[Effect of the setting on therapeutic verbalization of affects]

In psychotherapy research vocabulary measures are still an exception, although clinically relevant hypotheses might well be investigated by means of those measures. The affective vocabulary seems to be particularly apt to serve as an indicator of psychotherapeutic processes, since the "processing of emotions" can be regarded as a crucial part of any kind of psychotherapy. The emotion theory of Dahl and a classification schema derived from DeRivera will be explained in the text. The development of the Affective Dictionary Ulm (ADU), a computer measure for evaluation of affective vocabulary was based on this classification system. The distinction between two important categories of emotions, it-emotions (like anger) referring to wishes about objects, and me-emotions (like depression) reflecting self states, i.e. beliefs about the status of wish fulfillment, will be explained. The study described focuses on the affective vocabulary of one psychotherapist in three different settings: initial interviews, short term therapy and psychoanalysis. It can be demonstrated, that the "intensity" of the setting significantly positively correlates with the use of words indicating object (or it-) emotions. According to the transference paradigm, these results suggest, that the intensification of psychodynamic settings lead to an increasing work on help to regulate object relationships.