Living Through Some Positive Experiences of Psychotherapy

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amedeo Giorgi ◽  
Nico Gallegos

AbstractIn this article three clients were asked to describe some alleviation of symptoms that they may have experienced in psychotherapy. The descriptions were broad enough so that they were able to be characterized as positive experiences. Positive experiences were easy to come by but they took place within a context of ongoing therapy that included as well negative experiences and lack of progress. Instrumental for the existence of the positive experiences was a high quality relationship with the therapist that was safe, trusting, caring and non-judgmental. Phenomenological reflections on the empirical findings indicated 1) that focused symptom relief was not necessarily the best strategy for outcome evaluation of therapy, 2) threw doubt on termination of therapy as a good criterion for the experience of therapy and 3) concluded that the relationship between therapist and client is complex but unified in a way that needs further clarification.

2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 1039-1046 ◽  
Author(s):  
GRAY A. VARGAS ◽  
PETER A. ARNETT

AbstractBoth social support and stress predict depression in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. Little work has been done on the relationship between positive life experiences and depression in this group. Ninety MS patients completed the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ), the Hassles and Uplifts Scale (HUS), the Chicago Multiscale Depression Inventory (CMDI), and the Affective Reading Span Task (ARST). The Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) was also used. Separate regression analyses were conducted with the EDSS entered at step 1, ARST memory bias score at step 2, SSQ at step 3, either Hassles or Uplifts at step 4, and the interaction term at step 5 to predict depression. Uplifts interacted significantly with social support to predict depression, but hassles did not. After considering disability level, memory bias, and social support and uplifts main effects, the interaction of uplifts and social support accounted for nearly 5% independent variance in depression (p < .05). These results suggest that the absence of uplifts, combined with low levels of social support, is related to depression in MS patients. More generally, these data indicate that it is important to study the absence of positive experiences along with stress and negative experiences in this population. (JINS, 2010, 16, 1039–1046.)


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 115-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maie Stein ◽  
Sylvie Vincent-Höper ◽  
Nicole Deci ◽  
Sabine Gregersen ◽  
Albert Nienhaus

Abstract. To advance knowledge of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between leadership and employees’ well-being, this study examines leaders’ effects on their employees’ compensatory coping efforts. Using an extension of the job demands–resources model, we propose that high-quality leader–member exchange (LMX) allows employees to cope with high job demands without increasing their effort expenditure through the extension of working hours. Data analyses ( N = 356) revealed that LMX buffers the effect of quantitative demands on the extension of working hours such that the indirect effect of quantitative demands on emotional exhaustion is only significant at low and average levels of LMX. This study indicates that integrating leadership with employees’ coping efforts into a unifying model contributes to understanding how leadership is related to employees’ well-being. The notion that leaders can affect their employees’ use of compensatory coping efforts that detract from well-being offers promising approaches to the promotion of workplace health.


Author(s):  
Melanie K. T. Takarangi ◽  
Deryn Strange

When people are told that their negative memories are worse than other people’s, do they later remember those events differently? We asked participants to recall a recent negative memory then, 24 h later, we gave some participants feedback about the emotional impact of their event – stating it was more or less negative compared to other people’s experiences. One week later, participants recalled the event again. We predicted that if feedback affected how participants remembered their negative experiences, their ratings of the memory’s characteristics should change over time. That is, when participants are told that their negative event is extremely negative, their memories should be more vivid, recollected strongly, and remembered from a personal perspective, compared to participants in the other conditions. Our results provide support for this hypothesis. We suggest that external feedback might be a potential mechanism in the relationship between negative memories and psychological well-being.


This chapter considers the relationship between intellectual difficulty and moral responsibility. It focuses on this question: if it is difficult for us to come to believe the truth about some matter, and we do not in fact come to believe it, so that we are ignorant of that matter, does that affect our responsibility if we then act from our ignorance? Answering this question requires getting clearer on both intellectual difficulty and moral responsibility for actions done from ignorance. This chapter takes up both tasks, distinguishing three different kinds of intellectual difficulty—skill-related difficulty in performing, effort-related difficulty in performing, and difficulty in trying—and two different families of views regarding moral responsibility: agential control views and agential revelation views. The chapter then considers the interaction between these different kinds of intellectual difficulty and these different views of moral responsibility, focusing particularly on the familiar case of the Ancient Slaveholder.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robbie I’Anson Price ◽  
Francisca Segers ◽  
Amelia Berger ◽  
Fabio S Nascimento ◽  
Christoph Grüter

