Patterns of client emotion in helpful sessions of cognitive-behavioral and psychodynamic-interpersonal therapy.

Whereas cognitive-behavioral (CB) therapy sessions aim to be instructive and encouraging, psychodynamic-interpersonal (PI) sessions aim to be exploratory and may be emotionally painful. Raters rated degree of pleasure and arousal in each sentence of client speech in CB and PI sessions (N = 18) that therapists had identified as particularly helpful. Client emotion in PI sessions was less pleasant, on average, than client emotion in CB sessions; emotion was most negative in the middle of the PI sessions. Within sessions, arousal tended to follow a U-shaped course for CB clients but an inverted U-shaped course for PI clients. The results support suggestions that these two therapeutic approaches operate by different emotional mechanisms.