2410 research outputs found
Sort by
Exploring the Intersection Between Facial Movement, Physiology, and Emotional Regulation: Developing a Method for Children
Get PDFFor children in therapy, emotional regulation is frequently a focus of treatment. Identifying, understanding, and managing emotions are all key tasks in one’s development. Developing these skills at a young age has proven to be beneficial for one’s overall wellbeing. Approaching emotional regulation through a dance/movement therapy lens requires a focus on not only one’s cognitive perception of emotion but one’s physical sensation of emotion. Dr. Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System provides a means of systematically creating the sensation of emotion. An individual can experience a physiological response by creating universally identified facial expressions. This thesis introduces a method for children utilizing Dr. Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System to elicit emotion and explore how one experiences and understands their feelings. The intervention was tested in a session with a child in a mental health center. The case study demonstrates the therapeutic benefits of eliciting emotion and the strengths of approaching emotion from an embodied perspective
Teaching Coping Skills Through Altered Book Making with Adolescents in Acute Crisis Treatment: Development of a Method
Get PDFThis thesis examines how altered book making can be used as a coping skill for adolescents between the ages of 13 to 18 in an acute setting within the Partial Hospitalization Program in northern Massachusetts. Altered books are mixed media art journals that can be a platform for coping with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, just as previous research has shown journals have been for many decades. Research has outlined that adolescents need an equal mix of structure and freedom and crave the idea of being insightful and involved in their own treatment. The group process is a unique format to teach altered book making, giving clients the opportunity to impress upon one another. This thesis will allow the reader to gain insight on two weeks of art therapy sessions with adolescents in the PHP, showing how they adopted the use of altered books to help them cope while they were experiencing difficult symptoms of various mental health diagnoses. Clients who attended the program were able to start their own altered books using materials provided to them. During the research, it was found that implementing an altered book project with a large group of adolescents was challenging, yet successful in introducing a healthy coping skill to over 20 clients in the PHP. Clients also evidenced the importance of using good art materials and working alongside other adolescents who they trusted and felt safe with
Development Art Therapy Methods for Korean Immigrant Elders in an Independent Residential Community Setting
Get PDFThis paper addresses how art therapy methods can improve life quality, empowerment, and well-being for immigrant elders in the US. Participants were first generation immigrants aged 71-86 years old (birth years ranging from 1935 to 1950) who moved to the USA 20-30 years ago. Art groups were held weekly in one-hour long sessions. Data included observation notes of the participants throughout the sessions, a review and discussion of the participants’ art responses, as well as closing interviews. This thesis found art therapy can a) allow immigrant elders to engage with peers and communities, relieving social isolation and loneliness, b) support them in sharing their emotions symbolically without eliciting an extreme emotional response, c) offer a chance to review their lifespan and view their strengths and resilience, and d) provide an appropriate space to discuss life-death education. This thesis sheds light on the importance of art therapy in immigrant populations and offers recommendations for future research like this should be explored further in the future
A Group Music Therapy Method to Promote Mentalization Skills in Clients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Get PDFAbstract
This paper investigates the development of a group music therapy method by adapting elements of mentalization-based treatment (MBT) to help clients with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). A prominent characteristic of NPD is a deficiency in empathy. The fostering of empathy and emotional awareness forms the basis of MBT. Music therapy offers a means to explore these skills on a nonverbal level. This work is even more impactful in a group setting. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of literature specific to music therapy and NPD. Furthermore, despite the availability of writings separately concerning NPD, MBT, group therapy, and music therapy, there is little research synthesizing these topics, indicating that additional study is warranted. At this author’s internship placement at a private psychiatric hospital, there was a significant number of residents with high narcissistic traits. Since mentalization theory is one of the hospital’s foundational orientations, the development of this method aligned with both the institutional philosophy and the needs of the population. The resulting intervention plan consisted of nonverbal musical dialogues performed by residents and observed by peers. These were followed by verbal discussions guessing at their emotional and relational content. In addition, I incorporated weekly receptive group sessions aimed at deepening connections among residents and building trust in the therapeutic relationship. The results suggest that this intervention indeed facilitated the MBT component of affect elaboration by engaging the group’s interest and engendering a variety of interpretations and perspectives
