How Interpersonal Coordination Can Reflect Psychological Counseling: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

This study showed how interpersonal coordination between a psychotherapist and client changes during a psychological counseling session and how it reflects it. We aimed to evaluate psychological counseling sessions and understand psychotherapists’ embodied skills. Recently, it is considered that bodily coordination between a therapist and a client as well as psychotherapists’ embodied skills is important. We conducted an exploratory case study with quantitative analysis and a qualitative analysis. One female student and one female psychotherapist participated in our experiment. The student had a counseling session for 50 minutes in a session, which was video recorded. After quantifying both participants’ bodily activities by video image processing, the data were analyzed using nonlinear time series analysis in terms of the degree of coordination and the direction of influence. The data were also analyzed qualitatively by multiple researchers observing the video and by interviewing the psychotherapist. We identified the critical points of the session when the state of the client’s mind and the relationship between the therapist and client qualitatively changed. The results of qualitative and quantitative analyses were then compared. The results of the quantitative analysis showed that the degree of bodily coordination between the client and therapist was relatively high in three characteristic scenes: 1) building rapport, 2) clinical intervention, and 3) summarizing and closing the session. These results suggest that bodily coordination can highlight clinically important scenes. Moreover, the direction of influence also changed drastically in the clinical intervention scene. This case study suggests that interpersonal coordination between the client and therapist in a counseling session can partly reflect the quality of counseling (e.g. client-therapist relationship, clinical intervention).