Guided imagery as a psychotherapeutic mind-body intervention in health psychology: A brief review of efficacy research

Abstract

In this article the guided imagery technique, which is a therapeutic tool in counseling and allied fields using mental images produced by appropriate scripts, suggestions or affirmations by videos/tape records and by the client himself/herself, will be discussed. Guided imagination is a mind-body intervention. Mind-body interventions focus on the interactions among the brain, mind, body, and behaviour, and on the powerful ways in which emotional, mental, social, spiritual and behavioural factors can directly affect health. The technique, used in health psychology and counseling psychology, can be classified by the modality of its content: visual, verbal, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory, or kinesthetic. It is a flexible intervention whose efficacy has been indicated through a large body of research in the field over many decades. As such, it has earned the right to be considered a research-based technique. This article will give a brief outline of guided imagery techniques, and examples of selected research indicating its efficacy. Keywords: guided imagery, health psychology, counseling psychology, mind-body interventions. Imagery, as a mind-body intervention in counselling health psychology, is a general name given to a series of cognitive processes. The procedures used in these processes are psychotherapeutic tools that help professionals change people"s attitudes, behaviours, emotions and physiological reactions. The cognitive element in the techniques of imagery is "the whole of thoughts which represent and interpret the context of perception" (Crawford, 1992). A revival of interest in imagery was an important component of the so called cognitive revolution in psychology during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period when the behaviorist intellectual hegemony over the field was broken and the concept of mental representation was established as