Combining Non-traditional Therapeutic Competencies with Dance/Movement Therapy in Response to Client Reactivity: The Development of a Method
Get PDFIndividuals with reactive attachment disorder present as guarded towards therapeutic care and respond passively to treatment or become combative and aggressive. Previous body-based interventions for individuals with reactive attachment disorder included dangerous and unethical approaches that led to traumatization, distrust, and even death. Historical attachment therapies focused on making the client feel powerless and hopeless to accept care rather than practitioners adjusting to individualized client-centered care. A dance/movement therapy-informed method was developed to provide a nonthreatening therapeutic space to foster genuine participation for clients who present with reactivity towards treatment. The method was implemented over the course of seven weeks in weekly individual sessions with a female adolescent client who presented with reactivity towards therapeutic care. In response to this reactivity, sessions included activities that were familiar and non-threatening, including soccer, basketball, cornhole, volleyball, and going for walks. Body Attitude Coding Sheets and Laban Movement Analysis were used to record and assess the client’s ability to coregulate, communicate, and create through her movement patterns and action efforts. Results included changes in the participant’s pattern of action efforts as well as her use of coregulation, mirroring, and kinesthetic empathy
Group Scriptwriting for Male Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Community Engagement Project
Get PDFThe objective of this community engagement project was to explore the experiences of a group of male survivors of childhood sexual abuse via a writing process through a drama therapy-based lens, which included the use of scaffolding sessions with projective writing techniques, the use of aesthetic distance, verbally sharing written works to the witnessing audience, and embodied feedback and response by the witnessing audience to the performer. The participants were part of a grant-funded male sexual abuse survivor support group at an American outpatient, in-office mental health counseling group practice. All sessions were held in audio-video telehealth sessions. There were five members, all of whom were white/Caucasian, cisgender males between the ages of 50-70. This group was held for one hour, once per week, for a total of six weeks. This process resulted in feedback from the members following the performance. Topics included identifying growth, the traumatic experience being an event and not an all-encompassing or defining characteristic of the individual, identifying repeating patterns and reactions, feeling triggered and having more to say than able to include in a brief project, being able to work with the trauma without “falling in,” experiencing mixed feelings that at times made the process more helpful or more challenging, and reporting that listening to others’ stories was the most beneficial part. For future considerations, this author recommends holding this group twice per week and for eight weeks instead of six weeks to allow for more processing. This added processing time could help address stirred or activated feelings
Tacit and Kinesthetic Healing Factors in Chacian Dance/Movement Therapy
Get PDFDance/movement therapy (DMT) research historically, has relied on positivist epistemologies and methodologies when most of what gets communicated and transacted in clinical praxis lives in the tacit domain. Dance is a form of cultural knowledge that engages collective cognition to pass practices down through generations. Knowledge of DMT practices continues to be transferred from its founders to their apprentices to current day students. This study focuses on the Marian Chace approach, whose ideas and techniques continue to shape current DMT praxis. Grounded in ideas of enaction, distributed creativity, and emergence this study utilizes collaborative arts-based research and embodied artistic inquiry to ask the research question, what are the tacit kinesthetic healing factors in Chacian DMT?
Nine dance/movement therapists from across the United States participated as co-researchers over Zoom tele-conferencing, from March to May 2021, using dance, video capture, choreography, and video editing to transfer expert, embodied, tacit knowledge into explicit, lexical, knowledge. Each participated in a series of three focus groups in which they were asked to create, video record, and share movements representing the healing processes within their Chacian groups. The lead researcher created choreography from these movements, qualitatively analyzed the transcribed focus group interviews, then incorporated these lexical representations into the choreography. She then brought the choreography and list of healing factors found to the co-researchers for validation.
