Biomedical subjects

Charles Antaki

Publications and source records attributed to Charles Antaki.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Producing decisions in service-user groups for people with an intellectual disability: two contrasting facilitator styles.

Service-user groups whose goals include the promotion of self-advocacy for people with an intellectual disability aim, among other things, to encourage service users to identify problems and find solutions. However, service users' contributions to group sessions may not always be full and spontaneous. This presents a dilemma to the facilitator. In two case studies, we identify two ways in which the dilemma is managed. In one case, the facilitator takes an initiating role in each stage of a decision-making cycle. In the other, the facilitator short-circuits the decision-making cycle. The former seems to be closer to the philosophy of self-advocacy, but both nevertheless result in clients not taking the initiative and arguably disempowers them.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

When psychotherapists disclose personal information about themselves to clients.

Psychotherapists sometimes disclose personal information to their clients during therapeutic sessions. We report here our analysis of how these 'therapist self-disclosures' are done. In a sample of 15 sessions involving four therapists, we find that all therapists use them sparingly and some not at all. When they do, they 'match' something in the client's preceding turn. Vehicles for the match can range from comparatively simple agreements to more complicated 'second stories', which use analogies from the therapists' own current life. We find that these 'personal' disclosures are invariably rather ordinary but are made to bear visibly on the therapeutic business at hand, though not always in obvious ways. The ordinariness of therapist's self-disclosures underpins what seems to be one of their main actions-to 'normalize', for a number of disparate local interactional contingencies, the clients' experience. We discuss the practice of using one's own life experiences to bear on one's client's troubles, noting the recurrent features of extreme case formulations and explicit recipient design. We conclude with a brief discussion of the relation between our analyses and those which might be offered by members of the therapeutic community.

Communication↗

PubMed2005

Self-disclosure as a situated interactional practice.

Self-disclosure has long been a site of research in clinical and social psychology, where it suffers the fate of many interactional phenomena. It is operationalized (typically, into a set of bald statements of varying intimacy), and measured as a dependent variable (subject to the operation of factors like the age or gender of the discloser, the degree of acquaintance with the disclosed-to recipient, the expectation of reciprocity and so on), or manipulated as a causative independent variable (which affects such things as the perception of the discloser, the effectiveness of therapy, and so on). This treatment of self-disclosure, embedded in a research culture of a-contextual, experimenter-defined phenomena, risks missing the point that in ordinary life, self-disclosure is a social performance which must be brought off in interaction, and has its interactional context and its interactional consequences. When we examine examples of such brought-off disclosures, we start to see patterns in their design as voluntary revelations of personal data, and patterns in their social function, which are invisible to the standard factors and measures paradigm of experimental social psychology.

Humans↗