Sabine C. Koch

Women and computers. Effects of stereotype threat on attribution of failure

This study investigated whether stereotype threat can influence womens attributions of failure in a computer task. Male and female college-age students (n=86, 16-21 years old) from Germany were asked to work on a computer task and were hinted beforehand that in this task, either (a) men usually perform better than women do (negative threat condition), or (b) women usually perform better than men do (positive condition), or (c) they received no threat or gender-related information (control group). The final part of the task was prepared to provide an experience of failure: due to a faulty USB-memory stick, completion of the task was not possible. Results suggest a stereotype threat effect on womens attribution of failure: in the negative threat condition, women attributed the failure more internally (to their own inability), and men more externally (to the faulty technical equipment). In the positive and control conditions, no significant gender differences in attribution emerged.

Embodied affectivity: on moving and being moved

There is a growing body of research indicating that bodily sensation and behavior strongly influences ones emotional reaction toward certain situations or objects. On this background, a framework model of embodied affectivity1 is suggested: we regard emotions as resulting from the circular interaction between affective qualities or affordances in the environment and the subjects bodily resonance, be it in the form of sensations, postures, expressive movements or movement tendencies. Motion and emotion are thus intrinsically connected: one is moved by movement (perception; impression; affection2) and moved to move (action; expression; e-motion). Through its resonance, the body functions as a medium of emotional perception: it colors or charges self-experience and the environment with affective valences while it remains itself in the background of ones own awareness. This model is then applied to emotional social understanding or interaffectivity which is regarded as an intertwinement of two cycles of embodied affectivity, thus continuously modifying each partners affective affordances and bodily resonance. We conclude with considerations of how embodied affectivity is altered in psychopathology and can be addressed in psychotherapy of the embodied self.

Fixing the mirrors: A feasibility study of the effects of dance movement therapy on young adults with autism spectrum disorder:

From the 1970s on, case studies reported the effectiveness of therapeutic mirroring in movement with children with autism spectrum disorder. In this feasibility study, we tested a dance movement therapy intervention based on mirroring in movement in a population of 31 young adults with autism spectrum disorder (mainly high-functioning and Asperger’s syndrome) with the aim to increase body awareness, social skills, self–other distinction, empathy, and well-being. We employed a manualized dance movement therapy intervention implemented in hourly sessions once a week for 7 weeks. The treatment group (n = 16) and the no-intervention control group (n = 15) were matched by sex, age, and symptom severity. Participants did not participate in any other therapies for the duration of the study. After the treatment, participants in the intervention group reported improved well-being, improved body awareness, improved self–other distinction, and increased social skills. The dance movement therapy–based mirroring approach seemed to address more primary developmental aspects of autism than the presently prevailing theory-of-mind approach. Results suggest that dance movement therapy can be an effective and feasible therapy approach for autism spectrum disorder, while future randomized control trials with bigger samples are needed.

Rhythm is it: effects of dynamic body feedback on affect and attitudes

Body feedback is the proprioceptive feedback that denominates the afferent information from position and movement of the body to the central nervous system. It is crucial in experiencing emotions, in forming attitudes and in regulating emotions and behavior. This paper investigates effects of dynamic body feedback on affect and attitudes, focusing on the impact of movement rhythms with smooth vs. sharp reversals as one basic category of movement qualities. It relates those qualities to already explored effects of approach vs. avoidance motor behavior as one basic category of movement shape. Studies 1 and 2 tested the effects of one of two basic movement qualities (smooth vs. sharp rhythms) on affect and cognition. The third study tested those movement qualities in combination with movement shape (approach vs. avoidance motor behavior) and the effects of those combinations on affect and attitudes toward initially valence-free stimuli. Results suggest that movement rhythms influence affect (studies 1 and 2), and attitudes (study 3), and moderate the impact of approach and avoidance motor behavior on attitudes (study 3). Extending static body feedback research with a dynamic account, findings indicate that movement qualities – next to movement shape – play an important role, when movement of the lived body is an independent variable.

