Categories for classifying language in psychotherapy.

TLDR

Abstract

Department of LinguisticsUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillWilliam B. StilesUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillA review of language analysis systems employed in psychotherapy research sug-gests a typology based on the combination of three category types with twocoding strategies. The types are (a) content categories, (b) intersubjective cate-gories, and (c) extralinguistic categories. They are denned by distinct sets oflanguage features. The coding strategies are (a) the classical coding strategy, inwhich categories describe the text, and (b) the pragmatic coding strategy, inwhich categories describe the speaker. A review of research results suggests thatthe content, intersubjective, and extralinguistic features constitute distinct chan-nels of communication and that (a) the content channel carries information per-taining to the speaker's psychodynamic process and personality structure, (b)the intersubjective channel carries information pertaining to the quality of thespeaker's relationship with the other, and (c) the extralinguistic channel carriesinformation pertaining to the speaker's transitory emotional state. System con-sistency criteria are suggested for use in conjunction with the typology to evalu-ate categories and category systems.If the first stage in the scientific study ofa phenomenon is naming and classifying, thestudy of verbal behavior in psychotherapy ismired in its first stage. Reviews of the psy-chotherapy content analysis literature (Auld& Murray, 1955; Kiesler, 1973; Marsden,1965, 1971; Meltzoff & Kornreich, 1970)display an ungainly proliferation of categoriesand systems of categories to describe theverbal behavior of therapist and client. Onereviewer (Kiesler, 1973) put it this way: