Clients’ emotional instability and therapists’ inferential flexibility predict therapists’ session-by-session empathic accuracy.
Clients’ emotions often serve as a major focus for therapists’ attention. Interestingly, little is known about the factors that facilitate or hinder therapists’ accurate assessment of these emotions. We hypothesized that therapists’ accuracy would be negatively tied to their clients’ emotional fluctuation (i.e., instability) and positively tied to the therapists’ own inferential fluctuation (i.e., flexibility) as well as to the clients’ emotional intensity. Clients (N = 98/N = 76) received weekly psychodynamic psychotherapy at a university-based clinic. Following each session, clients reported their within-se...
Source: Journal of Counseling Psychology - November 29, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Development of the Self-Forgiveness Dual-Process Scale.
Progress in the scientific study of self-forgiveness reveals a need for (a) integration of the extant self-forgiveness literature with general psychological theory, (b) development of measures that reflect nuanced conceptualizations of self-forgiveness, (c) better understanding of the impact of self-forgiveness on personal and interpersonal functioning, and (d) development of evidence-based clinical applications of self-forgiveness. Accordingly, we conceptualized self-forgiveness within the framework of Social Cognitive Theory and developed the Self-Forgiveness Dual-Process Scale to assess value reorientation (VRO) and est...
Source: Journal of Counseling Psychology - November 12, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Reducing threat responses to help-seeking information: Influences of self-affirmations and reassuring information.
This research was an examination of the effects of two types of self-affirmation interventions in reducing threat responses associated with receiving help-seeking information. Help-seeking information can be threatening to one’s positive self-perceptions and people may avoid seeking such information to protect themselves. There is evidence that reflecting on personal values (values affirmation) may bolster self-integrity and mitigate this avoidance, and it is possible that reflecting on safe, close social relationships (social affirmation) could exhibit similar effects. To experimentally examine this theoretical idea, we...
Source: Journal of Counseling Psychology - October 15, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Secrets in psychotherapy: For better or worse?
We investigated how concealment and disclosure of secrets, two related but distinct processes, unfolded over the course of open-ended therapy for 39 clients and 9 therapists, using hierarchical linear modeling to identify longitudinal patterns and investigate relationships with working alliance and session quality. Results indicated that over the course of therapy, 85% of clients disclosed at least one secret and 41% concealed at least one secret, with 18% of sessions including a disclosure and 4% of sessions including concealment. Over time, clients were less likely to disclose secrets, and the secrets they chose to conce...
Source: Journal of Counseling Psychology - October 8, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Testing intersectionality of race/ethnicity × gender in a social–cognitive career theory model with science identity.
We examined group differences by race/ethnicity and gender to investigate potential cultural variations in a model to explain students’ research career intentions. Using a sample of 688 undergraduate students, we ran a series of path models testing the relationships between the experiential sources, research self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and science identity to research career intentions. Findings were largely consistent with our hypotheses in that research self-efficacy and outcome expectancies were directly and positively associated with research career intentions and the associations of the experiential...
Source: Journal of Counseling Psychology - October 4, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
