Vicarious emotional experience and emotional expression in group psychotherapy

Emotional arousal is a key concept in most theories of change. To be able to understand the role of emotional expression better, two treatments, cognitive therapy (CT) and focused expressive psychotherapy (FEP; a manualized form of Gestalt therapy), with opposite process assumptions about the expression of emotions were compared. Additionally vicarious emotional experience in the sense of an underlying emotional contagion was examined. Clients suffering from major depression were rated for the expression of emotion in three randomly selected sessions of a 20-session treatment course. While the types of emotions generally experienced by CT clients and FEP clients did not differ significantly, differences in the subgroups of active and observing-group members were found. This indicated that the process assumptions made by the respective treatments were only valid for the actively participating clients and not for the observing group members. Emotional contagion as a process was not supported.