Notwithstanding the many methodological advances made in the field of psychotherapy research, at present a metatheoretical, school-independent framework to explain psychotherapy change processes taking into account their dynamic and complex nature is still lacking. Over the last years, several authors have suggested that a dynamic systems (DS) approach might provide such a framework. In the present paper, we review the main characteristics of a DS approach to psychotherapy. After an overview of the general principles of the DS approach, we describe the extent to which psychotherapy can be considered as a self-organizing open complex system, whose developmental change processes are described in terms of a dialectic dynamics between stability and change over time. Empirical evidence in support of this conceptualization is provided and discussed. Finally, we propose a research design strategy for the empirical investigation of psychotherapy from a DS approach, together with a research case example. We conclude that a DS approach may provide a metatheoretical, school-independent framework allowing us to constructively rethink and enhance the way we conceptualize and empirically investigate psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record

In this paper we present a method to evaluate the quality of a rater’s judgement, which can integrate and enrich the use of inter-rater agreement as a reliability measure. Our proposal is an integrative one and evaluates the quality of a rater’s performance through an analysis of the profile of that individual rater’s performance. We discuss its rationale on the basis of the interpretation of inter-rater agreement, highlighting some critical issues. For this purpose, we adopt a computational model based on fuzzy set theory, demonstrating its main characteristics with an exemplary case study.

The work presents a psychodynamic, semiotic and dialogical model of affect and of the role it plays in sensemaking. The model is based on the following three general assumptions. A) Affective semiosis works in accordance to the dynamic unconscious which Freud conceptualized in terms of primary process. According to this interpretation, the uncon- scious is the mind’s homogenising way of functioning, which transforms every categorical relation into a relation of identity. B) Affect is the generalized, homogenising and abso- lutizing embodied basic intersubjective meanings according to which experience is interpreted. C) Affective semiosis performs both the grounding and regulative functions in sensemaking, orienting the way people interpret experience.

The authors propose a method for analyzing the psychotherapy process: discourse flow analysis (DFA). DFA is a technique representing the verbal interaction between therapist and patient as a discourse network, aimed at measuring the therapist- patient discourse ability to generate new meanings through time. DFA assumes that the main function of psychotherapy is to produce semiotic novelty. DFA is applied to the verbatim transcript of the psychotherapy. It defines the main meanings active within the therapeutic discourse by means of the combined use of text analysis and statistical techniques. Subsequently, it represents the dynamic interconnections among these meanings in terms of a ‘‘discursive network.’’ The dynamic and structural indexes of the discursive network have been shown to provide a valid representation of the patient-therapist communicative flow as well as an estimation of its clinical quality. Finally, a neural network is designed specifically to identify patterns of functioning of the discursive network and to verify the clinical validity of these patterns in terms of their association with specific phases of the psychotherapy process. An application of the DFA to a case of psychotherapy is provided to illustrate the method and the kinds of results it produces.

The work presents a computer-aided method of content analysis applicable to verbatim transcripts of psychotherapy: the Automated Co-occurrence Analysis for Semantic Mapping (ACASM). ACASM is able to perform a context-sensitive strategy of analysis aimed at mapping the meanings of the text through a trans-theoretical procedure. The paper is devoted to the presentation of the method and testing its validity. To the latter end we have compared ACASM and independent blind human coders on two tasks of content analysis: (a) estimating the semantic similarity between two utterances; (b) the semantic classification of a set of utterances. Results highlight that: (a) ACASM’s estimates of semantic similarity are consistent with the corresponding estimates provided by coders; (b) coders’ agreement and coder-ACASM agreement on the task of semantic classification have the same magnitude. Results lead to the conclusion that the content analysis produced by ACASM is indistinguishable from that performed by human coders.

In accordance with Windelband’s original proposal, the notions of nomothetic and idiographic are complementary terms, rather than an oppositional dyad. Given their dynamic and field-dependent nature, psychological phenomena are inherently unique―the relationship between their way of being and their constant becoming is mediated by the contingent conditions of the field. Therefore, science cannot be anything but idiographic―always facing a new unique event―while it is aimed at producing general knowledge of the nomothetic kind out of the ever- changing processes that unfold through irreversible time. The uniqueness of psychological phenomena makes it unfeasible for science to rely exclusively on inductive generalization that works through accumulation of empirical evidence provided by aggregated collections of specimens either within a single case (accumulation over time) or by assuming equivalence of exemplars across single cases subsumed under the same general class (a category viewed as a population). Abductive generalization can be a solution to the class-individuals relationship problem as it allows characterizing the dynamics of the unique case while it arrives at generalization.

