{"title":"Responding to In-the-Moment Distress in Emotion-Focused Therapy","authors":"Peter Muntigl, Lynda Chubak, L. Angus","doi":"10.1080/08351813.2023.2170663","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Emotion-focused therapy offers a setting in which clients report on their personal experiences, some of which involve intense moments of distress. This article examines video-recorded interactional sequences of client distress displays and therapist responses. Two main findings extend understanding of embodied actions clients display as both a collection of distress features and as interactional resources therapists draw upon to facilitate therapeutic intervention. First, clients drew from a number of vocal and nonvocal resources that tend to cluster on a continuum of lower or higher intensities of upset displays. Second, we identified three therapist response types that oriented explicitly to clients’ in-the-moment distress: noticings, emotional immediacy questions, and modulating directives. The first two action types draw attention to or topicalize the client’s emotional display; the third type, by contrast, had a regulatory function, either sustaining or abating the intensity of the upset. Data are in North American English.","PeriodicalId":51484,"journal":{"name":"Research on Language and Social Interaction","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Research on Language and Social Interaction","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2023.2170663","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 3
Abstract
ABSTRACT Emotion-focused therapy offers a setting in which clients report on their personal experiences, some of which involve intense moments of distress. This article examines video-recorded interactional sequences of client distress displays and therapist responses. Two main findings extend understanding of embodied actions clients display as both a collection of distress features and as interactional resources therapists draw upon to facilitate therapeutic intervention. First, clients drew from a number of vocal and nonvocal resources that tend to cluster on a continuum of lower or higher intensities of upset displays. Second, we identified three therapist response types that oriented explicitly to clients’ in-the-moment distress: noticings, emotional immediacy questions, and modulating directives. The first two action types draw attention to or topicalize the client’s emotional display; the third type, by contrast, had a regulatory function, either sustaining or abating the intensity of the upset. Data are in North American English.
期刊介绍:
The journal publishes the highest quality empirical and theoretical research bearing on language as it is used in interaction. Researchers in communication, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, linguistic anthropology and ethnography are likely to be the most active contributors, but we welcome submission of articles from the broad range of interaction researchers. Published papers will normally involve the close analysis of naturally-occurring interaction. The journal is also open to theoretical essays, and to quantitative studies where these are tied closely to the results of naturalistic observation.