Abstract
Approximately 58 million people, or one in four adults in the United States, suffer with a diagnosable mental illness. Forty (40) million people are diagnosed with anxiety disorder, and approximately 14 million people are diagnosed with major depression. Psychotherapy has been shown to be effective for treating a wide array of mental illnesses. However, only 25% of individuals who have a diagnosable mental illness will come to therapy; and of those, approximately half will drop out after the first session. There is substantial published evidence that the success of therapy does not strongly depend on the type of therapy but depends instead on the human relationship between the therapist and client. Observational approaches that investigate the emotional expressions in the therapeutic relationship have not been systematically applied before. The current chapter details how an affect-based coding system (the Specific Affect Coding System, SPAFF), originally developed for couples, can be applied to counselors and clients in a therapy setting to determine the quality of the therapeutic relationship. Case studies of video recordings describing the application of this approach are included.
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Peluso, P.R., Diaz, P., Tabib, G. (2018). Quantitative Video Coding of Therapist-Client Sessions. In: Strawinska-Zanko, U., Liebovitch, L. (eds) Mathematical Modeling of Social Relationships. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76765-9_3
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