Carla Cunha

• PhD in Psychology, specialization in Clinical Psychology
• Professor (Associate) at Instituto Universitário da Maia - ISMAI [University Institute of Maia], Portugal

The present study explores how resentment and forgiveness can affect older people and how resentment can be alleviated or intensified over time. The investigation is based on a qualitative methodology, using life history interviews, carried out in two moments. Data were collected from 20 individuals over 65 years old. Data were subject to thematic...

Treatment satisfaction has been found to have good therapeu- tic results in psychotherapy, and the 18-item version of the client satisfaction questionnaire (CSQ-18) is one of the most widely used measures to evaluate it. This study sought to carry out a pilot analysis of the psychometric’s properties and factorial structure, as well as validate the...

This study aimed to validate and explore the psychometric properties of the credibility/expectancy questionnaire (CEQ) for the Portuguese population in the context of routine practice. The sample includes 87 clients from a university psychotherapy clinic. All clients completed self-report measures to assess credibility and expectation (CEQ), as wel...

Several studies have suggested that self-forgiveness promotes psychological well-being. The state self-forgiveness scale (SSFS) and the differentiated self-forgiveness process scale (DSFPS) are two self-report questionnaires that assess self-forgiveness in psychotherapy, personal change, and health. The present study aims to examine the psychometri...

Intimate partner violence results in extensive negative mental health outcomes including depression, posttraumatic stress, and anxiety. Moreover, victimized partners who experience cumulative episodes of abuse over time can also present severe affect dysregulation and interpersonal difficulties. Preliminary evidence for existing psychological treat...

The theory of the dialogical self, which is based upon the metaphor of the self as a dialogue between different voices and I-positions, conceptualizes the structure and functioning of the self as a product of communication and relational processes. The dynamics of the dialogical self imply an articulation between the individual self and the self in...

Background: Depression is currently considered the epidemic of the century. In recent decades, research has established that psychotherapy is globally effective for the treatment of depression; however, it remains open which psychotherapeutic treatment is most effective and, particularly, if its efficacy is maintained over the long term. Given the...

Protocol of a brief clinical intervention in Emotion-Focused Therapy and self-forgiveness in undergraduate students

Background: The lack of knowledge regarding psychometric characteristics of brief scales for assessing the severity of symptoms of depression for the Portuguese population limits the ability of health professionals to signal clinically relevant situations, as well as the implementation of alternative forms of mental health care. The Patient Health...

Study of the psychometric properties of the scales SSFS & DSFPS for the Portuguese population.

Psychometric properties of the SSFS and DSFPS for the Portuguese population and its relation with psychological well-being.

Previous laboratory studies have explored the importance of participants adopting an immersed or distanced perspective in the analysis of their experiences. These studies concluded that distancing allows analyzing emotions in a healthier way and immersion leads to higher vulnerability. However, in psychotherapy, the relationship between these persp...

The impact of Emotion-Focused Therapy in the processes of forgiveness and self-forgiveness.

Objective: The Assimilation model argues that therapists should work responsively within the client's therapeutic zone of proximal development (TZPD). This study analyzed the association between the collaborative processes assessed by the Therapeutic Collaboration Coding System (TCCS) and advances in assimilation, as assessed by the Assimilation o...

Objective: This research explored the consolidation phase of emotion-focused therapy (EFT) for depression and studies-through a task-analysis method-how client-therapist dyads evolved from the exploration of the problem to self-narrative reconstruction. Method: Innovative moments (IMs) were used to situate the process of self-narrative reconstru...

The present study focuses on the analysis of novelty emergence in classic Gloria Films with Rogers, Perls, and Ellis to understand how the same client formulated her own problem and if and how change occurred in those three sessions. The Innovative Moments Coding System was applied to track innovative moments (IMs) and their themes. The session wit...

This paper describes the implementation and assessment of a feminist psycotherapeutic intervention with four groups of women victims of partner violence. The main goals guiding this intervention were: 1) to inform about the phenomenon of gender violence, 2) to deconstruct discourses on gender, 3) to reflect on meanings and the impact of personal tr...

Per Linell’s (2009) book Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically offers an inte- grated view upon the many strands of Dialogism, establishing itself as an essential ref- erence to the field. In this review of his book we aim to discuss a few selected topics, building upon these with our own views. Initially, we focus on the relevance and...

Self-multiplicity is a widely recognized phenomenon within psychology. The study of how self-continuity emerges amidst self-multiplicity remains a crucial issue, however. Dialogical approaches are widely viewed as suitable for developing this field of study but they demand coherent methods compatible with their theoretical bases. After reviewing th...

According to the narrative framework, clients seek therapeutic help due to the constricting nature of problematic self-narratives and psychotherapy should contribute to the elaboration of narrative novelties and innovative self-narratives. We term these narrative novelties as innovative moments (IMs) and developed the Innovative Moments Coding Syst...

According to the narrative framework, clients seek therapeutic help due to the constricting nature of problematic self-narratives and psychotherapy should contribute to the elaboration of narrative novelties and innovative self-narratives. We term these narra- tive novelties as innovative moments (IMs) and developed the Innovative Moments Cod- ing...

According to the narrative approach, change in self-narratives is an important part of successful psychotherapy. In this view, several authors have highlighted the usefulness of narrating new experiences (like actions, thoughts, and stories) during therapy in contrast with maladaptive client self-narratives. These new experiences are termed here in...

Dialogism is presented as a relational paradigm in which intersubjective and communicational relationship is considered the most appropriate to further explore and understand selfhood. In abandoning the paradigm of self-awareness for the comprehension of selfhood, dialogism attempts to elaborate on the importance of the intersubjective relationship...

In recent decades, several psychologists have emphasized the central role that narratives play in human life (Sarbin, 1986; Bruner, 1990; McAdams, 1993; Hermans and Hermans-Jansen, 1995). If, as Bakhtin (1984) argued, ‘to be is to communicate’ (p. 187), narratives are as important to the self as they are for others with whom we relate: One (re)cons...

This commentary focuses on König's (2009) work as an opportunity to elaborate on selfhood as a dynamic and dialogical phenomenon. We depart from Bakhtinian dialogism and dialogical self theory to focus on the dynamics of selfhood processes and draw a more explicit theoretical link between the dialogical self and phenomenological experience. The int...

This commentary focuses on König’s (2009) work as an opportunity to elaborate on selfhood as a dynamic and dialogical phenomenon. We depart from Bakhtinian dialogism and dialogical self theory to focus on the dynamics of selfhood processes and draw a more explicit theoretical link between the dialogical self and phenomenological experience. The int...

Haye's article "Living being and speaking being" highlights a confusion that the traditional cognitive science has been making between cognition and representation, reducing semantics (meaning) to the syntax (computation with symbols). This traditional view cannot fully grasp the dependence of meaning on the relational context, opening space for th...

This book brings to social scientists a new look at how human beings are striving towards understanding others-- and through that effort--making sense of themselves. It brings together researchers from all over the World who have suggested a set of new approaches to the basic research issue of how human beings are social beings, while being unique...

It is intuitively felt that ambiguity plays a crucial role in human beings' everyday life and in psychologists' theoretical and applied work. However, ambiguity remains essentially non-problematised in psychological science since its foundation. This article analyses positivist and social constructionist perspectives on ambiguity in the context of...

Resumo A questão da identidade pessoal tem sido alvo de diversas abordagens, pelo que neste trabalho se descreve a forma como questões de índole epistémica subjazem a diferentes concepções e respostas a esta questão por diferentes modelos teóricos da psicologia. Grande parte deste problema deve-se a uma imagem da natureza do conhecimento como sendo...