First experiment: the identification of affect attunement in adult psychotherapy

In this chapter, the author shows that the students’ judgements of attunement would correspond to some degree with those of the experts, though moderated perhaps by professional experience and other attributes such as personality. In fact, the judgements made by the two groups of subjects were very different, and the degree of disagreement between experts and students raised a number of interesting questions. In addition to the findings in relation to the experts and the students, the experiment suggested new ideas about the nature of the concept under investigation. The agreement between the students’ judgements and those of the experts were little better than should have occurred by chance, even amongst those students who had prior experience. The usefulness of the proposed classification is strengthened by the fact that similar categories were identified in the coding of those students whose judgements were similar to those made by the experts.