Changes in self and object representations following psychotherapy measured by a theory-free, computational, semantic...

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Computational Linguistics
• Psychotherapy Research

Background:

• Assessing the impact of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy on cognitive and affective schemas is crucial.
• Previous methods may lack objectivity or computational rigor in evaluating therapeutic change.
• Understanding changes in self and parent representations offers insight into therapeutic outcomes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a theory-neutral, computational method for quantifying semantic changes in object representations.
• To investigate alterations in the semantic content of self and parent descriptions after long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy.
• To compare these changes in a clinical group with an age-matched non-clinical sample.

Main Methods:

• Utilized Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to construct a semantic space from verbatim transcripts.
• Quantified descriptions of the self and parents from young adults undergoing psychotherapy and a control group.
• Analyzed data at three time points: baseline and two follow-ups.

Main Results:

• The psychotherapy group exhibited significant changes in all representations from baseline to follow-up.
• No comparable semantic changes were observed in the non-clinical comparison group.
• The findings indicate sustained shifts in affective-cognitive schemas of self and others.

Conclusions:

• The developed semantic space method effectively detects changes resulting from long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy.
• Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy is associated with sustained modifications in core cognitive-affective schemas.
• This data-driven approach supports the efficacy of psychodynamic therapy in fostering significant personal change.