
Cheri L Marmarosh- PhD
- Professor (Associate) at George Washington University
Cheri L Marmarosh
- PhD
- Professor (Associate) at George Washington University
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99
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Publications (99)
The current commentary explores the complex issues raised in ‘Israel-Palestine: Unresolved group trauma is an obstacle for peace’ (Ezquerro and Cañete, 2025), a paper that applies individual and group analytic theory to understand how intergenerational group traumas can lead to human suffering and interfere with peace. The commentary offers additio...
Seventy patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) in treatment at McLean Hospital received a group intervention to incorporate spirituality into mental health care treatment. The Spiritual Psychotherapy for Inpatient, Residential, and Intensive Treatment (SPIRIT) intervention is a hospital-based intervention grounded in a cognitive behavi...
Objective: Group therapists are in the trenches helping patients suffering from many different issues, including people diagnosed with depression, anxiety, substance use, eating disorders, and pain. Group therapists know the value of groups, and they understand that group therapy is a valid treatment intervention. Unfortunately, not everyone is awa...
Six hundred and fifty-four inpatients who participated in a spiritual group therapy intervention provided qualitative feedback regarding what helped them and what could be improved. Patients revealed that enjoying a sense of connection with other people and a sense of openness in the groups and simply talking about spirituality with other people wa...
People are living longer lives with incurable cancer, and the number of people living with incurable/metastatic cancer is growing. Although people are surviving longer, the quality of their life has yet to receive adequate research attention. Psychological vital signs, evidence-based psychological signs, and symptoms that are critical to patient we...
We are surrounded by trauma, grief, pandemics, health care inequality, poverty, climate change, and social injustice, not to mention increases in suicide, depression, and loneliness. How can group therapists address these issues and thrive? The current special edition focuses on how groups foster compassion, provide spiritual healing, and address h...
Importance: Race and ethnicity are critical factors that influence healthcare equity for cancer patients and need to be studied. Objective: This study explores how race and ethnicity influence patients living with multiple myeloma (MM), an incurable blood cancer. Design: Four hundred and thirty-five patients diagnosed with smoldering or active MM c...
Objective: Telehealth has gained significant popularity in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and public health guidelines (Burgoyne & Cohn, 2020). To continue therapeutic services with little disruption, mental health professionals provided online options to patients. Group therapy has transitioned online without research exploring individual facto...
One hundred twenty-six supervisors completed a survey regarding their perceptions of telesupervision compared to face-to-face supervision after transitioning to online supervision during COVID-19. The results revealed that most supervisors enjoyed engaging in online supervision, valued it, and wanted to continue using it, but they had little to no...
Using a sample of couples from the E(f)FECTS study, a Randomized Clinical Trial of Emotionally Focused Therapy across five Spanish Speaking Countries, we will explore the relationship between attachment, reflective functioning (RF), epistemic trust (ET), and couple satisfaction. Although much has been written about the importance of RF and ET in re...
Mental health services are experiencing unprecedented levels of demand from clients during COVID resulting in longer wait lists and therapist burnout. As Nemoyer et al. (2019) point out, minorities experience a higher burden of mental illness while having less access and lower quality treatments. COVID has increased demands for mental health servic...
Group psychotherapy has been shown to be equivalent to individual therapy for many disorders, including anxiety, depression, grief, eating disorders, and schizophrenia (Burlingame & Strauss, 2021). In addition to effectiveness in reducing symptoms, group offers members a sense of belonging, purpose, hope, altruism, and meaning throughout treatment...
Prior research highlights the importance of spirituality/religion (S/R) as it relates to several aspects of mental health and clinical interventions. This research has been expanded to include the concurrent examination of neurobiological correlates of S/R to elucidate potential biological mechanisms. However, the majority of neurobiological resear...
Background: In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most group therapists moved their practice to online platforms. Surveys of psychotherapists indicate that many intend to maintain at least part of their practices online after the pandemic. This survey-based study is an attempt to identify therapist experiences with doing group therapy online, and...
Objective: The present article applies attachment theory to understand the impact of COVID-19 on social inequities, discrimination, and oppression of people based on their different group identities (e.g., race, class, ability, gender, faith). Method: Theory and research was reviewed in the area social and clinical psychology. The link between atta...
Group psychology and group psychotherapy (GPGP) are distinctive, effective practices that meet an important need. In 2018, the American Psychological Association recognized GPGP as a specialty, thus setting standards for education and training in the field. Although there is a need for high-quality group psychotherapy, practitioners often lack stan...