The Kestenberg Movement Profile: Performance of Novice Raters

Whether for clinical evaluation or research purposes, the reliable assessment of movement behavior is central to the practice of dance/movement therapy. While few researchers have examined the rater training process for movement observation tools, this pilot study is an investigation of the agreement of novice raters on the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP). The novice raters were students who completed a basic KMP training of 45 hours. The five student raters constructed KMP ratings of four participants from a non-clinical, adult population for three of the nine KMP dimensions (tension-flow rhythms, bipolar, and unipolar shape-flow). Performance of the raters was assessed using generalizability theory (Cronbach, Gleser, Nanda & Rajaratnam, 1972). Results indicated rather inconsistent reliability for novice raters. Raters displayed particular difficulty with unipolar shape-flow, and more successful rating for tension-flow rhythms and bipolar shape-flow. The results are discussed in the context of using data analysis to investigate rater training issues pertinent to dance/movement therapy practice and research.

Overcoming Disembodiment: The Effect of Movement Therapy on Negative Symptoms in Schizophrenia- A Multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial

Objective: Negative symptoms of patients with Schizophrenia are resistant to medical treatment or conventional group therapy. Understanding schizophrenia as a form of disembodiment of the self, a number of scientists have argued that the approach of embodiment and associated embodied therapies, such as Dance and Movement Therapy (DMT) or Body Psychotherapy (BPT), may be more suitable to explain the psychopathology underlying the mental illness and to address its symptoms. Hence the present randomized controlled trial (DRKS00009828, http://apps.who.int/trialsearch/) aimed to examine the effectiveness of manualized movement therapy (BPT/DMT) on the negative symptoms of patients with schizophrenia. Method:A total of 68 out-patients with a diagnosis of a schizophrenia spectrum disorder were randomly allocated to either the treatment (n = 44, 20 sessions of BPT/DMT) or the control condition [n = 24, treatment as usual (TAU)]. Changes in negative symptom scores on the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) were analyzed using Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) with Simpson-Angus Scale (SAS) scores as covariates in order to control for side effects of antipsychotic medication. Results:After 20 sessions of treatment (BPT/DMT or TAU), patients receiving movement therapy had significantly lower negative symptom scores (SANS total score, blunted affect, attention). Effect sizes were moderate and mean symptom reduction in the treatment group was 20.65%. Conclusion:The study demonstrates that embodied therapies, such as BPT/DMT, are highly effective in the treatment of patients with schizophrenia. Results strongly suggest that BPT/DMT should be embedded in the daily clinical routine.

Neurological Abnormalities in Recent-Onset Schizophrenia and Asperger-Syndrome

Background: Neurological abnormalities including a variety of subtle deficits such as discrete impairments in sensory integration, motor coordination (MOCO), and sequencing of complex motor acts are frequently found in patients with schizophrenia (SZ) and commonly referred to as neurological soft signs (NSS). Asperger-syndrome (AS) is characterized by sensory-motor difficulties as well. However, the question whether the two disorders share a common or a disease-specific pattern of NSS remains unresolved. Method: A total of 78 age- and education-matched participants [26 patients with recent-onset SZ, 26 individuals with AS, and 26 healthy controls (HC)] were recruited for the study. Analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs), with age, years of education, and medication included as covariates, were used to examine group differences on total NSS and the five subscale scores. Discriminant analyses were employed to identify the NSS subscales that maximally discriminate between the three groups. Results: Significant differences among the three groups were found in NSS total score and on the five NSS subscales. The clinical groups differed significantly in the NSS subscale MOCO. The correct discriminant rate between patients with SZ and individuals with AS was 61.5%. The correct discriminant rate was 92.3% between individuals with AS and HC, and 80.8% between SZ patients and HC, respectively. Conclusion: Our findings provide new evidence for the presence of NSS in AS and lend further support to previously reported difficulties in movement control in this disorder. According to the present results, SZ and AS seem to be characterized by both quantitative and qualitative NSS expression.

“We Dance and Find Each Other”1: Effects of Dance/Movement Therapy on Negative Symptoms in Autism Spectrum Disorder

The treatment of deficits in social interaction, a shared symptom cluster in persons with schizophrenia (negative symptoms) and autism spectrum disorder (DSM-5 A-criterion), has so far remained widely unsuccessful in common approaches of psychotherapy. The alternative approach of embodiment brings to focus body-oriented intervention methods based on a theoretic framework that explains the disorders on a more basic level than common theory of mind approaches. The randomized controlled trial at hand investigated the effects of a 10-week manualized dance and movement therapy intervention on negative symptoms in participants with autism spectrum disorder. Although the observed effects failed to reach significance at the conventional 0.05 threshold, possibly due to an undersized sample, an encouraging trend towards stronger symptom reduction in the treatment group for overall negative symptoms and for almost all subtypes was found at the 0.10-level. Effect sizes were small but clinically meaningful, and the resulting patterns were in accordance with theoretical expectations. The study at hand contributes to finding an effective treatment approach for autism spectrum disorder in accordance with the notion of embodiment.

