Soft Prosody and Embodied Attunement in Therapeutic Interaction: A Multimethod Case Study of a Moment of Change

Abstract

This study focused on a moment of weeping in one psychotherapy case. The overall aim was toexplore the role of “soft prosody” in psychotherapy interaction—that is, the participants’ use ofpauses, a lower volume, slower rhythms, and softer intonation than in the surrounding speech. Amixed-method, micro-analytic perspective was applied to investigate (a) social interaction, includ-ing its verbal and nonverbal elements; (2) the participants’ bodily responses, including autonomicnervous system (ANS) measurements; and (3) the participants’ thoughts and feelings during thetherapy session, as reported in subsequent individual interviews. Soft prosody was observed to be animportant conversational tool. It was used in conveying affiliation and offering therapeutic formula-tions, and it appeared to contribute both to emotional attunement between the participants and to thetherapeutic change that occurred during the interaction under study. Two differing bodily synchro-nization tendencies in the arousal levels were observed among the participants: (a) a complementarytendency—that is, when the client’s arousal increased, the therapist’s decreased (occurring duringthe active therapeutic processing); and (b) a tendency to concurrent decreased arousal in all of theparticipants.