The group climate, cohesion, and alliance with the leaders are critical elements of effective group psychotherapy. Although there has been significant attention to these curative mechanisms, there has been less attention to ruptures in the group relationships or the repair of them. The current special issue is devoted to theory, research, training,...
Objectives: All relationships experience tensions and ruptures, but not all ruptures are acknowledged and repaired. Individual therapy researchers have shown that repairing ruptures in the therapy relationship is associated with an increased alliance, decreased dropout, and positive treatment outcome. Until recently, there has been less attention p...
We describe results from an empirical study of neural correlates associated with avoidant and anxious attachment. Participants were given a task designed to produce a high rate of errors while their brain waves were measured using electroencephalography (EEG). In the current study, we examined the relationship of anxious and avoidant attachment to...
Therapists engage in transfers—a specific type of termination—with clients who will be continuing treatment with new therapists after they depart. Consequently, new therapists begin treatments in the shadow of the loss of outgoing therapist. These transfer experiences frequently occur in yearlong training settings, where therapists-in-training enco...
Objective: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) threatened not only people’s physical health but also every aspect of their psychological well-being: from their struggle to avoid contracting the disease, to their coping with the disruption of the normal course of their lives, to the trauma they endured when the virus took the lives of those they love...
The purpose of this article is to serve as a guide for counseling psychologists to learn about a neuroscience methodology that can be used to study psychotherapy change processes. Event-related potential (ERP) is a specific type of electroencephalography that can be time-locked to a stimulus and thus allows researchers to examine neural responses t...
Relying on positive internal representations facilitates our ability to feel safe and secure when taking risks and provides a road map to guide us during interpersonal exchanges. Although most graduate programs encourage students to engage in research, we rarely link participating in research as directly influencing positive internal representation...
The current issue highlights the necessity of feedback in group psychotherapy—both monitoring group member feedback during treatment and providing feedback to group members before and during group therapy. Regardless of the orientation or type of group, collecting members’ perceptions and experiences influences how the group leader identifies membe...
Attachment theory is influencing the research and practice of group psychotherapy. The current issue highlights some of the bridges attachment theory has made both to contemporary group theories that include interpersonal theory and polyvagal theory and to approaches to group work that include mentalization-based group treatment. In addition, attac...
Data from interviews with 12 graduate-level trainees about their experiences of working with clients who had been transferred to them from another therapist were analyzed using consensual qualitative research. Trainees reported a range of helpful and hindering aspects about the transfer experience related to the client (e.g., client had experienced...
Therapists often struggle to determine the most important things to focus on during termination. Reviewing the treatment, identifying plans for the future, summarizing positive gains, and saying goodbye receive the most attention. Despite our best intentions, termination can end up becoming intellectualized. Attachment theory and recent development...
Often, group therapists collaborate with individual therapists in conjoint treatment. Many of these patients start in individual therapy and are referred to the group to help facilitate the treatment and address interpersonal and relational issues that either cannot or will not be addressed in the individual work. Although this has the potential to...
Objective:
To determine how counselors' attachment anxiety and avoidance related to congruence between counselors' and clients' Working alliance (WA) ratings. Congruence strength was defined as the regression coefficient for clients' WA ratings predicting counselors' WA ratings. Directional bias was defined as the difference in level between couns...
Reviews the video, Irvin Yalom: On Psychotherapy & Writing by Irvin Yalom (2015). This video is an interview with Yalom about his life’s work by one of his close colleagues, Orah Krug. Krug asks Yalom questions that address his development as a writer and master clinician. She does a wonderful job interviewing Yalom and highlighting different aspec...
This article focuses on the future of attachment-based psychotherapy research and begins with a brief summary of the research that has been done and then explores 8 predictions for the future. The main emphasis of these predictions is the growing complexity in our research needed to capture the mechanisms that facilitate or hinder the therapy proce...
The current review comprehensively examines recent advances in 2 innovative areas of neuroscience research on healthy adults regarding neuropsychosocial interactions on human cognition and behavior, as well as implications for counseling psychologists conducting research and in practice. Advances in how oxytocin influences prosocial behavior and th...
Eighty-three patients in psychodynamic psychotherapy completed the Selfobject Needs Inventory (SONI), a measure of adult attachment, a measure of working alliance, and the Symptom Checklist-Revised between the third and fifth sessions of therapy. Replicating previous nonclinical research, a positive correlation was found between avoidance of selfob...
The purpose of this study was to test the notion that complementary attachments are best for achieving a secure base in psychotherapy. Specifically, we predicted third to fifth session alliance from client- and therapist-rated attachment style interactions. Using a combined sample of 46 therapy dyads from a community mental health clinic and univer...
