O contexto clínico em estudo: categorização de comportamentos de uma díade terapêutica.

Abstract

This paper has as its objective the study of the clinical context, identifying vocal verbal behaviors categories of the verbal narratives in a therapeutic section. It also analyses the behaviors emitted by the therapist and client discussion s themes during each therapeutic relationship. For that matter, it was chosen the use of direct observation of the behavior as a method to obtain trustworthy data and construction of verbal behavior categories. A behavioral therapist and a 22 years old female patient were participants in this study. The client presented complaints related to her suffering after a relationship breakup, difficulty engaging in other relationships, timidity, and depression. The session were video tapped. All videos were watched and transcribed, making possible the thematic analysis worked in each session and the development of the verbal behavior categories. The selection of these categories was built utilizing: five vocal verbal behavior categories described by B.F. Skinner in his book Verbal Behavior and, six vocal verbal behavior categories taken from observations of this study. The data shows that the therapist s verbalizations were more often than the client s verbalization. Categories, such as autoclitic , tact and mand , had the most frequent occurrence when compared to the other categories. The data shows that the therapist emitted more verbalizations in the theme variable explanations and the client in the theme other subjects . Moreover, the data leads to the development of possible functional relationships between the behaviors emitted by the therapist and the behaviors emitted by the client. It also suggests that therapists trained to utilize verbal behavior as an incentive to promote changes can amplify their interventions effect. In general, this study demonstrates the importance of the verbal behavior study in the therapeutic interaction in order to enhance its efficiency and, therefore, to promote behavior changes in the client s behavior repertory.