Understanding the social emotional practices of therapists

Abstract

Emotions are central to the therapy process and skilful use by therapists of client emotion is an essential catalyst to client change. However, the contribution of emotion to the therapy process and how therapists’ social emotional skills are incorporated into psychological practice is still unclear. Using a statistical method for mapping psychological constructs, therapists’ social emotional skills were transformed into a “map” with three spatial dimensions, which was supported by comparative reliability checks. The nature of social emotional skills was further investigated by administering a Q-Sort of emotional practice items to 47 therapists. Ten highly applicable clusters of social emotional skills across seven style patterns with therapists were identified. Tentative links were drawn between demographic data and both clusters and therapist styles. These findings suggest therapists’ social emotional skills can be organised into meaningful clusters and that therapists can be styled according to their responses across these clusters. Furthermore, gaps identified in the model suggest possible “blind spots” in the literature. The implications of these findings are significant for training and practice.

Keywords:

• Social emotional practice
• emotional intelligence
• emotional competence
• therapist variables
• common factors
• master therapists
• multi-dimensional scaling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here https://doi.org/10.1080/09515070.2017.1359494.

Notes on contributors

Shane T. Harvey is the director of the Massey University Psychology Clinic (PN). His research interests include the emotional practices of those in the helping professions and treatment outcome research.

Andreas Marwick is a clinical psychologist. His research interests include the emotional social practices of therapists.

Don M. Baken is a clinical psychologist and research coordinator at the Massey University Psychology Clinic (PN). His research interests include applied health psychology and treatment outcome research.

David Bimler is a statistician at Massey University specializing in multidimensional scaling in the social sciences.

Jan Dickson is a clinical psychologist based at the Department of Corrections, NZ. Her research interests include treatment outcome research.