Editorial: Dynamic systems theory and embodiment in psychotherapy research. A new look at process and outcome.

This research topic encompasses a collection of articles from a dynamic systems and embodiment perspective on psychotherapy research. The collection follows the general tenet that communicative processes in psychotherapy are a field-dynamic phenomenon with temporal extension occurring in a context. The context of psychotherapy, at any point in time, is given by multiple elements that belong to different phenomenological domains (e.g., sensation, behavior, affectivity, thought, language) and interact with each other and the environment over time (Salvatore and Tschacher, 2012). What works is the interaction between elements—namely, their being part of a whole—rather than the elements themselves. Consequently, no element is considered to possess invariant clinical meaning; rather, its impact on the entire therapeutic system is mediated by the field, understood as the set of ever-changing, co-occurring elements regulating (e.g., “enslaving”) the systems behavior. In addition, psychotherapy unfolds irreversibly through time. Everything happening within the communication between client and therapist (and within their minds) occurs in a time-frame, i.e., owed to what happened before, and paving the way for what will follow. In this sense, psychotherapy—just as any form of interaction—is inherently dynamic, and as such time-dependent. Although these observations are familiar to clinicians, they have been widely neglected by researchers who have continued to endorse reductionist approaches (e.g., Elliott and Anderson, 1994). This is partly so because alternative approaches entail epistemological and methodological difficulties. Viewing psychotherapy in terms of field dynamics raises the epistemological issue of downward causality, i.e., the problem of modeling the pars-toto relation among levels of explanation. Moreover, the time dependency of psychotherapy processes renders most traditional strategies of data analysis unsuitable because these strategies commonly assume independent observations. Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) (Thelen and Smith, 1994; Kelso, 1995; Haken, 2010) can offer a solution to this impasse. DST has developed in various fields (e.g., physics, biology, as well as cognitive sciences), adopting a holistic and time-dependent approach. However, it is not widely applied in psychotherapy research. The reason may be sought in the fact that DST represents a challenge for the traditional, evidence-based approach to the empirical study of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy research adopts mainly an inductive, data-driven logic of investigation. Accordingly, research is assumed to deal with facts, with interpretation following after. DST challenges such a view. It proposes a new way of looking at the relation between theory and data: Data are not self-contained facts ready to be retrieved and evident in and of themselves. Rather, they are the product of the theory-driven modeling of phenomena. The very notion of time dependency shows the inherent nexus between theory and data characterizing the DST perspective. Indeed time dependency is not an empirical fact, but a theoretical tenet that is used to interpret phenomena; accordingly, what is relevant is not the event that occurs, but the co-occurrence of the event with what occurs before, together with, and after it. Thus, it is a theoretical tenet that defines what empirical content to focus on: the co-occurrence of events. In the final analysis, the empirical datum of co-occurrence emerges only through and within the theoretical framework of the time-dependency tenet. The theory-driven logic contained in DST provides a two-fold opportunity. On the one hand, it demands methodological innovation in the field of psychotherapy research. Data can be collected by making use of traditional instruments (e.g., session reports, category systems, video analysis, repeated ambulatory assessments, etc.) with a data analysis focus on measures of variability (e.g., standard deviation, entropy), since this is considered informative of the behavior of a dynamic system. Moreover, research designs should necessarily be longitudinal, aiming at assessing many time-points as possible over sessions and/or treatments. Finally, data-analysis should make use of longitudinal modeling in order to model the time-dependent systems behavior; moreover, idiographic approaches should be adopted, with the aim of being able to create general, nomothetic models without disregarding the individual, idiographic nature of each systems dynamics (e.g., Tschacher and Ramseyer, 2009). On the other hand, it pushes researchers to develop theoretical frameworks capable of grounding the empirical investigation of clinical phenomena. The need for theoretical development is particularly evident in process research. Indeed, basic questions of outcome research (e.g., Does the psychotherapy work? For whom? Under which