Rivka Tuval-Mashiach

Bar Ilan University | BIU · Department of Psychology

Integrating the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined future, narrative identity is a person’s internalized and evolving story of the self, functioning to provide life with some degree of meaning and purpose (McAdams & McLean, 2013). While narrative identity has been found to be associated with a range of psychological and social ph...

To improve the provision of psychotherapy, many countries have now established clinical practice guidelines for the treatment of specific disorders and mental health concerns. These guidelines have typically been based on evidence from meta-analyses of randomized clinical trials with minimal consideration of findings from qualitative research desig...

Background The delay time from onset of symptoms of a myocardial infarction to seeking medical assistance can have life-threatening consequences. Women delay significantly more often than men do in calling for medical help, once symptoms of a myocardial infarction occur. Objectives The current qualitative study’s main aim was to explore psychosoci...

Background Seeking help for perinatal mood and anxiety disorders is crucial for women’s mental health and babies’ development, yet many women do not seek help for their condition and remain undiagnosed and untreated. This systematic review of systematic reviews aimed at summarizing and synthesizing findings from all systematic reviews on seeking he...

Research shows that traumatic events may shatter people's perceptions and assumptions about the world, potentially resulting in PTSD symptoms as well as a lack of integration of the event into one's narrative and experiencing the self as flawed, fragmented, and incoherent. Metacognition, the ability to reflect upon oneself and others and the use of...

ABSTRACT Innovative moments (IMs) in psychotherapy contradict or challenge clients’ maladaptive patterns of meaning associated with their suffering. IMs are receiving increased theoretical and empirical attention in psychotherapy research and are associated with symptomatic improvement. However, little is known about possible predictors of IMs and...

Objective: The motivation to change in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) predicts both treatment outcomes and the therapeutic alliance (TA). In addition, different countertransference patterns have previously been related to the patient’s motivation to change and the TA. However, the mechanisms through which these relationships occur are unclear....

This study examined the relationship between implicit and explicit levels of change in psychotherapy—the ability to shift between self-states, measured by the Two Person APES (TPA), a relational extension of the Assimilation of Problematic Experiences Scale (APES), and the emergence of exceptions to the problematic self-narrative, measured by the I...

Hospitalization of children in an inpatient psychiatric ward is stressful for both the children and their parents, and separation from the parents during hospitalization is probably one major cause of this stress. We designated one room in a closed inpatient unit to enable a parent to stay with his/her child, including overnight, during the 1st wee...

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a chronic disease requiring medical adherence. However, among adolescents, non-adherence rates may reach up to 75%. Satisfaction or frustration with psychological needs is a crucial factor in the motivation and management of health-related behaviors. This study aimed to examine the differences in good health practices and p...

Objective Studies indicate a significant challenge for therapists in forming a therapeutic alliance (TA) with patients coping with anorexia nervosa (AN). While TA is a significant predictor of treatment outcomes, and AN treatment has low success rates, little is known about factors that affect the formation of an alliance and its quality in the tre...

Aims and objectives To qualitatively explore COVID-19-related experiences of mothers of preterm infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), the main challenges they face, and the resources available for them. Background The birth of a preterm infant is a stressful event under otherwise normal circumstances. The outbreak of COVID-19, the un...

We study the phenomenon of linguistic syn-chrony between clients and therapists in a psychotherapy process. Linguistic Synchrony (LS) can be viewed as any observed interdependence or association between more than one person's linguistic behavior. Accordingly, we establish LS as a methodological task. We suggest a LS function that applies a linguist...

Child loss may undermine one’s faith. Whereas much is known about religion’s role following loss, less is known about the experience of divine struggle—namely, struggling with complex God-related emotions/beliefs—particularly among diverse sociocultural samples. Employing a narrative approach, we interviewed 20 bereaved Modern-Orthodox parents. Ana...

Despite the increase in research on shared issues among family members, less is known about familial thinking patterns and potential changes when a family undergoes a transition. The present longitudinal study aimed to examine whether family members share common thinking patterns, specifically regarding rational and irrational beliefs, and whether...