Although extensively discussed in theoretical papers, empirical studies of therapist attachment and perceptions of ruptures and repairs are lacking. The present study examined the relationship between therapist attachment anxiety and avoidance and their perceptions of rupture tension, effort, and repair. Twenty-two novice therapists completed a mea...
Reviews the book, Expanding the Practice of Sex Therapy: An Integrative Model for Exploring Desire and Intimacy by Gina Ogden (see record 2013-19356-000 ). This book highlights a new approach to sex therapy, and the reviewer strongly believe therapists need more books and training on this topic. After reading this, the reviewer had a deeper appreci...
We examine sexual and loving feelings, on the part of both the therapist and patient, as they relate to their real relationship, patient transference, and therapist countertransference. Loving feelings (agape) often are part of a strong real relationship and they tend to have a positive effect. Sexual feelings, too, may be part of the real relation...
Actor-partner interdependence modeling (APIM; Kashy & Kenny, 2000) was used to study the early therapeutic alliance in 74 clients being treated by 29 therapists to explore the relationship between the alliance and treatment progress, while prioritizing the dyadic nature of the alliance. The APIM examines collaboration/influence by modeling the impa...
Group therapy can facilitate changes for members with greater attachment anxiety who tend to struggle with negative self-perceptions, difficulties regulating emotions, poor reflective functioning, and compromised interpersonal relationships. A clinical example of a therapy group with members who had elevated attachment anxiety and who were diagnose...
One of the most critical goals for couple psychotherapy is to foster a new relational experience in the session where the couple feels safe enough to reveal more vulnerable emotions and to explore their defensive withdrawal, aggressive attacking, or blaming. The lived intimate experience in the session offers the couple an opportunity to gain integ...
Despite a large literature applying attachment to individual, family, and couple psychotherapy, it has taken much longer for clinicians to apply attachment theory to group psychotherapy. The lack of research attention in this area makes these three studies in this special section even more important to the field. They contribute significant finding...
The supervisory relationship is one of the most important components in training therapists' professional development, and it is a frequent area of training-focused research. The current study explored how 57 training therapists' adult romantic attachments relate to the attachment to the supervisor and the supervisory working alliance. Additionally...
There is much debate about the definition of transference and the use of transference in psychotherapy treatment. The current section brings together three papers presented at the American Psychological Association's Annual conference that bridge diverse areas of psychology and the study of transference. Each of these papers contributes to our unde...
Two studies explored how counselor and client agreement on the therapy alliance, at the beginning of treatment, influenced early session evaluations and symptom change. Unlike prior studies that operationalized alliance convergence as either a profile similarity correlation or a difference score, the present study used polynomial regression and res...
Attachment theory has recently been applied to clinical practice in an effort to improve understanding and treatment of the maladaptive relational patterns clients bring to therapy. While most of this research has focused on individual therapy, interest in the application of attachment theory to group psychotherapy is growing. This paper will explo...
Group cohesion is one of the most studied and theorized factors in group counseling. Despite the literature that describes cohesion, how it relates to group process, its mediating potential, and how it directly predicts change, we are still unsure exactly how cohesion operates in different groups and the best way to measure it. This chapter will re...
The development and validation of a client version of the Real Relationship Inventory (RRI-C) is reported. Using a sample of clients (n = 94) who were currently in psychotherapy, a 24-item measure was developed consisting of two subscales (Realism and Genuineness) and a total score. This 24-item version and other measures used for validation were c...
Eight-one first-year doctoral students in a psychodynamic program completed the SWAP-200 on a standardized case to determine the usefulness of the instrument with novice clinicians and to assess race-based differences in diagnostic outcome. The test case represented either a Caucasian or an African American woman who had either a masochistic or an...
Although clinical researchers have applied attachment theory to client conceptualization and treatment in individual therapy, few researchers have applied this theory to group therapy. The purpose of this article is to begin to apply theory and research on adult dyadic and group attachment styles to our understanding of group dynamics and processes...
The current study examined the relationship between 63 intake clients’ and 28 college student’s attachment styles and their attitudes of group psychotherapy. The authors examined the relationship between attachment anxiety and avoidance and the subscales of the Group Therapy Survey-R (Carter, Mitchell, & Krautheim, 2001). Results revealed a signifi...
A large body of literature has supported the application of attachment theory to the understanding of college student development and the process of individual psychotherapy. Despite group treatment being one of the major methods of intervention in college counseling centers, there has been very little research guided by attachment theory that has...
