Department of Psychology, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.
Department of Psychology, Universität Münster, Münster, Germany.
Psychother Res. 2021 Jul;31(6):752-764. doi: 10.1080/10503307.2020.1849849. Epub 2020 Nov 24.
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. 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 (), how they influenced each other in their mimicry () and the effects of mimicry on the patients' alliance. Videos of 151 sessions were rated by two observers. 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. 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.
医患联盟是治疗进展的核心。社会模仿，即自动模仿他人，与建立关系有关。这是第一项系统研究模仿及其在现实心理治疗过程中对工作联盟影响的预先注册研究。在针对强迫症（OCD）的认知行为治疗（CBT）过程中，对 64 对不同的患者-治疗师进行了拍摄。通过使用演员-伙伴相互依存模型，我们分析了治疗师和患者早期模仿的程度如何预测他们自己的模仿（），他们在模仿中如何相互影响（）以及模仿对患者联盟的影响。两位观察者对 151 次治疗的视频进行了评分。患者表现出稳定的低模仿水平。此外，患者的模仿预测了治疗师的模仿，表明治疗师会根据患者调整自己的模仿水平。只有治疗开始时患者的模仿，而不是治疗师的模仿，预测了患者的联盟。结果表明，积极的患者的作用被低估了。此外，研究结果通过揭示患者表现出的低模仿水平提供了新的治疗目标，这可能导致社会成本。
