Thursdays from 12.30 pm to 1.30 pm
Participation in an expert session costs 30 euros. You can participate in all expert sessions for 90 euros!
15% discount for VUB-PE partners (staff, alumni, internship mentors) and VVKP members.
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Psychological therapies strive to improve the overall emotional state of the client. Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) aims to achieve this by avoiding lengthy discussions of the problem and by focusing on the positive aspects of the client’s life. To direct the conversation towards the positive, SFBT practitioners use many techniques, including reframing what the client said, appreciating and complimenting the client, and asking questions that nudge the client towards elaborating on their desired future. But to what effect? If these techniques succeed, the emotional valence of the client’s speech should transition towards positive, both within and across sessions. Importantly, and as theorized by SFBT, more positive conversations should be more successful at inspiring a positive vision of the future, leading to better therapy outcomes. To test these predictions, we recorded and transcribed sessions and measured clinical outcomes for 29 SFBT clients. We then used a transformer-based Large Language Model (HerBERT) to track the evolution of clients’ emotional state as expressed through language. The analysis revealed that although clients did become more positive, this did not correlate with therapy outcomes. We discuss the potential of machine learning and the implications of our findings for psychotherapy.
Jarosław R. Lelonkiewicz obtained a degree in Applied Psychology from Jagiellonian University (Poland) and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Edinburgh (UK). He has taught at The University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University (UK) and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (Italy) and Monterrey Institute of Technology (Mexico). He is now based at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, working as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow. In his research, Jarosław investigates the processes supporting complex cognition. What enables us to produce and understand language? How is it that we learn? What determines how much we remember? At the BRUCCpro session, Jarosław will tell us about his recent project looking into the impact of using positive language in psychotherapy.
The Minority Stress Model proposes that structural oppression experienced due to a certain minority identity leads to higher rates of psychopathology, especially for adolescents and young adults. This also holds true for gender-diverse persons, that is, persons who experience their gender beyond the norms or stereotypes of the sex they were assigned at birth. Notably, the rates of death by suicide among transgender youth are substantially elevated compared to the general population. Traditionally, psychology and psychiatry pathologized diverse genders, however, contemporarily, the consensus in the mental health field is, that variation in gender identity is healthy and normal. Despite this progress, stigma and discrimination still play a vital role in chronic psychological distress in gender-diverse people. Gender-affirmative interventions that target the predictors of stress and improve resilience have the potential to improve mental health in gender-diverse persons despite experiencing discrimination and stigma. This talk will give an overview of the construction of gender, intersectionality, and gender affirmative interventions within the context of clinical psychology as well as introduce the current research project POWER.
Laura Maria Lingenti is a PhD student at VUB under the supervision of Prof. Imke Baetens and Prof. Kris Baetens. They earned their bachelor’s degree in psychology and completed their master’s degree in cognitive and clinical neuroscience, specialising in psychopathology, at Maastricht University. Following their studies, they gained experience working for a WLINA*-organisation providing an assisted living initiative for (multi-)marginalised girls, transgender, and non-binary adolescents in Berlin. In 2023, they won the Brussels Innoviris Applied PhD grant for their proposal on designing and testing a resilience-building intervention for gender-diverse persons in Brussels.