Characterizing the Language of Therapist Interventions in Moments of High Patient Arousal

The Referential Process (RP) is defined as a set of functions (Arousal, Symbolizing, and Reflecting/Reorganizing) that describe the rendering of subsymbolic experience into verbal, symbolized form. Movement through the RP-beginning with the subsymbolically-dominated Arousal function-has been associated with therapeutic progress and personality change. The present exploratory study examined therapist language features linked to facilitation of patients' movement from Arousal to Symbolizing. Using treatment transcripts for six treatments from the RP Data Base, cases of high patient Arousal were divided into intervention categories based on the presence and/or positioning of the subsequent patient Symbolizing peak. The language of therapists' interventions in response to high patient Arousal moments was examined using the computerized measures of the RP, as well as measures of Disfluency and other linguistic features. Interventions most immediately facilitative of patient movement from Arousal to Symbolizing displayed significantly higher Reflecting/Reorganizing scores, and occurred earlier in the session, as compared to interventions in which a patient symbolizing peak occurred later, and those in which no patient symbolizing peak occurred at any subsequent point in the session.