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The Reflective Functioning (RF) instrument was developed by Peter Fonagy, Mary Target, and colleagues. According to its developers, “Reflective functioning involves both a self-reflective and an interpersonal component that ideally provides the individual with a welldeveloped capacity to distinguish inner from outer reality, pretend from ‘real’ modes of functioning, intra-personal mental and emotional processes from interpersonal communications”, (Fonagy et al. 1997). Psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalysis may be treatments that uniquely foster RF, and increased RF can facilitate improvements in symptoms and character, and increase resiliency to external stressors.
The current measurement of RF is a sophisticated and time consuming process, requiring extensively trained raters and the use of verbatim transcripts of narratives derived from the Adult Attachment Interview, or AAI (Main and Goldwyn 1991). We label this measurement Rater RF (RRF) to contrast it with the Computer RF (CRF) that we are developing. The extensive training and expertise required to measure RRF make it difficult to use in a large-sample study of psychoanalytic treatments and their impact on RF. Computer-aided linguistic analysis has the potential to facilitate the rating of RF in a more efficient manner, while simultaneously identifying the linguistic markers of high and low RF speech. We plan to develop a linguistic model of RRF speech that can then be validated on psychotherapy transcripts