Clin Child Psychol Psychiatry
January 2025
Measuring satisfaction with psychological health services is important in clinical settings to evaluate the benefits of treatment. Past research has shown that relationship with therapist is at the core of satisfaction reports. However, measurement tools focusing on patients' psychological health care experiences are rather scarce.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTherapeutic alliance and mentalization are common factors inherent to all effective treatments. Mentalization-based interventions have the potential to create a safe relationship, which makes further mentalizing interventions possible. However, to date, no study has examined the bidirectional relationship between these variables in child psychotherapy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychodynamic child psychotherapy is an evidence-based approach for a range of child mental health difficulties and needs to constantly adapt to meet the needs of children. This study is the first to investigate whether the use of mentalization-based interventions (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChild Psychiatry Hum Dev
April 2024
Utilizing multiple informants to assess children's depressive symptoms increases diagnostic accuracy, reliability, and validity of inferences. However, previous studies have found low to moderate agreement among informants. We applied network statistics to gain insight into children and their mothers' differential perceptions of depressive symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
December 2021
Despite advances in psychotherapy research showing an evidence-base for psychodynamic psychotherapy (PDT) in adolescents, developmentally specific treatment characteristics are under-researched. We aimed to identify interaction structures (IS: reciprocal patterns of in-session interactions involving therapist interventions, patient behaviors, and the therapeutic relationship) and assess associations between IS and outcome. The study cohort comprised 43 adolescents ( = 13.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Consult Clin Psychol
February 2021
Objective: This study is the first to investigate the effect of psychodynamic technique (PT), therapeutic alliance, and their interactions with outcome in psychodynamic child psychotherapy.
Method: The sample comprised 79 Turkish children (mean age = 6.86 years, 38% girls) with discrete internalizing (22%), discrete externalizing (11%) and comorbid internalizing and externalizing (67%) problems.
We explore state of the art machine learning based tools for automatic facial and linguistic affect analysis to allow easier, faster, and more precise quantification and annotation of children's verbal and non-verbal affective expressions in psychodynamic child psychotherapy. The sample included 53 Turkish children: 41 with internalizing, externalizing and comorbid problems; 12 in the non-clinical range. We collected audio and video recordings of 148 sessions, which were manually transcribed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMentalization, operationalized as reflective function, is defined as the capacity to understand behavior in terms of mental states. Mentalization can be self-focused (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImproved insight and affect expression have been associated with specific effects of transference work in psychodynamic psychotherapy. However, the micro-associations between these variables as they occur within the sessions have not been studied. The present study investigated whether the analyst's transference interpretations predicted changes in a patient's insight and emotion expression in her language during the course of a long-term psychoanalysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Consult Clin Psychol
July 2019
Objective: This study investigated therapeutic alliance (TA) trajectories, their demographic and symptomatic predictors, and associations with outcome in psychodynamic child psychotherapy.
Method: The sample included 89 Turkish children ( = 6.87, = 2.
Internalizing and externalizing problems have been related to negative emotionality, and affect regulation deficits in several studies. Certain psychodynamic models of treatment use children's symbolic play activity as a medium to mentalize negative emotions in order to develop children's affect regulation. However, the complex associations among these constructs and their associations with outcome have not been examined.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNonlinear Dynamics Psychol Life Sci
January 2019
A systematic single case study with a mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology was conducted to investigate the nonlinear dynamics of change in play profiles of a child in psychodynamic play therapy. The first aim of the study was to cluster the different features of play characteristics (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe first aim of this study was to identify interaction structures (IS), which refer to clusters of items characterizing the course of psychotherapy in terms of reciprocal interaction patterns between the therapist and the child, secondly to assess their trends over the course of treatment, and finally investigate which IS predict outcome in long-term psychodynamic child psychotherapy. The sample included 52 children with externalizing and internalizing problems. 192 sessions were rated with the use of the Child Psychotherapy Q-Set (CPQ).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildren with behavioral problems often have problems with symbolic play organization, specifically with the regulation of negative affect and its representation. One of the aims of psychodynamic therapy with these children is enhancing their symbolic and mentalizing capacities in play. This study investigated the associations between promoting mentalization, and the growth of symbolic play and affect regulation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLiterature has shown the importance of mentalizing techniques in symptom remission and emotional understanding; however, no study to date has looked at the dynamic relations between mental state talk and affect regulation in the psychotherapy process. From a psychodynamic perspective, the emergence of the child's capacity to regulate affect through the therapist's reflection on the child's mental states is a core aspect of treatment. In an empirical investigation of 2 single cases with separation anxiety disorder, who were treated in long-term psychodynamic play therapy informed with mentalization principles, the effect of therapists' and children's use of mental state talk on children's subsequent capacity to regulate affect in play was assessed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEven though there is substantial evidence that play based therapies produce significant change, the specific play processes in treatment remain unexamined. For that purpose, processes of change in long-term psychodynamic play therapy are assessed through a repeated systematic assessment of three children's "play profiles," which reflect patterns of organization among play variables that contribute to play activity in therapy, indicative of the children's coping strategies, and an expression of their internal world. The main aims of the study are to investigate the kinds of play profiles expressed in treatment, and to test whether there is emergence of new and more adaptive play profiles using dynamic systems theory as a methodological framework.
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