Mimicry in psychotherapy – an actor partner model of therapists’ and patients’ non-verbal behavior and its effects on the working alliance

Abstract

Objective: The alliance between patient and therapist is central for therapeutic progress. Social mimicry, the automatic imitation of another person, has been linked to building relationships. This is the first preregistered study to systematically investigate mimicry and its effects on the working alliance in real psychotherapy sessions.

Method: Sixty-four different patient-therapist dyads were filmed during a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). By using actor-partner interdependence models, we analyzed the extent to which therapists’ and patients’ earlier mimicry predicted their own mimicry (actor effect), how they influenced each other in their mimicry (partner effect) and the effects of mimicry on the patients’ alliance. Videos of 151 sessions were rated by two observers.

Results: Patients showed stable low mimicry levels. Furthermore, the patients’ mimicry predicted that of the therapists, indicating that therapists adapt their mimicry levels to patients. Only the patients’ but not the therapists’ mimicry at the beginning of treatment predicted the patients’ alliance.

Conclusion: The results suggest that the role of the active patient is underestimated. Furthermore, results offer new treatment targets by shedding light on low mimicry levels displayed by patients, which might lead to social costs.

Keywords:

• mimicry
• psychotherapy
• working alliance
• actor-partner interdependence model
• non-verbal behavior in psychotherapy

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Alisia Wieler and Mara Ohlhoff for their mimicry ratings.

Data Availability and Open Practices

This is a preregistered study. The preregistration, code and supplemental materials are publicly available via the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/rg5zp.

Geolocation Information

Germany.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Supplemental Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2020.1849849.

Notes

1 The mimicry skewness values were acceptable according to professional standards (e.g. Eid et al., 2017; for the exact values can be found in the Supplemental Material). Also, none of the skewness values were significantly different from zero.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG EX 17/6-1 and GL 607/7-1].