Military personnel transitioning to civilian life have reported significant challenges in reintegrating into civilian culture. Filmmaking has been used as a therapeutic intervention to enhance the community reintegration of veterans, but there are no published quantitative data documenting its impact. The present study provides outcome data on 40 v...

Replication, broadly defined as the repetition of a research study, generally among different subjects and/or situations, is commonly conducted in quantitative research with the aim of determining whether the basic findings of the original study can be generalized to other circumstances. Qualitative researchers have for many years objected to the n...

Despite the high prevalence of incest, survivors are reluctant to disclose its existence for reasons such as shame, guilt and the presence of an accusatory and stigmatizing social discourse. The current mixed methods study examined the internal discourses of 13 incest survivors in Israel, reflected in self-reported internal dialogs which emerged du...

We present the first work on automatically capturing alliance rupture in transcribed therapy sessions, trained on the text and self-reported rupture scores from both therapists and clients. Our NLP baseline outperforms a strong majority baseline by a large margin and captures client reported ruptures unidentified by therapists in 40% of such cases.

Computerized natural language processing techniques can analyze psychotherapy sessions as texts, thus generating information about the therapy process and outcome and supporting the scaling-up of psychotherapy research. We used topic modeling to identify topics discussed in psychotherapy sessions and explored (a) which topics best identified client...

Introduction: Early detection is critical in the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD). An at-risk population for cardiac disease-and conveniently approachable in terms of timing-is cardiac patients' offspring, at the moment when the parent is hospitalized for his or her own cardiac event. Based on the theoretical underpinning of life turning...

Raw linguistic data within psychotherapy sessions may provide important information about clients' progress and well-being. In the current study, computerized text analytic techniques were applied to examine whether linguistic features were associated with clients' experiences of distress within and between clients and whether changes in linguistic...

Military personnel transitioning to civilian life commonly report difficulty with establishing friendships, reconnecting with family, and a greater sense that they do not “fit in.” Personal narrative interventions have the potential to increase the community’s interest and understanding of Veterans’ experience. This study examines the impact of a n...

Although empirically supported treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) exist, many patients fail to complete therapy, are nonresponsive, or remain symptomatic following treatment. This paper presents the results of a delayed intervention quasi-randomized controlled study that evaluated the efficacy of narrative reconstruction as an inte...

Background: While much research has been devoted to examining individual differences in one's interpersonal attachment, very little research has been devoted to examining individual differences in one's attachment to God (ATG). Particularly, how ATG dimensions relate to different religious denominations (RD). Purpose: To explore the relationship be...

Raw linguistic data within psychotherapy sessions may provide important information about clients’ progress and well-being. In the current study, computerized text analytic techniques were applied to examine whether linguistic features were associated with clients’ experiences of distress within and between clients and whether changes in linguistic...

Background The concept of potential‐to‐experience is a major component in psychodynamic theory and assumed to be an important component of psychotherapeutic technique. However, as this assumption has never been empirically tested, the relationship between such interventions and treatment outcome is unclear. The aim of this pilot study is to explore...

Objectives: Contemporary relational theories consider clients' ability to move between multiple self-states and clients' ability to experience and process emotions to be two therapeutic processes inherently connected and fundamental to growth and change in psychotherapy. The current research aimed to empirically explore these theoretical assumption...

A positive sense of agency is crucial for a successful transition to adulthood. Young women at risk may struggle with a compromised sense of agency due to their backgrounds and daily challenges, potentially delaying them at the stage of emerging adulthood when they are required to become independent. The current paper looks at the development of ag...

Objectives: Contemporary relational theories consider clients' ability to move between multiple self-states and clients' ability to experience and process emotions to be two therapeutic processes inherently connected and fundamental to growth and change in psychotherapy. The current research aimed to empirically explore these theoretical assumptio...

Objectives: The loss of a child is a traumatic life event. While bereavement research has examined the roles of both interpersonal attachment and religiosity in coping with loss, only a handful of studies have addressed the concept of attachment to God (ATG). The current study examined ATG's role as a mediator in the relationship between religious...

