A neurophysiological fingerprint of the empty-chair dialogue

Stein, Maria; Rohde, Kristina Barbara; König, Thomas; Pascual-Leone, Antonio; Caspar, Franz (June 2014). A neurophysiological fingerprint of the empty-chair dialogue (Unpublished). In: Society for Psychotherapy Research. Kopenhagen.

The empty chair dialogue is a validated technique used in Gestalt and emotion focused therapy to help clients overcome unresolved interpersonal grievances. It aims at influencing emotional processing in a way that emotional states characterized by advanced meaning making, thus by the integration of cognition and affect, are facilitated. Even though a variety of studies demonstrated the effectiveness of this technique as well as the usefulness of improvements in emotional processing, it remains unclear how these changes are characterized on a neuronal level. The present study aimed at tracing changes induced by the empty-chair dialogue with electrophysiological methods.
Subjects reporting long-standing interpersonal grievances were recruited. After informed consent, an experienced therapist guided subjects to work on their individual interpersonal theme using the empty chair dialogue. During this one-session intervention, multichannel EEG was recorded and the session was video-taped. Afterwards, a validated observational rating instrument was used to identify time periods representing emotional states characterized by either high or low meaning making and the preprocessed, artifact-free EEG-data was labeled accordingly. Thus the comparison of neurophysiological activity during two distinct types of emotional processing becomes possible. EEG-data will be analyzed with modern methods of frequency analysis. Furthermore global field synchronization will be compared between the two types of emotional processing.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Poster)

Division/Institute:

04 Faculty of Medicine > University Psychiatric Services > University Hospital of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy > Psychiatric Neurophysiology [discontinued]
07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Psychology > Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy

UniBE Contributor:

Stein, Maria, Rohde, Kristina Barbara (B), König, Thomas, Caspar, Franz

Subjects:

600 Technology > 610 Medicine & health

Language:

English

Submitter:

Maria Stein

Date Deposited:

22 Dec 2014 16:24

Last Modified:

29 Mar 2023 23:34

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/61247

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