Abstract Social information is widely used in the animal kingdom and can be highly adaptive. In social insects, foragers can use social information to find food, avoid danger or choose a new nest site. Copying others allows individuals to obtain information without having to sample the environment. When foragers communicate information they will often only advertise high quality food sources, thereby filtering out less adaptive information. Stingless bees, a large pantropical group of highly eusocial bees, face intense inter- and intra-specific competition for limited resources, yet display disparate foraging strategies. Within the same environment there are species that communicate the location of food resources to nest-mates and species that do not. Our current understanding of why some species communicate foraging sites while others do not is limited. Studying freely foraging colonies of several co-existing stingless bee species in Brazil, we investigated if recruitment to specific food locations is linked to (1) the sugar content of forage, (2) the duration of foraging trips and (3) the variation in activity of a colony from one day to another and the variation in activity in a species over a day. We found that, contrary to our expectations, species with recruitment communication did not return with higher quality forage than species that do not recruit nestmates. Furthermore, foragers from recruiting species did not have shorter foraging trip durations than those from weakly-recruiting species. Given the intense inter- and intraspecific competition for resources in these environments, it may be that recruiting species favour food resources that can be monopolised by the colony rather than food sources that offer high-quality rewards.


2011 ◽  
Vol 243-249 ◽  
pp. 4956-4959
Author(s):  
Jian Chao Hao ◽  
Hui Fen Liu ◽  
Dong Ling Wei ◽  
Li Jun Shi ◽  
Jun Li Li ◽  
...  

The relationship between formaldehyde emission and time was researched and a mathematical model was developed which describes the variation of formaldehyde with time in the airtight chamber. It was found that high quality composite floor was in line with 0-order kinetic equation and low quality composite floor was in line with 1-order kinetic equation. Besides, the effect of activated carbon adsorption on formaldehyde was studied and the result showed that activated carbon had poor adsorption on formaldehyde for weak van der waals force.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 632-643 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandra Daniela Calero ◽  
Juan Pablo Barreyro ◽  
Irene Injoque-Ricle

Emotional intelligence includes self-perception regarding attention to feelings, clarity of feelings and mood repair. The aim of this work is to study the relationship between emotional intelligence, self-concept, and self-esteem. The sample included 137 adolescents from Buenos Aires City, that attended middle school, with a mean age of 13.12 years old (SD = 1.79). Correlation analysis and linear regression analysis were performed. Results showed significant positive correlations between self-esteem and clarity of feelings on the complete sample and the female subsample, and between mood repair and self-esteem on the male subsample. The linear regression analyses showed results on the same line. It´s concluded that positive self-evaluation regarding emotions, emotion comprehension and recovery can minimize the effect of negative experiences.


Author(s):  
Tamotsu Murakami ◽  
Tomoyuki Koyanagi

In the present competitive business environment, designers and engineers need to come up with creative, innovative and valuable design ideas. In engineering design, the function (F), behavior (B) and structure (S) of a product are discussed using design theory and methodology. On the other hand, the concept of user experience (UX) is becoming important in product design. In this paper, we first discuss the relationship among F, B, S, UX and the value of a product. Then we propose a delta design map as a framework for a systematic method and computational tool for design ideation support. A delta design map does not describe F, B, S and UX for design examples but describes their differences (delta) between design examples. This approach makes the descriptions efficient and gives clear criteria on what needs to be described and what need not be described. By preparing a delta design map, we can systematically and exhaustively analyze the potential similarity among all design examples from the viewpoint of F, B, S and UX and obtain triggers for ideation. The results of a simple trial of the proposed method are presented and discussed in this paper.


2007 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
S Sandberg ◽  
DC McCann ◽  
S Ahola ◽  
H Oja ◽  
JY Paton ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-502
Author(s):  
Elizabeth L. Borkowski ◽  
Wanda E. Leal

This study aims to examine how positive and negative reinforcers during an individual’s first few cigarettes (cigarette initiation experiences) are associated with adulthood smoking behavior. Respondents from the Add Health were asked about subjective feelings during their first few cigarettes. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) and logistic regression, we examine the differential effects of positive and negative cigarette initiation experiences on 30-day cigarette use in adulthood and lifetime nicotine dependence. The results indicate that all measures of positive cigarette initiation experiences are positively associated with both cigarette measures; however, the opposite is not true of negative cigarette initiation experiences. The results highlight the misconceptions of antidrug policies aimed at punishment of users, by indicating that positive experiences influence later cigarette use more than negative experiences. These findings suggest that drug policies and initiatives aimed at punishment may be misguided and could benefit from adopting operant conditioning concepts that emphasize reinforcements.


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