Michael Hölzer

The verbalization of emotions in the therapeutic dialogue: A correlate of therapeutic outcome?

An English version of the “Affective Dictionary Ulm” was constructed based on Dahls emotion theory for the computerized investigation of affective vocabularies of transcripts stemming from the Penn Psychotherapy Project. Therapist and patient vocabularies from “most successful” and “least successful” psychodynamic therapies were investigated at the beginning and at the end of treatment. Two hypotheses were partially confirmed: (1) therapists verbalize more emotions than their patients, and (2) “most successful” therapists will name more emotion words than their “least successful” colleagues. Furthermore, we found that–in comparison with their initial levels–at the end of treatment “most successful” therapists tended to verbalize emotions of the subcategory “anger.” These represent affective states where according to Dahls (1978) emotion theory a subject attributes the “focus of control” of a situation towards the self.Eine englische Fassung des „Affecktinan Diktionais” Ulm wurde auf der Basis von Dahls...

The German specimen case, amalia x: Empirical studies

The authors provide a perspective on how psychoanalytic process research can be implemented. This is based on a process research model described elsewhere and summarizes the kinds of studies that can be situated on the four levels of the model. The authors summarize multiple empirical studies that were performed in a completely tape-recorded psychoanalytic therapy and have been published. These studies demonstrate the many modalities empirical process research has available to objectively study psychoanalytic process phenomena and their implication for outcome.

How to Find Frames

Frames (Fundamental Repetitive and Maladaptive Emotion Structures) are a powerful way to display the recurrent plots of the stories that patients in psychotherapy tell about themselves and their li...

Das „Affektive Diktionär Ulm“ als eine Methode der quantitativen Vokabularbestimmung

Mit dem Aufkommen einer dialogorientierten Linguistik, im deutschen Sprachraum eingefuhrt als Diskurs- oder Konversationsanalyse (Klann 1979, Flader et al. 1982), wurde das Verstandnis von Sprache als Handlung eine brauchbare Basis fur die Untersuchung sprachlicher Elementarbestandteile auch in psychotherapeutischen Dialogen. Selbst wenn Freuds beruhmte Charakterisierung — „In der analytischen Behandlung geht nichts anderes vor als ein Austausch von Worten zwischen dem Analysierten und dem Arzt.“ (Freud 1916–17, S. 9) — mehr didaktisch orientiert gewesen sein durfte, so gibt sie doch eine heute noch aktuelle Ausgangssituation wieder, die nach der systematischen Untersuchung dieser Worter ruft.