Bridging a suffered mind: Experiential focus enables perspective-taking for staying connected with other people

Lo, Pak Kwan, Chiu, Chui-De

Submission type

Oral only

Scheduled

Parallel Session VI: Keurzaal, 09-06-2018, 13:00 - 14:30

Kernwoorden

Connectedness, processing focus, perspective-taking

Onderzoeksgebied

Therapeutic relationship

Introductie

In therapeutic sessions clients share emotion and seek connectedness with therapists. Despite attempts to comfort clients, therapists sometimes fail to connect the self with clients in sight. We postulated that taking others’ perspective is necessary in this process, and this vehicle can only be turned on when listeners immerse in the experience of disclosers rather than the logic of their narrative. Hence, focusing on sensorimotoric experience such as physical and emotional reactions, in contrast to analytical inference, should be a prerequisite for a merge between the self and other.

Materiaal en methodes

The hypothesis was tested in a social sharing experiment. College students listened attentively to an audio-taped narrative in which a person disclosed everyday hassles. Factors under study were focus of participants (i.e., processing orientation, experiencing versus problem-solving) and dispositional propensity of switching between self- and other-perspectives (i.e., cost of perspective-taking).

Resultaten

Results showed that participants with less cost for perspective-taking reported higher degree of perceived connectedness with the discloser than those with more cost, and this link was evident only when an experiential focus was adopted.

Conclusie

Experiential focus appears to be a key to turning on the critical vehicle of perspective-taking for relationship through bridging the self and another mind.