Paper presents a method of content analysis framed within a semiotic and contextual model of the psychotherapy process as a situated dynamics of sensemaking: the Dynamic Mapping of the Structures of Content in Clinical Settings (DMSC). . DMSC is a system of content analysis focused on a generalized level of meaning, concerning basic aspects of the patient's narrative (e.g., if the narrative concerns herself or other than herself).Method. The paper presents the result of the application of DMSC to an intensive single-case analysis (Katja). The method has been applied by judges to the transcripts of sessions and is aimed at identifying patterns of combinations (defined: Patterns of content) of the categories characterizing the patient's narratives (pattern analysis approach) as well as at mapping the transition among these patterns (sequential analysis approach). . These results provide evidence of its construct validity. In accordance with the theoretical model grounding the method, we have found that: (a) DMSC provides a meaningful representation of the patient's narratives in terms of Patterns of content; (b) the probability of transition among the Patterns of content have proved to be significantly associated with the clinical quality of the sessions. . The DMSC has to be considered an attempt paving the way for further investigations aimed at developing a deeper understanding of the role played by the dynamics of sensemaking in the psychotherapy process.

The paper presents a method of content analysis framed within a semiotic and contextual model of the psychotherapy process as a situated dynamics of sensemaking: the Dynamic Mapping of the Structures of Content in Clinical Settings (DMSC).

The paper tests longitudinally the hypothesis that educational subcultures in terms of which students interpret their role and their educational setting affect the probability of dropping out of higher education. A logistic regression model was performed to predict drop out at the beginning of the second academic year for the 823 freshmen of a three-year bachelor degree in psychology at an Italian university. The model uses both measures of students' educational subculture and incoming levels of knowledge and skills. The probability of dropping out was used as dependent variable. Results show that the probability of dropping out is significantly associated with students' educational subculture – but not with their incoming level of knowledge and skills. Our results suggest the need to recognize the meaning as a legitimate variable of research and of intervention in the field of educational success

In this paper a dynamic and semiotic model of meaning (DSMM) is presented. According to it: a) meaning is the emergent product of a field dynamics; b) meaning consists of the way signs iteratively combine with each other in the local circumstances of communication; c) meaning is bivalent, i.e. it emerges from the iterative mutually constitutive tension between two components: an observable side, the Significance in Praesentia (SIP), namely the portion of the world used as sign, and a latent side, the Significance in Absentia (SIA), namely the pertinent gestalt of linkages among signs defining the condition of interpretability of the former. In the second part of the work some methodological implications of DSMM for the study of meaning are highlighted. In particular, emphasis is given to the wisdom of adopting a methodology being able to model the contingency and situativity of socio-symbolic phenomena

Inscrivendosi entro una cornice concettuale di matrice socio costruttivista e psicodinamica, si propone che lo sviluppo del rapporto scuola/fruitori sia un processo sociale culturalmente mediato. Promuoverlo implica confrontarsi con le domande dei fruitori e con i modelli simbolici che le sostanziano. Entro questa premessa, la ricerca presentata – una mappatura dei modelli di significazione del servizio scolastico delle famiglie degli studenti di un campione nazionale di scuole italiane - risponde ad una duplice funzione: come sistema di indagine e conoscenza, essa è volta all’individuazione ed alla elaborazione dei codici di significato in rapporto ai quali i genitori regolano il proprio rapporto con l’ambiente scolastico; come congegno psicologico clinico strettamente connesso all’intervento, essa mira a fornire competenze alle scuole in termini di criteri per interpretare i modelli di rapporto proposti dalle famiglie.

