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Langs and Badalamenti (1994a) have given us a provocative account of their preliminary efforts to quantify the means by which therapists and clients express themselves in a psychoanalytic session. Using videotaped recordings of psychoanalytic consultations originally prepared for a teaching conference on how analysts work, Langs and Badalamenti have scored successive 8 second intervals* of the sessions according to five variables: how new is the material under discussion (newness of thematic material); to what extent a story is being told as opposed to generalisations being offered (extent of narration versus intellectualisation); to what extent the material is discussed in positive tones; to what extent in negative tones; and how halting or continuous the dialogue is.
In this way Langs and Badalamenti assemble a large database consisting of ten different time series, five for therapist and five for client. They approach their data in a number of different ways.
By calculating a standard statistical measure, the cross correlation between the time series of client and therapist, Langs and Badalamenti obtain measures of who follows whom in the session: if the therapist becomes more positively toned does the client follow? If the client becomes more positively toned does the therapist follow? In this sample of sessions the strongest correlations were observed in newness of theme, extent of narration and negative tone. The variances of these variables were also the largest. In two strongly experienced sessions the correlations in these variables along with their variances were both quite high, suggesting an attunement model of strong sessions where client and therapist are closely attuned (high correlations), and this attunement produces a wide range (large variance) of emotional response and newness of theme (spontaneity), all possible characteristics of what could be experienced as a strong session. Other interpretations are of course possible.
A second approach deals wi