Observation of the romantic lives of the majority of young people shows that they might move between transitory and inconsistent states, being in and out of a relationship. The present study aims to better understand the meaning of these fluctuations. For this purpose, and employing a multi-method design, 144 Israeli adolescents (59.7% females) wer...

Organizations are rife with paradoxes, yet we know very little about how leaders simultaneously handle multiple paradoxes. To address this question, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of 78 formal interviews conducted over a period of 13 months with leaders in a high-growth retail organization. We supplemented this primary data with revie...

Investigación del cambio mutuo de los estados del self del paciente y del terapeuta: Un estudio de investigación clínica integradora de un caso único El presente estudio presenta un examen integrador de método mixto de un solo caso utilizando la TPA, o la Escala de asimilación de experiencias problemáticas de dos personas (APES). A partir del model...

Despite the availability of effective treatments for coping with traumatic experiences, a large percentage of military veterans in need do not seek help. The “I Was There” model is a new filmmaking program which is a creative-expressive tool, developed to enable veterans to reflect on their experiences and jointly create short artistic films. These...

Background Previous research has shown that people with psychotic disorders have impaired functioning prior to the onset of the illness. The main goal of the proposed study was to deepen understanding of the characteristics of premorbid impairment in persons later diagnosed with psychotic disorders. Methods We examined unique premorbid data from I...

Objective: The present study aimed to examine the association between patient–therapist micro-level congruence/incongruence ratio and psychotherapeutic outcome. Method: Nine good- and nine poor-outcome psychodynamic treatments (segregated by comparing pre- and post-treatment BDI-II) were analyzed (N= 18) moment by moment using the MATRIX (total nu...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0191949.].

Introduction Shared traumatic reality occurs when therapists are doubly exposed to a traumatic event, both through their clients’ experience, along with their own direct exposure. Studies have shown that a shared traumatic reality can lead to both positive and negative outcomes for therapists. Most studies have examined these reactions sometime aft...

Objective: According to the Assimilation Model, the self is consisted of multiple internal voices which are sometimes conflicted, or even dissociated, from one another. Thus, a key therapeutic goal is to create awareness and dialogue between a patient's various internal voices, in order to facilitate positive change. A recent development of this t...

Objective: Military service is a highly stressful period both for the soldiers serving and for their parents. Surprisingly, parents’ experience has been mostly ignored in the research. This study’s goal is to shed light on the experience and distress levels of parents of active duty combat soldiers during Operation Protective Edge, a military opera...

The current cross-sectional study investigated and compared the associations between insight, self-stigma, and family burden among Jewish and Arab mothers of an adult son or daughter with serious mental illness (SMI) in Israel. A total of 162 Israeli mothers of a person with SMI participated in the study; 95 were Jewish (58.6%), and 67 were Arab (4...

Objective: Findings from the field of trauma have shown that there is a negative relationship between dissociation and integration of loss into the self-narrative. At the same time, an increasing amount of literature on grief has stressed the importance of an integrated self-narrative in the grieving process. Accordingly, the current study examine...

Background Previous research has shown that people with psychotic disorders have impaired functioning prior to the onset of the illness. The main goal of the proposed study was to deepen understanding of the characteristics of pre-morbid impairment in persons later diagnosed with psychotic disorders. Methods We examined unique pre-morbid data from...

This article describes the perspectives of alumni of National Civic Service (NCS) in Israel on its impact at the individual level. We compared 250 young women who were identified as youth at risk with 295 mainstream volunteers. Overall, the two groups show similar outcomes that are typical to this developmental stage of life. Yet youth at risk expe...

Upon repatriation, veterans of combat and war-captivity may need others with whom to share the traumatic experiences they underwent during the war. Such an experiential connection is encompassed in the term "affective empathy". However, given an inherent epistemic gap between that which is known to the narrator-experiencer and the knowledge of thos...

Methodological flexibility in qualitative research is not only unavoidable but also an inherent part of it. Each case of qualitative research is a singular process, requiring the researcher to craft his or her own method or make changes in accordance with the circumstances. As a result, the study’s process and decisions taken along the way often re...