Results are captured in a 9-minute edited dance video and in a list of 24 healing factors: four that are common to verbal psychotherapy; 13 that are widely discussed in DMT literature; and seven that reside mainly in the tacit domain. The seven are: Modulating Tempo, Building and Releasing Tension, Actively Using Breath, Connecting and Being Seen, Accepting Chaos, Transforming, and Creating States of Grace. Findings provide validation of Schmais’ (1985) healing factors in group DMT, Koch’s (2017) meta-theory of embodied aesthetics, Lauffenburger’s (2020) unique factors in DMT, and deWitte et al.’s (2021) mechanisms of change. The researcher concludes that flow and grace are interrelated and that one factor, Creating States of Grace, can potentially be used as a composite indicator of overall healing efficacy of DMT groups
Patient-Drama: A Literature Review of Simulated Patient Experiences in Medical Education and Training
Get PDFSimulated patient experiences are commonly used in medical education and training. These experiences have the benefit of training students in real-world environments without risks to real patients. However, these forms of training can be expensive to implement. Additionally, there may be room to improve their effectiveness for training medical providers in humanistic skills like empathy and relationship building. These experiences can be considered dramatic encounters with the incorporation of dramatic elements like role, story, and improvisation. Given the intentional use of drama in these simulated patient experiences, it can be argued that the definition of drama therapy broadly applies to these experiences. This literature review examines simulated patient experiences through the lens of drama therapy. Four specific types of simulated patient experiences are examined- peer role play, peer simulation, standardized patient experiences, and clinical scenario drama. These experiences are examined using drama therapy’s core processes. The presence of the core processes in these simulated patient experiences, along with their absence, is identified. Potential benefits of the intentional incorporation of drama therapy’s core processes and associated interventions are suggested. Suggestions for future research examining the incorporation of drama therapy in simulated patient experiences are made, including research to deepen the understanding of drama therapy’s core processes and research to solidify understanding of dramatic processes that influence learning outcomes in simulated patient experiences
Moving Through Loss: The Experience of Ambiguous Loss with Hospitalized Children, The Development of a Method
Get PDFThe current method examined the effects of ambiguous loss with medical transplant patients in a pediatric hospital by utilizing a dance/movement therapy intervention. The development of this method was based on ambiguous loss theory with a dance/movement therapy approach. The explored literature identified central themes of ambiguous loss, such as resilience. These themes were connected to the practice of dance/movement therapy, such as embodiment. With this connection, the intervention was developed and implemented with participants. The central themes that emerged from the intervention were change, loss, meaning-making, and hope. One child and two adolescents were participants in this intervention, and each was treated as a separate, individual intervention. All three of the participants had or were awaiting a form of transplant. By utilizing a dance/movement therapy method, the participant embodied an experience that is often difficult to find words to describe. The intervention included a verbal check-in, body-based warm-up, a movement directive, a movement-based closing, and a verbal closing. Rich and positive results were produced by this method that provided a deeper understanding of ambiguous loss with chronically hospitalized children. The recognition of ambiguous loss within the medical and mental health field will provide patients with further, invaluable support throughout their hospitalization
Benefits of Expressive Arts in Coping with Anxiety for Inpatient Adolescents: Development of a Method
Get PDFDevelopmentally, adolescence is a period of change and for teens experiencing psychiatric crisis, these changes may be more difficult to manage. Adolescents admitted to a psychiatric inpatient unit are often experiencing emotional or psychological crises and complex mental health needs. The arts-based intervention that took place aimed to seek the benefits of artmaking in coping with anxiety and stress for adolescents in a short-term psychiatric inpatient unit who all experience symptoms of anxiety. Patients, ages 12-18, participated in three expressive arts groups that used watercolor to encourage the use of arts-based interventions to cope with anxiety, encourage connections with peers to build a sense of belonging, and increase a sense of self. The results demonstrated an increase in presence, focus, and relaxation while using watercolors. Altogether, this paper emphasized the benefits of arts-based interventions, specifically watercolor, and the need for more arts-based interventions during treatment for the inpatient setting