Abstract

FROJAN PARGA, María Xesús; MONTANO FIDALGO, Montserrat; CALERO ELVIRA, Ana  and  RUIZ SANCHO, Elena. An Approach to the Functional Study of the Verbal Interaction Between Therapist and Client During the Therapeutic Process. Clínica y Salud [online]. 2011, vol.22, n.1, pp.69-85. ISSN 2174-0550.

This paper presents the development process of a coding system of the verbal behavior of therapists (SISC-CVT) and its application in the analysis of a series of clinical sessions. The aim was to identify topographies of the clinicians' verbal behavior that could be related to the hypothesized functions of this behavior. We analyze the recordings of 101 sessions, corresponding to 21 adult clinical cases. The initial hypothesis was that the categories of therapists' verbal behavior are distributed throughout the clinical intervention in such a way that a model of verbal performance could be established related to the clinical objective pursued by the psychologist during the therapeutic process. The results have confirmed this hypothesis and support the conclusion that what is related to the type of verbal behavior emitted by cognitive-behavioral therapists is the clinically relevant activity that is being carried out in session. According to these results, therapists perform four types of clinically relevant activity (assessment, explanation, treatment and consolidation of change). These are related to the type of categories of verbal behavior that are most frequent during each activity, rather than to the temporal moment of therapy in which they occur.

Keywords : clinical context; verbal behavior; observational methodology; cognitive-behavioral therapy.

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