Abstract
The present moment, or “nowness,” has been studied in the psychology of time. Here, we are interested in the duration of shared nowness, an expansion of individual nowness: this social present is defined by the nonverbal synchrony of two individuals. Therapeutic presence means a therapist is fully attuned and “present” in the session, an important property of the therapeutic alliance. The embodied and systemic (interpersonal) concept of the social present can thus be applied to therapeutic interaction in the here-and-now. We report which findings have accumulated so far. The social present in nontherapeutic dyads was higher in competitive interactions and in people with openness to experience and low narcissism. It was associated with clients’ self-efficacy in the psychotherapy context and with reduced depression as psychotherapy outcome. Our conclusion is that the measure of the social present may provide a link between experiences in the here-and-now and the measurable embodiment in psychotherapy.
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Tschacher, W., Ramseyer, F., Pfammatter, M. (2020). The Social Present in Psychotherapy: Duration of Nowness in Therapeutic Interaction. In: Ochs, M., Borcsa, M., Schweitzer, J. (eds) Systemic Research in Individual, Couple, and Family Therapy and Counseling. European Family Therapy Association Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36560-8_3
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