Abstract

Objective Close interpersonal relationships are fundamental to emotion regulation. Clinical theory suggests that one role of therapists in psychotherapy is to help clients regulate emotions, however, if and how clients and therapists serve to regulate each other’s emotions has not been empirically tested. Emotion coregulation – the bidirectional emotional linkage of two people that promotes emotional stability – is a specific, temporal process that provides a framework for testing the way in which therapists’ and clients’ emotions may be related on a moment to moment basis in clinically relevant ways. Method Utilizing 227 audio recordings from a relationally oriented treatment (Motivational Interviewing), we estimated continuous values of vocally encoded emotional arousal via mean fundamental frequency. We used dynamic systems models to examine emotional coregulation, and tested the hypothesis that each …
Objective

Method

Date

2020

Authors

Christina S Soma, Brian RW Baucom, Bo Xiao, Jonathan E Butner, Peter Hilpert, Shrikanth Narayanan, David C Atkins, Zac E Imel

Journal

Psychotherapy research

Volume

30

Issue

5

Pages

591-603

Publisher

Routledge