conditions?) may be addressed in terms of the evidence-based paradigm, this does not hold once the focus moves to the issue of why and how psychotherapy works. Answers to such questions require developing a model of psychotherapy process—an enterprise that cannot be carried out purely empirical, i.e., as a mere accumulation of evidence. Theory-free research has provided an increasing collection of factors that play a role (moderating, mediating) in clinical exchange and its efficacy; and this has been enlarging the knowledge of what is relevant in psychotherapy process. However, this process in itself—the inherent dynamics of how it works—has remained a black box. The more data one collects, the more one is able to detect what happens outside the box—the input, the output, and their linkage—but one cannot look inside. The key to open the black box is theory, not data. In this situation, some clinical researchers have started to introduce ideas of embodiment and enaction into psychotherapy research (e.g., Fuchs and Schlimme, 2009; Koch, 2011; Michalak et al., 2014). Embodiment and enaction theories bring in an organismic perspective on human interaction and outcomes—taking into account body-environment coupling, dynamic movement, emergent phenomena, and the circularity of interaction processes as opposed to the cognitivistic computer metaphor that tries to predict interaction processes and outcomes from a linear causality perspective. This innovative view triggers a rethinking of the clinical interaction by recognizing the embodied nature of psychological and communicative phenomena. The embodied enactive perspective has extended the cognitive paradigm in psychology to include the body, that is, the “lived body” as conceptualized by phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1962), as an organismic, self-organizing entity (Varela et al., 1992), forming multiple feedback cycles with its environment (Gibson, 1966). Empathy, bonding and rapport are formed on a body basis (Ramseyer and Tschacher, 2011). The tenet of embodiment contributes to the theoretical framework psychotherapy research has been looking for. The integration of this tenet with DST opens up a promising scenario in the field of psychotherapy research, developing new transdisciplinary theoretical concepts, methodologies, and standards of knowledge. The notion of field dynamics enables us to account for the role played by the communication context in the regulation of intra-psychological processes. Moreover, the new embodied-systemic approach provides a way of seeing psychological phenomena in terms of dynamic Gestalts, thereby enabling researchers to go beyond hampering dichotomies (e.g., mind-body; structure-function) as well as beyond reductive, molecular approaches. The embodied-systemic approach is prone to develop methodological strategies transcending the conventional opposition between idiographic and nomothetic sciences, by accounting for the temporal dynamics of data. This research topic aims to outline and develop this promising scenario. We have collected theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers that highlight the heuristic power of approaches endorsing the embodied and field-dynamic nature of clinical phenomena. In sum, these contributions demonstrate the need for (a) more theory development in the field of psychotherapy research, (b) more development of methods that appropriately reflect the complexity of natural interaction between two or more agents, and (c) more translational research based upon clinical questions and implicit knowledge of clinical practitioners. We hope that this special issue is a beginning of clinicians and researchers being bolder in terms of acknowledging complexity, emergence and uncertainty, developing theories, methods and practice that account for them. The collected contributions pave the way for more appropriate and heuristically more powerful empirical investigations of complex phenomena such as the psychotherapy process.

El sol - die Sonne

Zusammenfassung. In der Forschungstradition der Sapir-Whorf Hypothese thematisiert die vorliegende Studie den Einfluss von Sprache auf Denken am Beispiel der Beziehung zwischen grammatischem und naturlichem Geschlecht. Untersucht wurde der Einfluss der grammatischen Geschlechtskongruenz von Objektbezeichnungen und Vornamen auf die Erinnerungsleistung sowie die Beurteilung der Objektbezeichnungen auf der Potenzdimension eines Semantischen Differentials. Dreiundvierzig spanische und 50 deutsche Teilnehmende einer Online-Studie sollten genuskongruente und -inkongruente Objekt-Vornamens-Paare in ihrer Muttersprache oder im Englischen lernen und erinnern (z.B. Sonne - Paula; Sonne - Paul; vgl. Boroditsky & Schmidt, 2000). Zwei Drittel der 36 Objektbezeichnungen hatten im Spanischen und Deutschen gegenlaufiges Genus. In der spanischen Substichprobe, nicht jedoch in der deutschen, wurden mehr kongruente als inkongruente Begriffspaare erinnert, unabhangig davon, ob die Studie in der Muttersprache oder auf Englisc...