Differences in the Communication of Cancer Diagnoses by Different Health Professionals and the Impact of Oncologist Communication on Patients' Emotions.

The field of healthcare is increasingly adopting a humanistic perspective in the physician-patient relationship. One of the more salient aspects being studied is the communication between the two. This study serves a dual purpose.

Verbal interaction patterns in the clinical context: a model of how people change in therapy.

Background: The paper “Why do people change in therapy? A preliminary study" (2006), published in this journal, led to the beginning of a line of research based on observational methodology and aimed at the clarification of the therapeutic process. Throughout these years, significant progress has been made towards an explanation of clinical change. In this paper, a synthesis of this line of research is presented, along with a series of conclusions that can, to some extent, provide an answer to the questions we posed in the aforementioned first paper.

A theoretical and methodological proposal for the descriptive assessment of therapeutic interactions.

Objective: The goal of this study is to show the development of a strategy for a descriptive assessment of the therapeutic interaction.

Method: In this study, we develop an observational methodology to analyze the dialogues that took place during 92 sessions conducted in a psychological center in Madrid, Spain, in which 19 adults were treated for various psychological problems by 9 behavioral therapists. A system was developed to codify vocal behavior of both the therapists and the clients; the software The Observer XT was used for recording.

Descriptive study of the Socratic method: evidence for verbal shaping.

In this study we analyzed 65 fragments of session recordings in which a cognitive behavioral therapist employed the Socratic method with her patients. Specialized coding instruments were used to categorize the verbal behavior of the psychologist and the patients. First the fragments were classified as more or less successful depending on the overall degree of concordance between the patient's verbal behavior and the therapeutic objectives.

Functional analysis of the verbal interaction between psychologist and client during the therapeutic process.

The goal of this study is to analyze the verbal interaction that takes place between client and therapist over the course of a clinical intervention so as to analyze the potential learning processes that may be responsible for changes in the client's behavior. A total of 92 sessions were analyzed, corresponding to 19 clinical cases treated by 9 therapists specializing in behavioral therapy. The variables considered were therapist and client verbal behaviors, and these were categorized according to their possible functions and/or morphologies.

[Therapists' verbal behavior category system].

This paper presents the theoretical and methodological basis of a therapist's verbal behavior category system that allows us to study clinical psychologists' language from a functional-analytic framework and with a rigorous observation method. The procedure to develop the coding system is explained in detail from a very early stage of exploratory observation, to the systematic observation through the use of The Observer XT software. An analysis of intra- and inter-rater reliability using the kappa coefficient and taking into account the factors that affect the values of Cohen's index was carried out.