Abstract

Psychotherapy can be an emotionally laden conversation, where both verbal and nonverbal interventions may impact the therapeutic process. Prior research has postulated mixed results regarding how clients emotionally react following a silence after the therapist is finished talking, potentially due to studying a limited range of silences with primarily qualitative and self‐report methodologies. A quantitative exploration may illuminate new findings. Utilising research and automatic data processing from the field of linguistics, we analysed the full range of silence lengths (0.2–24.01 s), and measures of emotional expression—vocally encoded arousal and emotional valence from the works spoken—of 84 audio recordings of Motivational Interviewing sessions. We hypothesised that both the level and the variance of client emotional expression would change as a function of silence length; however, due to the mixed …

Date

January 1, 1970

Authors

Christina S Soma, Bruce E Wampold, Nikolaos Flemotomos, Raghuveer Peri, Shrikanth Narayanan, David C Atkins, Zac E Imel

Journal

Counselling and psychotherapy research

Volume

23

Issue

2

Pages

378-388