Events Calendar

Moderating Factors in Predicting Substance Use: Listening to Therapists and Clients Interact

Speaker: Paul C. Amrhein, Columbia University

Talk Title: Moderating Factors in Predicting Substance Use: Listening to Therapists and Clients Interact

Abstract: During psychotherapy, and motivational interviewing (MI), in particular, the counselor and client construct a conversation. Besides treatment-specific mechanisms invoked by the counselor (e.g., exploration of ambivalence), the content of this conversation is the result of well-learned discourse mechanisms entailing language fluency, communication skills, goal-directed motivation and social learning, shared by orparticular to these individuals. Shared discourse mechanisms can enable but disparate mechanisms can inhibit a conversation that reliably leads to improved treatment outcomes. Important in this regard is the extent of mutual speaker entrainment at phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic levels. The pragmatic level, specifically, speech acts, will be the focus of my talk, as I discuss how matches and mismatches in counselor and client discourse mechanisms can promote or derail the therapeutic conversation, triggering,e.g., client face management, that can skew the meaning and prognostic value of client talk, as a measure of therapeutic engagement and treatment outcomes. The Technical Hypothesis of MI posits that counselor verbal behavior indirectly influences unhealthy client behavior through increases in the strength or frequency of client change talk. Poorly understood, however, is whether or how counselor and client language indices (measured by MITI, MISC or DARNC coding schemes), as markers for discourse mechanisms, interact to determine the predictive value of client change talk.I will present findings of two recent MI training studies based on Swedish Corrections exit interviews and New York City community treatment sessions for substance abuse to demonstrate how and why change talk does not always lead to behavior change.To better understand how the MI conversation engages mechanisms of change, it is clearly important to understand when it doesnt.

Biography: Dr. Amrhein has attracted national and international attention for his research on motivational interviewing and the study of commitment language. He earned his PhD in Experimental Psychology and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research has important implications for understanding and predicting changes in drug use. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University in New York and he holds a tenured faculty position in the Department of Psychology at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Dr. Amrhein also served on the faculty of the University of New Mexico, where he worked closely with Dr. William R. Miller on studies of motivational interviewing.

Host: Prof. Panayiotis Georgiou

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems