About
47
Publications
29,824
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188
Citations
Introduction
Dr Halovic is currently involved in a variety of research endeavours. He continues his doctoral research on the psychophysics for non-verbal indicators of expressed emotions. He continues research on the process and efficacy of Conversational Model Therapy (CMT) and the measurement of psychotherapist expertise. More recently, he has been awarded a grant to fund research on the non-verbal communication between client and therapist within CMT.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
May 2013 - present
Cumberland Hospital
Position
- Clinical Research Coordinator
Description
- Coordinating the research division of the Westmead Psychotherapy Program. Management of therapist-patient allocation and patient communication with the program. Conduction of patient assessments, referrals and progress reviews.
April 2014 - present
Position
- Scientific Advisor
Education
January 2006 - February 2010
February 2003 - December 2005
February 1997 - December 1999
Publications
Publications (47)
Previous evidence has shown that males and females display different gait kinematics which may influence the perception of emotions displayed through the same walking gait. We therefore investigated the influence of walker gender on the perception of happiness, sadness, anger and fear displayed through walking movements. Full-light (FL), point-ligh...
Perceiving emotions from gait can serve numerous socio-environmental functions (e.g. perceiving threat, sexual courting behaviours). Participant perceivers were asked to report their strategies for identifying happiness, sadness, anger and fear in point-light walkers. Perceivers claimed they identified happiness by a bouncing gait with increased ar...
We investigated the existence and nature of adaptation aftereffects on the visual perception of basic emotions displayed through walking gait. Stimuli were previously validated gender-ambiguous point-light walker models displaying various basic emotions (happy, sad, anger and fear). Results indicated that both facilitative and inhibitive aftereffec...
Graphic medicine holds promise for overcoming a client’s initial dismissal of psychotherapeutic treatment by improving their agency in their own treatment. Graphic medicine refers to the use of comics or graphic novels to facilitate the mutual understanding of psychotherapeutic processes, and may be potentially used to stimulate enjoyable discussio...
Point-light displays of walking gait carries an assortment of information about the individual and this information is often perceivable to others. Some of these bits of information are entangled, with some facilitating and others inhibiting each other. We sought to untangle the perception of basic threat emotions from sex of the walker and the per...
Background:
Attachment research has continued to evolve since J Bowlby’s seminal work on the formation of the attachment bond, to embrace the way trauma and loss and overwhelming stress disorganise us and our important relationships, with important impacts on coping, health and wellbeing. We present a symposium where current approaches to the Adul...
Background:
The importance of personal regulation, developed in early life and broken down by trauma, loss and overwhelming stress in one or more domains has seemed relevant to the development of functional neurological disorder (FND). The Health-Modified Adult Attachment Interview (HM-AAI) has been adapted to these presentations with probes elici...
Clinician-lead research is important to further the development of various psychotherapeutic methods. The applied experiences of clinicians, in their treatment of their many clients, can be fed back into the scientific literature on psychotherapy and thus further develop evidence-based practice. However, clinician-researchers often face unique chal...
The threat of the Corona virus (COVID-19) has caused worldwide social distancing, where citizens were typically quarantined within their own homes. Access to psychotherapeutic treatments, which are reliant upon the socially constructed therapeutic relationship between the client and therapist, have been similarly hindered. The Westmead Psychotherap...
The typical approach to measure psychotherapeutic progress is through the use of psychometric questionnaires. Questionnaires can provide a standard baseline that is easily replicable in multiple settings however, they are limited by the numerical reporting methodology underlying the psychometric structure. Patients often struggle to interpret the q...
“Jane” is a mother of two, who was referred for psychotherapy. However, Jane had misgivings about engaging in the offered psychotherapy because of threats made by her domestically violent partner. The therapy sessions are audio recorded for the purpose of professional supervision and clinician reflective practices. Jane’s partner had threatened to...
This is a printable version of the CoMTAS, which is an adherence scale for Conversational Model Therapy (CMT).
Background: The key features of short-term dynamic interpersonal psychotherapy (STDIP) are outlined along with the background of its development. Preliminary data demonstrating functional improvement in a small case series of patients is presented.
Methods: Nineteen patients were evaluated at commencement and end of therapy in a pilot study. Instru...
Measuring adherence to a given psychotherapeutic approach has numerous benefits, such as ensuring therapist fidelity in the reporting of patient outcomes, the verification of therapist expertise, and facilitating the training of new psychotherapists by minimizing the cognitive load within a complex skillset. The Conversational Model Therapy Adheren...
Mental illness and the consequent treatment is complex, and the communication of that complexity amongst psychotherapeutic professionals can be difficult. This difficulty however, pales in comparison to the difficulty of the layperson’s understanding of their mind’s own inner workings and how best to treat them. How is a potential client supposed t...
Background:
Earlier in 2017, The Counseling Psychologist published a special issue dedicated to the topic of psychotherapist expertise. The respective authors’ debate about what constitutes psychotherapist expertise and how it can be measured and verified. These collective studies will be reviewed and our own perspectives on the debate will be argu...
Background:
Adolescence is a time of rapid growth in body and functional capacity, alongside both temporary and enduring changes in the psychology and personality of the young person. Adolescence can be seen as a time, when characteristic ways of thinking, feeling and behaving in relation to oneself and to others i.e. personality traits, are often...
Background:
The Conversational Model (CM) was developed as an approach to individual treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder by Meares and Hobson. Over the last decade its use has been expanded from long-term treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder to Short-term intervention for a range of presentations and diagnoses. Most recently it ha...
Background:
It is now more commonly recognized that childhood trauma predisposes adults to develop psychiatric disorders later in life, especially personality pathology but the presence of personality pathology in psychiatric inpatients is rarely recognized.
Objectives:
To examine consecutive admissions to a psychiatric inpatient facility over a f...
Background: Functional neurological disorder (FND)
has often been associated with unresolved trauma
and unspoken stress. With modern neuroscience, we
are putting together a framework of understanding of
disordered self-regulation from failed homeostasis under
overwhelming stress. Conversational model therapy (CMT),
integrating psychodynamic psychot...
Background:
Earlier in 2017, The Counseling Psychologist published a special issue dedicated to the topic of psychotherapist expertise. The respective authors’ debate about what constitutes psychotherapist expertise and how it can be measured and verified. These collective studies will be reviewed and our own perspectives on the debate will be argu...
Background: Stress and trauma, often consciously
undeclared, have been associated with conversion
disorder, now termed functional neurological disorder
(FND). With contemporary approaches to stress
regulation and adaptation, we are being equipped with
complex relational, systems approaches to personal and
interpersonal stress regulation, but these...
The psychotherapy of commonly occurring severe personality disorders-borderline, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent, obsessive compulsive, and schizoid-presents the therapist with a unique therapeutic challenge, as each personality disorder rarely occurs alone. Integration of what is most useful and what works in each model is being proposed to enab...
Psychodynamic psychotherapies rely upon trust, openness and free association in the context of a psychologically safe therapeutic relationship. Confidentiality is thus a cornerstone of psy-chotherapeutic practice. The achievement of a sense of safety is easily compromised and likely to be impinged upon by regulations that threaten the privacy of th...
The case of Jordan (Mason 2017) highlights the gamble of connecting with the past through genomic testing. Unfortunately for Jordan, his genomic testing identified two variant genes which account for up to 75% of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease cases. Furthermore, his children were identified as having a 50% risk of inheriting the gene which corres...
This data set describes the experimental data collected and reported in the research article “Walking my way? Walker gender and display format confounds the perception of specific emotions” (Halovic and Kroos, in press) [1]. The data set represent perceiver identification rates for different emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear and neutral), a...
Background: Meares et al. (2012) outlined within the clinician’s manual for Conversational Model Therapy (CMT), the basis for a scale that would measure adherence to CMT within any given therapy session. The CMAS has been further developed over a number of focus groups with the team of CMT experts at the Westmead Psychotherapy Program (WPP), to mor...
Objective:
This opinion piece encourages mental health researchers and clinicians to engage with mental health issues among tuberculosis patients in the Asia-Pacific region in a culturally appropriate and ethical manner. The diversity of cultural contexts and the high burden of tuberculosis throughout the Asia-Pacific presents significant challeng...
The case of Xiang as described by Jane Carroll is indeed disconcerting well beyond the immediately apparent factors contained within the article. While Xiang’s direct medical expenses are excessive and his inability to pay for those expenses and further support his noncustodial family seem to be the main issues up for debate, Xiang, however, is lik...
Meares et al. (2012) outlined within the clinician’s manual for Conversational Model Therapy (CMT), the basis for a scale that would measure adherence to CMT within any given therapy session. Our aim was to further develop the Conversational Model Adherence Scale (CMAS) through multiple workshops with senior clinicians within the Westmead Psychothe...
Background: The Westmead Psychotherapy Program has conducted a psychotherapy program for people with personality disorder for over 30 years. Current health department policy relating to trauma-informed care and recovery focus give this program continuing relevance. The focus of the program has changed from treatment of Borderline Personality Disord...
Objective: To report preliminary data describing the interim treatment outcome of 44 patients referred with treatment-resistant depression (TRD), comorbid personality disorders and histories of early childhood trauma using the Conversational Model (CM) of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Method: Patients (N = 44), 13 males and 31 females with long hist...
A core issue in speech perception and word recognition research is the nature of information perceivers use to identify spoken utterances across indexical variations in their phonetic details, such as talker and accent differences. Separately, a crucial question in audiovisual research is the nature of information perceivers use to recognize phonet...
Background:
A Balint group is a form of case discussion group originally developed by Michael Balint in the 1950s for doctors, as a way of helping them to manage patients they were struggling to help. They aim to help clinicians reflect creatively on the therapeutic relationship; however, there has been limited evaluation of the capacity to improv...
This study investigated the perception of four emotions (i.e. happy, sad, anger, fear, and neutral) from the kinematics of gait style. Each of the studied emotions can be perceived solely through the kinematics of walking gait. However, the perception of these emotions are influenced by the display format (i.e. full-light, point-light, syntheticall...
Previous evidence clearly shows that some basic emotions (e.g. happiness, sadness and anger, Edgeworth, Keen, Cane & Gross, 2008; Michalak et al. 2009) can be displayed through gait kinematics. On the computational side, these basic emotions can be reliably identified from kinematic gait data (Karg, Jenke, Kuhnlenz & Buss, 2009) though, the emotion...
Time-keeping among dancers was investigated by measuring a dancer's movement in the presence and absence of music. If an internal clock was at work, then change from the ideal would manifest as scaling - consistently faster or slower unaccompanied performance; if time differences were due to lapsing, then sections from the with-music condition woul...
Previous evidence has indicated that the perception of emotions in others is confounded by the gender of the person displaying the emotion. This confound may be conceptually based or structurally/kinematically based. Male and female full-light (conceptual and kinematic information) and point-light walkers (kinematic information) displaying either a...
Detailed methodology for the investigation of the perception of basic emotions from walking style
Perception of dance, like live music, is multimodal. Participants and/or beholders, at the very least, respond to visual, temporal, and auditory cues. An experiment was conducted during a live performance and under controlled conditions to investigate the effect of the presence and absence of a musical soundscape on the kinematics and dynamics of a...
There is a common belief in anti-victimisation research that walking with confidence will prevent potential assaults however, there is little verifiable evidence of what exactly constitutes a confident walk or how it kinematically differs from a non-confident walk. Participants were primed with high confidence (low balance beam task) or low confide...
Questions
Questions (2)
I had recently been contacted about publishing in a journal published by Science Repository. I submitted an article and it was accepted without any observable peer review. A number of other flags were raised, giving me concerns that the journal was a predatory journal. I then looked into other journals published by Science Repository and the same flags were raised for them too. Is Science Repository a predatory publisher? It seems the case, but I am open to new information before I withdraw my paper from the journal.
