Exploring the relation between clinician's mentalizing interventions and group members' change

Clinicians may adopt different styles in therapeutic process, and one of the main issue is which kind of clinicians' interventions are better at producing positive outcomes (Lingiardi, 2013; Stigler et al., 2007). In the field of mentalization therapy, many studies have shown that some therapeutic actions are better at producing clients' change (e.g., clarifications) (Bateman & Fonagy, 2012); nevertheless, not enough is known about the effectiveness of mentalizing clinicians' interventions in group counselling. This work is aimed at analyzing which counsellors’ mentalizing actions are better at producing change in clients participating in nine-sessions group counselling aimed at promoting mentalization. Two groups of seven underachieving university students participated in this study. The effectiveness of the counselling paths was assessed with the academic performance inventory (Esposito et al., 2017). Transcripts of 18 sessions were analyzed through two procedures: a) the innovative moments coding system (Gonçalves et al., 2011), which is a reliable method for studying change by tracking narrative innovations (Reflection, etc.) along the therapeutic process; and b) the Mentalization Based-Treatment for Groups Adherence and Quality Scale (Karterud, 2015), which allows to code 19 types of mentalizing interventions (e.g., identifying and mentalizing events in the group, etc.). Outcome results showed that only one group improved in terms of academic performance (Z=- 2,226; p= 0,026). Process measures showed that, in the good outcome group, group members' narrative innovations were mainly prompted by specific mentalizing counsellor's interventions, such as questions on mental states, challenging unwarranted beliefs and managing group members turn taking. Nevertheless, also some "no traditional" mentalizing interventions (e.g. interpretations) promoted members' change. The innovative relevance of these findings for group mentalizing counsellors will be discussed.