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6th World Congress on
Mental Health, Psychiatry and Wellbeing
March 20-21, 2019 | New York, USA
The Relation of
Nonverbal Synchrony
and Therapeutic Alliance
Ruptures
Jack Trevor Friedman, Jeremy Safran, Jerzy
Kaufmann, Howard Steele, Miriam Steele
The New School for Social
Research, USA
The study of nonverbal
synchrony examines the
degree to which individuals’
nonverbal cues, such as body
movement, coordinate in time.
Within the psychotherapeutic
dyad, nonverbal synchrony has
been shown to correlate with
therapeutic alliance and outcome
(Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2011).
However, nonverbal synchrony
research has yet to address
ruptures in the therapeutic
alliance.
To address this gap, the present
study analyzed an archive of
client-therapist video-films
comprising
118 fifty-minute sessions that
were collected in the early 1990s
and subjected to rigorous study
by Jeremy Safran and his research
students. The naturalistic sample
consisted of 14 therapist-patient
dyads, who completed 12
sessions (6 weeks of relational
psychodynamic therapy and 6
weeks of cognitive behavioral
therapy). 118 sessions were
included, as some were omitted
due to quality. Patients and
therapists provided self-reports
of rupture frequency, intensity
and resolution, after each session.
Nonverbal synchrony values
were computed using a software
program called Motion
Energy Analysis (MEA), which
quantifies bodily motion by
tracking frame-to-frame pixel
changes.
Results showed that there was
no significant correlation between
MEA synchrony and rupture
frequency or intensity. However,
when patients perceived a
rupture in a session (n=20),
synchrony correlated negatively
with perceptions that the rupture
was resolved, r =-.572, p=.005.
Low and moderate synchrony
was, in other words, linked up
with patients’ reporting the
rupture was resolved.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EMERGENCYMENTAL HEALTH AND HUMAN RESILIENCE 2019, VOLUME 21
DOI: 10.4172/1522-4821-C2-030
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