Il lavoro illustra le 3 linee di lavoro nell’ambito della process research su cui si concentra l'interesse degli autori: a) l’analisi concettuale delle premesse teoriche e metodologiche che fondano la ricerca sullo scambio clinico; b) la definizione di un modello generale del processo clinico; c) lo sviluppo di strategie di analisi dello scambio clinico coerenti con tale modello generale. Ciascuna linea di sviluppo viene presentata e discussa in ragione dei suoi presupposti concettuali, di alcuni dei risultati rilevanti che ha prodotto, così come delle prospettive future a essa associata.

This paper proposes a reading of liminal transitions in semiotic terms, namely as a byproduct of the dynamics of sensemaking consisting of how two components of meaning interact: the observable side of meaning (Significance in Praesentia) – the rupture directly experienced by the interpreter – and a further generalized meaning – the semiotic scenario (Significance in Absentia) which makes the lived experience interpretable. Due to its pre-semantic and affective nature, in the liminal hotspot the semiotic scenario keeps a certain version of the self alive, regardless of the changes occurring in the real world. The conditions that favor such dynamics are briefly outlined as well as some implications for theory, methodology and intervention.

This work presents a dialogic model of psychotherapy (the Two-Stage Semiotic Model, TSSM) with discourse flow analysis (DFA) and a low-inferential method of analysis based on it. TSSM claims that in good-outcome psychotherapy, the patient’s system of meanings follows a U-shaped trend: First, it decreases, and then the dialog promotes new meanings. DFA represents a session’s dialog as a “discourse network” made by the associations for temporal adjacency between contents; then it studies the network’s dynamic properties. DFA has been applied to the textual corpus obtained from the verbatim transcript of a 15-session psy- chotherapy course. Findings are consistent with the hypotheses.

This paper provides an analysis of a basic assumption grounding the clinical research: the ontological autonomy of psychotherapy—based on the idea that the clinical exchange is sufficiently distinguished from other social objects (i.e. exchange between teacher and pupils, or between buyer and seller, or interaction during dinner, and so forth). A criticism of such an assumption is discussed together with the proposal of a different epistemological interpretation, based on the distinction between communicative dynamics and the process of psychotherapy— psychotherapy is a goal-oriented process based on the general dynamics of human communication. Theoretical and methodological implications are drawn from such a view: It allows further sources of knowledge to be integrated within clinical research (i.e. those coming from other domains of analysis of human communication); it also enables a more abstract definition of the psychotherapy process to be developed, leading to innovative views of classical critical issues, like the specific-nonspecific debate. The final part of the paper is devoted to presenting a model of human communication—the Semiotic Dialogical Dialectic Theory–which is meant as the framework for the analysis of psychotherapy.

Embedded in the strand of research on the community determinants of sense of community (SoC), the study was designed to verify whether: (1) the size of the urban context was inversely related to residents’ SoC; (2) the size of the urban centers affected some of the correlates of SoC, namely the perception of social support, the residential environmental satisfaction, the residential social climate satisfaction, and the perceived reliability of local services in the areas of health, transport, administration, education, and security. The sample comprised 1254 individuals residing in a variety of towns/cities of different sizes in Southern and Northern Europe. Analyses revealed that the larger the town/city, the lower the SoC expressed by the inhabitants. They also showed that the residential environmental and social climate satisfaction, as well as perceived social support, were associated with an increase in SoC, but that there were variations in the patterns of associations according to towns/cities’ size. © 2017 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

In this paper I discuss two basic theses about the formalization of cultural psychology. First, I claim that formalization is a relevant, even necessary stage of development of this domain of science. This is so because formalization allows the scientific language to achieve a much needed autonomy from the commonsensical language of the phenomena that this science deals with. Second, I envisage the two main functions that formalization has to perform in the field of cultural psychology: on the one hand, it has to provide formal rules grounding and constraining the deductive construction of the general theory; on the other hand, it has to provide the devices for supporting the interpretation of local phenomena, in terms of the abductive reconstruction of the network of linkages among empirical occurrences comprising the local phenomena.

Dialogical theory is a contender to become a general theory of the psychotherapy process. In this perspective, it is important to clarify the specificity of the dialogical clinical standpoint within the more general domain of the relational paradigm. To this end, the authors propose to consider the constitutive nature of otherness for the self as the basic tenet grounding and qualifying the dialogical standpoint. Moreover, they provide a reading of some clinical theories as more or less radical interpretations of such a tenet. Finally, they raise the issue of the quality of otherness (a dialectic counterpart versus an organic complement) as a relevant issue that, due to its methodological and clinical implications, dialogical clinical theory is asked to address in its endeavour to develop itself as a comprehensive framework for clinical thinking.

