordinary capacity to derive relations between events and that it is a simple matter to show that neutral stimuli can acquire discriminative functions indirectly with no direct training; (b) that private events can readily acquire discriminative functions; (c) that anxiety disorders seem to occur with little apparent direct learning or that the amount of direct learning is extraordinarily out of proportion with the amount of responding; and (d) that the primary function of anxious behavior is experiential avoidance. We conclude that the most interesting aspects of anxiety disorders may occur as a function of derived rather than direct relations between public events and overt and private responses with avoidance functions. Implicit in this conclusion and explicit in the paper is the assertion that anxiety is a suitable subject for behavior-analytic study.     

Relational and absolute stimulus learning by monkeys in a memory task.

Three experiments showed stimulus control by either the absolute properties of probe stimuli, relational properties of the probe-list relationship, or both in a serial probe recognition memory task in which a four-item memory list was followed by a single probe (test) item. In Experiment 1, 3 rhesus monkeys received 39 to 75 repetitions of the same 24-trial stimulus sequence. Special tests showed stimulus control by the absolute properties of the probe stimuli. Retention of previous relational control was demonstrated by the good transfer (83%) to novel list and probe stimuli at the beginning of Experiment 2. During Experiment 2, control by absolute properties of the probe stimuli gradually reoccurred. Only a small measure of control by list stimuli could be detected or promoted. In Experiment 3, 4 monkeys were shown to have largely lost their ability to perform on the basis of the list-probe relationship, and were performing primarily on the basis of the absolute properties of the probe stimuli. Over the next 15 weeks, these monkeys were transferred to new stimuli at the beginning of each week. Control by the relational aspects of the task gradually returned. As transfer performance increased, control by the absolute properties of the probe stimuli was eliminated. The results are discussed in terms of stimulus control and performance strategies used by the monkeys.     

The effectiveness of unitization in mitigating age-related relational learning impairments depends on existing cognitive status

Binding relations among items in the transverse patterning (TP) task is dependent on the integrity of the hippocampus and its extended network. Older adults have impaired TP learning, corresponding to age-related reductions in hippocampal volumes. Unitization is a training strategy that can mitigate TP impairments in amnesia by reducing reliance on hippocampal-dependent relational binding and increasing reliance on fused representations. Here we examined whether healthy older adults and those showing early signs of cognitive decline would also benefit from unitization. Although both groups of older adults had neuropsychological performance within the healthy range, their TP learning differed both under standard and unitized training conditions. Healthy older adults with impaired TP learning under standard training benefited from unitized training. Older adults who failed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) showed greater impairments under standard conditions, and showed no evidence of improvement with unitization. These individuals’ failures to benefit from unitization may be a consequence of early deficits not seen in older adults who pass the MoCA.     

Relational Mobility Increases Social (but Not Other) Risk Propensity

In recent years, we have witnessed a resurgent focus on ecological features, especially various forms of mobility that afford social psychological processes. Extending this work, the current research examined whether relational mobility affects risk propensity. We conducted three studies using both correlational (Studies 1 and 3) and experimental (Study 2) methods. Results provide support for the hypothesis that perceptions of relational mobility are associated with risk propensity in the domain of interpersonal behaviors but not other risk domains (health, financial, etc.). Findings in Study 3 suggested that the association between relational mobility and propensity for risky interpersonal behaviors may stem from the effect of relational mobility in lowering subjective risk (but not in increasing expected benefits) of such behaviors. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gender, Power, and Relationship Ethics In Family Therapy Education

Awareness and sensitivity about gender issues have central positions in family therapy education. Traditionally gender relationships have been treated as either a reflection of cultural values and norms or as a dynamic of the way that men and women deal with the other sex. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study that examines the meaning and enactment of gender issues in the supervisory process in family therapy. Based on that study, the authors developed a strategy for raising issues of gender equity in clinical training and describe the effects of that strategy on one practicum.Professor of Family and Child Sciences and the director of the Interdivisional Program in Marriage and Family Therapy at Florida State UniversityAn associate professor of Family and Child Sciences and the co-director of the Family Policy and Research Unit in the Family Institute at Florida State University     

跨期决策中的负折扣现象及其机制

主流跨期决策模型认为, 跨期决策存在一个时间折扣过程。时间折扣是指人们会根据将来获益或损失的延迟时间对其效用进行折扣, 折扣后的效用小于原来的效用, 而负折扣现象违背了时间折扣过程。负折扣现象出现在金钱、非金钱的获益与损失领域, 其可能的解释机制为预期情绪。目前关于负折扣现象的研究, 较少验证其影响机制, 未来的研究可以结合眼动追踪和fMRI技术探讨其机制, 并丰富对负折扣现象的影响因素研究。