The Verbalization of Emotions in the Therapeutic Dialogue–A Correlate of Therapeutic Outcome?

An English version of the “Affective Dictionary Ulm” was constructed based on Dahl's emotion theory for the computerized investigation of affective vocabularies of transcripts stemming from the Penn Psychotherapy Project. Therapist and patient vocabularies from “most successful” and “least successful” psychodynamic therapies were investigated at the beginning and at the end of treatment. Two hypotheses were partially confirmed: (1) therapists verbalize more emotions than their patients, and (2) “most successful” therapists will name more emotion words than their “least successful” colleagues. Furthermore, we found that–in comparison with their initial levels–at the end of treatment “most successful” therapists tended to verbalize emotions of the subcategory “anger.” These represent affective states where according to Dahl's (1978) emotion theory a subject attributes the “focus of control” of a situation towards the self.Eine englische Fassung des „Affecktinan Diktionais” Ulm wurde auf der Basis von Dahl's...