Experience-Dependent Counselor-Client Brain Synchronization during Psychological Counseling

Zhang, Ya; Tian, Meng; Yang, Yaxi; Hu, Yi

doi:10.1523/eneuro.0236-20.2020

Cited by 16 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 47 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In a more recent publication, this laboratory offers another fNIRS hyperscanning study of interactive brain synchronization during the interpersonal communication process within the first psychotherapeutic session, specifically exploring the role of the counselor's experience in building a therapeutic alliance with the client (Zhang et al, 2020). The work addresses the widely accepted clinical principle that an effective therapeutic relationship or working alliance is the most common and essential therapeutic factor in the clinical and counseling literatures (Wampold and Imel, 2015), and that the establishment of an effective therapeutic relationship is an essential component of therapeutic expertise (Hill et al, 2017).…”

Section: Conclusion: Intersubjectivity As Right Brain-to-right Brain Communications: Update and Clinical Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Intersubjectivity

Schore

2021

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In 1975, Colwyn Trevarthen first presented his groundbreaking explorations into the early origins of human intersubjectivity. His influential model dictates that, during intimate and playful spontaneous face-to-face protoconversations, the emotions of both the 2–3-month-old infant and mother are nonverbally communicated, perceived, mutually regulated, and intersubjectively shared. This primordial basic interpersonal interaction is expressed in synchronized rhythmic-turn-taking transactions that promote the intercoordination and awareness of positive brain states in both. In this work, I offer an interpersonal neurobiological model of Trevarthen’s intersubjective protoconversations as rapid, reciprocal, bidirectional visual-facial, auditory-prosodic, and tactile-gestural right brain-to-right brain implicit nonverbal communications between the psychobiologically attuned mother and the developing infant. These co-constructed positive emotional interactions facilitate the experience-dependent maturation of the infant’s right brain, which is in an early critical period of growth. I then address the central role of interpersonal synchrony in intersubjectivity, expressed in a mutual alignment or coupling between the minds and bodies of the mother and infant in face-to-face protoconversations, as well as how these right brain-to-right brain emotional transmissions generate bioenergetic positively charged interbrain synchrony within the dyad. Following this, I offer recent brain laterality research on the essential functions of the right temporoparietal junction, a central node of the social brain, in face-to-face nonverbal communications. In the next section, I describe the ongoing development of the protoconversation over the 1st year and beyond, and the co-creation of a fundamental energy-dependent, growth-promoting social emotional matrix that facilitates the emergence of the highly adaptive human functions of mutual play and mutual love. In the final section, I discuss the clinical applications of this interpersonal neurobiological model of intersubjectivity, which has a long history in the psychotherapy literature. Toward that end, I offer very recent paradigm-shifting hyperscanning research that simultaneously measures both the patient and therapist during a psychotherapeutic interaction. Using the Trevarthen’s two-person intersubjective model, this research demonstrates changes in both brains of the therapeutic dyad and the critical role of nonverbal communications in an emotionally-focused psychotherapy session. These studies specifically document interbrain synchronization between the right temporoparietal junction of the patient and the right temporoparietal junction of the clinician, a right brain-to-right brain nonverbal communication system in the co-constructed therapeutic alliance. Lastly, I discuss the relationship between the affect communicating functions of the intersubjective motivational system and the affect regulating functions of the attachment motivational system.

show abstract

Section: Conclusion: Intersubjectivity As Right Brain-to-right Brain Communications: Update and Clinical Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Intersubjectivity

Schore

2021

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In addition, rehabilitation of brain damage and therapy for mood disorders may benefit from better understanding of emotion-cognition interactions in the right hemisphere. As an example to that end, a recent study highlights the importance of rTPJ in counselor-client brain synchronization during psychological counselling [114].…”

Section: Competition Between Negative Emotional Stimuli and Global Visual Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion-Attention Interaction in the Right Hemisphere

