Linguistic cohesion in psychotherapy process and outcome.

  • Francis M
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Abstract

Therapeutic alliance researchers have increasingly relied on attachment theory's concept of coherence to gain insight into the mechanism of psychotherapeutic change. This paper presents a study designed to capitalize on the linguistic concept of coherence and the related concept of cohesion to augment the attachment theory perspective. The study used an algorithmic-based program to analyze the textual features of transcribed interviews with patients who were discussing their relationship with their therapist. The central premise that a high incidence of causal verbs and particles is a fundamental element of good psychotherapy outcome was well-supported. As hypothesized, a high incidence of causal verbs and particles clustered with abstract language to consistently correlate with good psychotherapy outcome. The suggestion that this cluster may represent the linguistic version of reflective functioning appears promising as an avenue for future research. This linguistic perspective on coherence provided explanatory evidence as to why this sample's initial patient Working Alliance Inventory (WAI) rating generated an unexpected significant negative correlation to good outcome. The effort to provide concurrent validity for the Therapeutic Attachment Scale (TAS) produced mixed results. Limitations such as small sample size (N = 20) and the resultant inability to run a factor analysis were discussed.

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APA

Francis, M. R. (2007). Linguistic cohesion in psychotherapy process and outcome.

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