The purpose of this study was to understand how the real relationship (RR) relates to important process and outcome variables from both the clients’ and therapists’ perspectives. Using a sample of 31 therapist/client dyads at a university counseling center, the authors examined the RR at the 3rd session of therapy and at termination. The results re...
The current study applied Smith, Murphy, and Coates' (1999) group attachment measure to college adjustment using 109 college students. Prior researchers have found that adult dyadic attachment styles predicted college adjustment. This article is the first to explore the relationship between both group and dyadic attachment styles and college adjust...
A large body of literature has supported the application of attachment theory to the understanding of psychotherapy. In addition, a more recent social psychological literature is exploring the application of attachment theory to the area of group dynamics and group process. The current study is designed to integrate these two distinct bodies of lit...
The development and initial validation of a therapist-rated measure of the real relationship in psychotherapy (the Real Relationship Inventory--Therapist Form [RRI-T]) is reported. Using a sample (n=80) of practicing psychotherapists and on the basis of prior theory, the authors developed a 24-item measure consisting of 2 subscales (Realism and Gen...
I. D. Yalom's (1995) hypothesis that group therapy cohesiveness is the precursor to the development of group-derived collective self-esteem (CSE), hope for the self (HS), and psychological well-being (personal self-esteem and depression) was tested. Participants were 102 university counseling center group therapy clients from process (n = 54) and t...
This study examined eating-disordered pathology in relation to psychopathology and adiposity in 162 non-treatment-seeking overweight (OW) and normal weight (NW) children, ages 6-13 years. Participants experienced objective or subjective binge eating (S/OBE; loss-of-control eating), objective overeating (OO), or no episodes (NE). OW children experie...
In adults, interview methods may detect eating-disordered behaviors more accurately than self-report methods. However, no studies have investigated the relationships between interview and self-report assessments in children. We compared results from the Eating Disorder Examination adapted for Children (ChEDE) with the Adolescent version of the Ques...
This article comments on J. E. Cameron's (1999) (see record
1999-03790-001) empirical examination of the relationship between aspects of social identity, the notion of possible selves, and the psychological adjustment of college students. The theoretical implications of Cameron's study, the application of the findings to real-world phenomena, and...
Social identity theory argues that individuals rely on group memberships to form and protect their self-concepts. The authors tested this assumption in therapy groups by teaching members to rely on their group's membership during their day-to-day activities. Participants in the control condition received general information about therapy, whereas t...
Social cognitive variables are salient factors in the prevention, development, and maintenance of health-related problems. These variables are of particular interest to counseling psychologists, as they are amenable to a variety of psychological interventions. We review several social-cognitive processes that have been studied in relation to behavi...
According to the social problem-solving model, a positive problem orientation wards off negative affect and promotes positive affect to enhance problem solving. It was hypothesized that the Problem-Solving Confidence and Personal Control factors on the Problem-Solving Inventory (Heppner, 1988) constitute facets of the problem orientation component;...
In the work we present in this article, we examined the contaminating effects of trait negative affectivity (TNA) on the relations between social support and psychological distress among college undergraduates. In the first study, it was suspected that controlling for TNA would substantially alter the associations between social support (as measure...
The authors examined the relation of problem-solving appraisal to health complaints and health-related expectancies among 321 undergraduates. Results indicated that self-appraised effective problem solvers reported fewer current physical symptoms during the 3 weeks prior to assessment and fewer health problems on the day of assessment than did inef...
A model to predict affective and informational antecedents of career indecision was proposed. The model attempted to explicate paths between personality dispositions, appraisal of problem-solving skills, career decision-making styles, and antecedents of career indecision. Both personality and coping constructs were posited to examine the relative c...
Disliked occupations and negative occupational information have been associated with higher levels of vocational differentiation. This study develops and tests a disconfirmation hypothesis that accounts for and qualifies both of these findings. Results of a 2 (gender) × 2 (favorable vs unfavorable occupations) × 3 (positive vs negative vs mixed val...
Recent studies of vocational structure have demonstrated that experimentally provided vocational constructs are used in less complex, less differentiated ways than are Ss' personally elicited construct dimensions. The possible reasons underlying these differences are addressed in this 2-part study. Results of Study 1 supported significant differenc...
Questions
Question (1)
I have a data set of therapy dyads and measured therapist attachment with self-report (ECR)--also have patient self-report attachment, alliance, and ruptures, and video of first 6 sessions--- Would love to be able to assess therapist ability to detect ruptures and be present with patients