The Transference Effect And Its Intervention

Transference is an important concept in psychodynamic theory,and has been gradually paid attention to by other psychotherapy theories and social cognition theory.Psychodynamic theory defines transference as the phenomenon in which a person transfers his or her early feelings,desires,and conflicts toward his or her parents onto the therapist.Social cognitive theory defines transference as social perception and interaction beyond a given information,that is,after the activation of the representation of significant others,the individual applies it to the social information processing of new target persons.Some researchers have developed a social cognitive research paradigm of transference,which quantifies the strength of the transference effect by constructing having participants remember a virtual new person with some overlap with the subject’s significant other representation and defining transference operationalization as a significant other representation congruency memory bias.Researchers in the field of social cognition have used this paradigm to explore the impact of the transference effect on social cognition and some moderating variables of the consistency effect.Through this paradigm,researchers in the field of social cognition have explored the influence of transference effect on social cognition and some moderating variables of transference effect.In the field of clinical research,researchers mainly focus on the relationship between the content of transference and psychopathology,as well as the relationship between transference intervention and the ultimate therapeutic effect.However,the existing social cognitive paradigm has some limitations:according to the dual processing theory of social cognition,transference,as a social cognitive process,consists of implicit automatic processing and explicit control processing.The existing social cognitive research paradigm of transference can only measure the externally controlled processing through memory recognition tasks,but not the implicit automatic processing.There are also certain blind spots in terms of research questions:Few quantitative studies have explored the relationship between the strength of the transference effect and psychopathology,as well as the direct effects and mechanisms of transference interventions on the transference effect.In order to address these limitations,this study extended and improved the original social cognitive research paradigm to measure both explicit and implicit effect of transference;then explored the relationship between the strength of the transference effect and psychopathology through quantitative research;finally examined the effects of three interventions on the on explicit and implicit effect of transference and discussed the underling mechanism.Study 1 aimed to improve and extend the social cognitive research paradigm and to verify the validity of the paradigm in inducing transference effects under automated processing in order to provide a reliable quantitative research paradigm for subsequent studies.Sub-study 1-1 aimed to improve the control features in the original paradigm by replacing irrelevant words with famous features in order to avoid them from being affected by the priming effect.The study used a 2 × 2 within-subjects design with 20 subjects each in the experimental and control groups and was paired one-by-one to examine whether this memory of a new person with similar features to the subject’s significant others induced an explicit effect of transference.The results of the study revealed a significant group*trait type interaction,with subjects in the experimental group having significantly higher false-positive memories for features not belonging to the new person but belonging to significant others was significantly higher than that for features not belonging to the new person and not belonging to significant others,while there was no significant difference between the two in the control group.This result suggests that remembering a new person that resembles a significant other triggers an episodic effect of transference,which in turn leads to significantly higher false-positive memories for subjects in the experimental group than for control subjects,consistent with their significant other representations.The improved paradigm allowed measuring the significance of the explicit effect of transference.Sub-studies 1-2 aimed to introduce a lexical decision task used in cognitive psychology to measure implicit cognitive processes and to verify whether the paradigm is effective in eliciting implicit effects of transference and to measure them accurately.The study used a 2 × 2 within-subjects design with 21 subjects each in the experimental and control groups,and was paired one-by-one to examine whether this memory of a new person with similar features to the subject’s significant others induced the implicit effect of transference.The results revealed that subjects reacted significantly less to the judgment of words that were not the new person but were significant other than to words that were neither the new person nor significant other,while the difference between the two was not significant in the control group.This result suggests that remembering the new person similar to significant other triggers an implicit effect of transference,which in turn leads to significantly lower response times for judgments of words that do not belong to the new person but belong to the significant other than for words that do not belong to the new person nor to the significant other.The improved paradigm can measure and examined the significance of the implicit effect of transference.Study 2 aimed to explore the relationship between the strength of transference effects and psychopathology using a modified social cognitive paradigm through quantitative research.Sub-study 2-1 aimed to explore the relationship between the effects of transference and psychopathology.This study(N=26)used a correlational study approach and found that the explicit effects of transference were significantly positively associated with hostile symptoms,paranoid symptoms,and interpersonal rigidity,and negatively associated with attachment anxiety.The results suggest that the explicit effect of transference is indeed strongly associated with some psychopathological symptoms.Sub-study 2-2 aimed to explore the relationship between the implicit effects of transference and psychopathology.This study(N=23)used a correlational study approach and found that the implicit effect of transference was significantly and positively associated with attachment avoidance,interpersonal problems of overly nurturant,and interpersonal rigidity.The results suggest that the implicit effect of transference is indeed strongly associated with some psychopathological symptoms.Study 3 aimed to validate the effects of the three intervention methods on the implicit and explicit effects of transference using a modified social cognitive research paradigm using an analog intervention experiment.Sub-study 3-1 aimed to validate the effects of the three intervention methods on the explicit effects of transference.In this study,three 2 × 4 mixed designs were used to divide the subjects into four groups:exploring the past group(N=27),awareness of the present group(N=28),replacing the old with the new group(N=28),and the control group(N=23)to test the effects of the three intervention methods on the explicit effects of transference,respectively.Sub-study 3-2 aimed to verify the effects of the three intervention methods on the implicit effect of transference.In this study,three 2 X 4 mixed designs were used to divide the subjects into four groups:exploring the past group(N=24),awareness of the present group(N=29),replacing the old with the new group(N=27),and the control group(N=27),to test the effects of the three intervention methods on the implicit effects of transference.The results found that the exploring the past intervention made the implicit effect of transference insignificant but did not significantly affect the explicit effect of transference;the awareness the present intervention did not significantly affect the implicit and explicit processes of transference;the replacing the old with the new intervention significantly reduced the accessibility of significant others’ representations at the level of the implicit effect of transference,and at the level of the explicit effect of transference,it made the subjects’ accuracy of recognition of both characteristics of the new person to the same level.The current study improves and expands the research paradigm of transference from the perspective of social cognitive theory,enabling it to quantify both explicit and implicit effect of transference,then explores the relationship between the explicit and implicit effect of transference and psychopathology,finally explores the direct effects of different intervention methods on the explicit and implicit effect of transference,fills the gap between basic and clinical research on transference,and lays the foundation for further exploration of the psychological mechanisms and intervention methods of transference.