Hartikainen

2021

Brain Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Hemispheric asymmetries in affective and cognitive functions have been extensively studied. While both cerebral hemispheres contribute to most affective and cognitive processes, neuroscientific literature and neuropsychological evidence support an overall right hemispheric dominance for emotion, attention and arousal. Emotional stimuli, especially those with survival value such as threat, tend to be prioritized in attentional resource competition. Arousing unpleasant emotional stimuli have prioritized access, especially to right-lateralized attention networks. Interference of task performance may be observed when limited resources are exhausted by task- and emotion-related processing. Tasks that rely on right hemisphere-dependent processing, like attending to the left visual hemifield or global-level visual features, are especially vulnerable to interference due to attention capture by unpleasant emotional stimuli. The aim of this review is to present literature regarding the special role of the right hemisphere in affective and attentional brain processes and their interaction. Furthermore, clinical and technological implications of this interaction will be presented. Initially, the effects of focal right hemisphere lesion or atrophy on emotional functions will be introduced. Neurological right hemisphere syndromes including aprosodia, anosognosia and neglect, which further point to the predominance of the intact right hemisphere in emotion, attention and arousal will be presented. Then there will be a brief review of electrophysiological evidence, as well as evidence from patients with neglect that support attention capture by emotional stimuli in the right hemisphere. Subsequently, experimental work on the interaction of emotion, attention and cognition in the right hemispheres of healthy subjects will be presented. Finally, clinical implications for better understanding and assessment of alterations in emotion–attention interaction due to brain disorder or treatment, such as neuromodulation, that impact affective brain functions will be discussed. It will be suggested that measuring right hemispheric emotion–attention interactions may provide basis for novel biomarkers of brain health. Such biomarkers allow for improved diagnostics in brain damage and disorders and optimized treatments. To conclude, future technological applications will be outlined regarding brain physiology-based measures that reflect engagement of the right hemisphere in affective and attentional processes.

show abstract

“…I also offer information about very recent advances in neuroscience methodology and technology that allows for a deeper understanding of the interactions of two right brain systems in the therapeutic relationship co-constructed by the clinician and the patient. The right brain-to-right brain model, first proposed in 1994, is now directly supported in groundbreaking paradigm shifting hyperscanning research of both the patient's and therapist's interacting brains, showing a right-lateralized interbrain synchronization between them during an emotionally-focused psychotherapy session (Zhang et al, , 2020. These advances provide a valuable opportunity for a deeper understanding of the implicit relational processes that operate between both members of the therapeutic dyad at levels beneath conscious awareness.…”

Section: Allan Schore **mentioning

confidence: 91%

Right Brain-to-Right Brain Psychotherapy: Recent Clinical and Scientific Advances

Schore¹

2021

JSST

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ontogenetically and phylogenetically" (p. 21). Consonant with this conceptualization, in his wide ranging studies of the unique specializations of the dual brain hemispheres the neuropsychiatrist Iain now asserts that "The right hemisphere both grounds our experience of the world at the bottom end, so to speak, and makes sense of it, at the top end," that this hemisphere is more in touch with both affect and the body, and that "neurological evidence supports what is called the primacy of affect and the primacy of unconscious over conscious will" (p. 44).For the past three decades I have offered interdisciplinary research and clinical data demonstrating that the right brain is the psychobiological substrate of the human unconscious. This right-lateralized deep core of the subjective self evolves in the early mother-infant attachment relationship, and over the lifespan this dynamic system, at levels beneath conscious awareness, intersubjectively communicates with other right brains, that are tuned to receive these communications. This nonverbal communication system lies at the foundation of the evolutionary mechanism of attachment, expressed as the implicit (unconscious) interactive regulation of emotion, and thereby the regulation of biological synchronicity between and within organisms.Thus synchronized right brain-to-right brain affectively charged attachment dynamics act as a biopsychosocial mechanism by which humans are sociophysiologically connected to others in order to co-regulate their internal homeostatic states .Applying this developmental model of the mother-infant dyad to the clinical context I have described how the co-created psychotherapeutic relationship acts as a dynamic intersubjective context of rapid communications of emotional states within the evolving therapeutic alliance.These spontaneous right brain-to-right brain nonverbal communications of self-states take place in the present moment, a time frame of fractions of a second to 2 to 3 seconds. Importantly, this "relational unconscious" not only communicates with but also synchronizes and is expanded by another relational unconscious (Schore, 2019a, b; 2020a,b). This synchronized coupling of right brain patterns allows the therapeutic dyad to mutually share unconscious implicit communicative, emotional, and regulatory functions, thereby facilitating psychotherapeutic growth and development of the patient's right brain.In my two recent volumes Right Brain Psychotherapy and The Development of the Unconscious Mind I continue to expand my theoretical and clinical studies of regulation theory, a theory of the development, psychopathogenesis, and treatment of the subjective self. This

show abstract

Experience-Dependent Counselor-Client Brain Synchronization during Psychological Counseling

Cited by 16 publications

References 47 publications

The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Intersubjectivity

The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Intersubjectivity

Emotion-Attention Interaction in the Right Hemisphere

Right Brain-to-Right Brain Psychotherapy: Recent Clinical and Scientific Advances

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About