The relational approach promotes the importance of oscillation between multiple self-states, while striving towards dialectics instead of integration (Bromberg, 1993). •Emotional experiencing is a widely studied construct, and has extensively been positively related to treatment outcome (Pascual-Leone, Paivio, & Harrington, 2016). • Bromberg (2003)...

The current chapter reviews the existing research on three aspects of parenting and the military in Israel: parenting of young soldiers; career military service and its effects on parenting; and the effects of PTSD on parenting, taking into account the unique cultural, social and political characteristics of Israel. The chapter’s first section shed...

The current study examined the distinctive gender-related expressions of adolescent romantic competence and patterns of maternal and paternal attitudes toward daughters’ and sons’ romantic involvements. Employing a qualitative approach, an in-depth interview assessing romantic competence was given to 69 Israeli adolescents (37 boys) ranging in age...

Background: Prolonged grief disorder (PGD) is a potentially disabling condition affecting approximately 10% of bereaved people. It has been suggested that the impaired integration of the loss memory, as expressed in recurrent memories of the loss and disorganization of memory, is involved in the development of PGD. Narrative reconstruction (NR), o...

Narrative reconstruction therapy for prolonged grief disorder—rationale and case study

Narrative reconstruction therapy for prolonged grief disorder—rationale and case study

The current study aims at gaining a better understanding of the transition phase from psychiatric hospitalization back to the community, using qualitative methodology and narrative analysis. This purpose of the study was to learn from the personal life stories of 15 people diagnosed with schizophrenia who had just returned to the community followin...

Exposure to the trauma memory is the common denominator of most evidence-based interventions for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although exposure-based therapies aim to change associative learning networks and negative cognitions related to the trauma memory, emotional interactions between patient and therapist have not been thoroughly consi...

Objective: Employing a cross-sectional design, the current study examined the relationships between various agents and types of support and posttraumatic growth (PTG) among women with breast cancer. Method: Eighty married women who were coping with breast cancer completed social support and PTG questionnaires. Results: All agents of social sup...

The present study examined the achievement of work and romantic authorship in 100 Israeli emerging adults (54 men) who were followed from age 22 to 29. At the age of 29, participants were asked to talk about their current occupational and romantic statuses and the changes they underwent and to reflect on the meaning of these changes. Qualitative an...

Loneliness may be seen as the epitome of relational deficit, and as an experience that may hold dire ramifications for health and well-being. Hence, it has become a phenomenon of growing interest in psychology, nursing, and healthcare. While loneliness literature in numerous disciplines is replete with attempts to define and conceptualize the e...

This study examined patterns of romantic relationship turning points in 100 Israeli emerging adults (54 males) who were followed from age 22 to 29. Analyses of interviews at age 29 yielded four distinctive patterns of romantic transitions that are associated with different levels of concurrent well-being: positive outcome turning points, negative o...

Loneliness holds detrimental ramifications for health and well-being. Nevertheless, loneliness references in the literature addressing combat-related trauma are few. Consequentially, the qualities and characteristics of such experiences in these posttraumatic realities remain uninvestigated empirically. In the current qualitative study we began fil...

Background Previous research has shown that people with psychotic disorders have impaired functioning prior to the onset of the illness. The goal of this study is to obtain a detailed, in depth, analysis of the characteristics of premorbid impairment. Methods In this study we examined summaries of interviews with 20 male adolescents who were later...

Bereaved Parents' Discourse with God following Loss: The Role of Parents' Internal Representations towards God – A Narrative Perspective.

Abstract The purpose of the current study was to focus on the subjective experience of mothers of daughters with ongoing anorexia nervosa. Specifically, we explored the stressors faced by these mothers while coping with their daughters' illnesses; we also looked at how they experienced their maternal selves and roles, and their perceived competence...

Psychological trauma is a metaphor insinuating a wound to the psyche. Hence, the life following traumatic experiences may serve as a case study exemplifying suffering phenomena. Loneliness, on the other hand, is an altogether different type of suffering. Thus, we have come to wonder whether and how the two coincided. That is, do those who return fr...