Characteristics of the higher educational programs (e.g. non systematic variability of course’s difficulty among and within programs and over times) make observed data (e.g. number of credits acquired) poorly informative indexes of the students’ performance. As alternative, it is proposed an extended version of Rasch model (the Three Facets Model, TFM). TFM conceptualizes student’s performance the expression of a three-component latent variable to be esteemed. In so doing, TFM is able to take into account the non-systematic sources of variation characterizing higher educatonal settings, thus avoiding limits entailed in the use of indexes based on observed data. An exemplificative longitudinal case study has been performed, aimed at detecting predictors of performance within an undergraduate program of psychology of an Italian university. Two regression models have been compared: one using a traditional index of performance based on observed data versus one using the TFM estimation.

It is recognised that cultural factors play a role in the onset and continuation of several mental health problems. However, there is a significant lack of empirical studies investigating the relationships between cultural factors and gambling behavior. This study assessed whether the subjective cultures through which subjects interpret and enact their experience of the social environment play a major role in increasing (or decreasing) the probability of pathological gambling. Participants, recruited in three different contexts (public health services for the treatment of addiction, casino, undergraduate course) were subjected to the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS) (Lesieur and Blume in Am J Psychiatry 144(9):1184–1188, 1987), in order to identify a group of pathological gamblers—and with the Questionnaire on the Interpretation of the Social Environment (QUISE) (Mossi and Salvatore in Eur J Educ Psychol 4(2):153–169, 2011)—in order to detect their subjective cultures. The study compares pathological group (scoring >5 on SOGS, n = 34) and a healthy control group (scoring <1 on SOGS, n = 35). One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare groups on QUISE scores of subjective culture. Moreover, a logistic regression was applied in order to esteem the capability of the QUISE scores to differentiate between pathological gamblers and control. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that pathological group expresses different subjective cultures compared with no gambler subjects. The theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed.

This study was aimed at developing the GMI (Grid of the Models of Interpretations), a category system for measuring therapist interpreta- tions in transcripts of both cognitive and psychodynamic psychotherapies. Satisfactory agreement levels were found among the five raters used to test reliability. Moreover, the GMI-based description of interpretations in different clinical orientations appeared clinically meaningful. GMI promises to be helpful in analyzing interpretations in terms of case-specific and distinctive patterns.

The teaching-learning process is grounded on cultural assumptions concerning the sense of the teaching relationship: who are the people engaged in the shared scholastic activity, what and why they are doing what they are doing. Generally, these assumptions are taken for granted and acted out, rather than being negotiated between student and teacher. Starting from the analysis of a transcript of communicative interaction in class, we discuss conditions and constraints concerning the educational model that we call “taken for granted setting”. Moreover, we highlight the fact that due to the profound cultural change in the student population, the teaching-learning relationship can no longer take these relational assumptions for granted. Consequently, we propose to consider teaching as being aimed at constructing, developing and governing the relational conditions required for the teaching to take place. We call such a methodological approach: reframing setting.

A content analysis of the representative Journals in the field of psychotherapy research has been performed. The analysis focused on the articles’ keywords. We analyzed 7086 works published in 17 Journals, in the period 2005-2011, using a two-step multidimensional procedure. Firstly, a Cluster Analysis led to the extrapolation of 4 groups of keywords, each of them interpreted as the marker of a topic active within the literature. Secondly, a factorial analysis was carried out in order to picture the thematic orientation of the most representative Journals, namely the main topics they focus on and how they differ from each other in this respect.

The aim of this chapter is to highlight the role that the unconscious plays in meaning-making. In pursuit of this goal, we will propose a semiotic conceptualization of the unconscious. Our starting point is Ignacio Matte Blanco’s theory of the unconscious. With it we will present a model of the affects as a mode of semiosis, in contrast to semiosis in “paradigmatic” (logical) thought. We will discuss (a) how affective semiosis might be conceived, (b) what kind of object it takes as its reference, and (c) how a joint psychodynamic and semiotic approach can help to understand meaning-making.