The purpose of the current study was to describe the process of religious coping in a religious community that underwent a forced relocation. Whereas previous work on meaning-making processes has looked at individuals, we sought to understand what happens to the process of religious coping when an entire community experiences a shared stressful eve...

Psychological trauma is a metaphor insinuating a wound to the psyche. Hence, the life following traumatic experiences may serve as a case-study exemplifying suffering phenomena. Loneliness, on the other hand, is an altogether different type of suffering. Thus, we have come to wonder whether and how the two coincided. That is, do those who retur...

This qualitative study used a focus group methodology to examine how mothers with ED perceive the impact their eating disorder has on their children and their relationships with them, as well as how their illness is impacted by motherhood. Through 10 session group meetings with 13 mothers, several themes emerged: (a) concerns about not being a "goo...

Experiences of discrimination and racism and individual coping strategies were examined among 22 emerging adult Ethiopian immigrants in Israel. In-depth interviews explored the way they perceive, understand, respond to, and cope with experiences of discrimination. Qualitative analysis identified an initial contrast between those interviewees who re...

The current study investigated the relationships between levels and modes of preparedness for relocation, ideology, and subsequent posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A sample of 269 relocated residents from Gush Katif completed questionnaires examining their previous life stressors, preparation prior to their relocation, level of ideology, and c...

Forced relocation has been recognised as a traumatic event, which can generate pathological and positive responses. The current study focused on the situation of Israeli residents who were forced to relocate from their homes in the Gaza Strip. Two main questions were examined: the association between post-traumatic symptoms and post-traumatic growt...

Collective trauma may lead to a pervasive loss of personal and social resources. The current study used a mixed method design to explore losses of social connections and affiliations following the collective trauma of forced relocation. A sample of 269 relocated residents from Gush Katif completed open-ended questionnaires regarding their ability t...

The use of narratives in social science research has increased enormously during recent decades, and has generated theoretical developments and fascinating empirical insights that have crystallized into an overall "narrative turn". Written and oral stories, diaries and interviews, serve as central channels in narrative research, supplying a multila...

Findings of this study, conducted on 142 adolescents (67 ninth graders and 75 eleventh graders), show that romantic experiences among adolescents are manifested in different forms: romantic fantasies, cross-gender friendships, and sustained interactions with a romantic partner. These three forms of experience are manifested differently across age a...

Narrative psychology theoreticians emphasized the importance of context to the construction, communication, and understanding of individuals' life stories. Still, the various contexts in which, and in reference to which, life stories are told, the methodological implications of the importance of context, and the possible interpretive moves explicat...

In this article, the authors offer a model for the exploration of the ways social actors narrate the forces that have driven their lives. They position this exploration in light of the notions of agency, structure, communion, and serendipity, as formulated in various social-science theories of human action, viewed as part of the cultural repertoire...

This briefing describes an Information Communication Technology (ICT) project in which academics from five geographically dispersed tertiary institutions collaborated in the design and implementation of an online teaching module on women's health and well-being. The module used the transformative possibilities offered by ICT to enable students from...

The study was designed to explore qualitatively developmental differences in disagreement negotiation and resolution skills between adolescent and young adult romantic partners. Twenty adolescent and 20 young adult couples participated in the study. The Knox inventory was used to measure the level of disagreement between partners on ten domains (e....

Narrative research of autobiographies has suggested that men and women construct narratives differently. Men tend to devise clear defined plots, and their stories are more linear, chronologically ordered, continuous, and coherent. Women's stories are more scattered and fragmentary, and they tend to construct narratives along multiple dimensions. In...

The authors evaluated psychological responses to continuous terror. Data were collected after 10 months of escalating hostilities against civilians in Israel. The study's participants were randomly selected adults living in two suburbs of Jerusalem, one frequently and directly exposed to acts of terrorism (N=167) and the other indirectly exposed (N...

Objective: The authors evaluated psychological responses to continuous terror. Method: Data were collected after 10 months of escalating hostilities against civilians in Israel. The study's participants were randomly selected adults living in two suburbs of Jerusalem, one frequently and directly exposed to acts of terrorism (N=167) and the other in...