Research on Focusing

Focusing
Written By Annette Dubreuil

There’s a fair bit of research on Focusing, and more underway. And there is a lot more work to do. In a piece by Donata Schoeller and Neil Dunaetz (which happens to be an excellent summary of Gendlin’s philosophy by the way), the authors quote Terrence Deacon’s “absential features” as values, ideas, goals and concepts that are not materially present or energetically measurable. Focusing is that way in some ways. We cannot measure the felt sense directly.

Still, there are a few studies in The Gendlin Online Library that either directly use measurement, or site the use of measurements.

  • First, Gendlin sites The transformation of conscious experience and its EEG correlates by saying “EEG correlates of the felt shift in focusing (in one published study [Don, N.S., 1977] that needs replication) were those known to accompany deep imagery (theta) but with a beta pattern indicative of the fact that there was not imagery. Theta is one end of the alpha scale, but differs from the usual alpha very importantly. Theta goes with imagery emerging from deep "unconscious" layers, whereas alpha in its usual range is associated with merely floating, thinking of nothing in particular.” (Excerpt from The Difference Between Focusing and Self-Hypnosis.)

  • Second, there are two studies from 1961 on autonomic correlates that look at galvanic skin response, skin temperature, and heart rate. The first, “Galvanic skin response correlates of different modes of experiencing” showed that paying attention to experiencing (the felt sense) silently produced fewer activations of the sympathetic (fight/flight) branch of the nervous system, as measured by fewer galvanic skin response (GSR) measures. In particular, continuous reference to directly felt experiencing (during silence and in the absence of interruptions) is associated with linear increase in galvanic skin resistance. Being in such a feeling process was an adaptive event even when the content being Focused on was somewhat stressful. In other words, Focusing appears to activate our safe and social nervous system (ventral vagal/flock). The second study, “Autonomic Correlates of Inter-Action Process” found that being in inter-action with an individual previously chosen, with whom the relationship was perceived as "good and close" resulted in sharing with both greater peaks of tension and greater peaks of relaxation, compared to those with whom the relationship was perceived as "cold and distant." In other words in these safe relationships, participants felt able to be more open to experience, more expressive, and more fully themselves, and this appears to occur autonomically. In contrast, in relationships with hostility, mistrust, and suspicion did not have high autonomic tension during inter-action. Their interpretation of this finding is that under low conditions the individual withdraws (e.g. goes into fold), keeps from being involved, and that he experiences not the hostility or mistrust as such, but instead a limited, narrowed and minimized process of experiencing. You can read about these studies in Jan Winhall’s book Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model: A Bottom-Up Approach on pages 138-139.

Most of the other research that has been done is qualitative. Here are a few resources that you may not know about housed on The International Focusing Institute website.

First, there are resources in The Eugene T. Gendlin Center for Research in Experiential Philosophy and Psychology. This website summarizes many things, including:

  • A newly collected list of doctoral dissertations compiled by Akira Ikemi, Hideo Tanaka and Kumiyo Sakai. It lists doctoral dissertations conducted on Focusing, Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy and Gendlin’s Philosophy as well as research studies using Focusing and its related methods, such as Thinking at the Edge (TAE) and the Experiencing Scale (EXP) in their methodologies.

  • The Current Status of Research on Focusing Oriented Psychotherapy: A Summary and Invitation by Rob Parker articulates some of the issues researchers have had measuring the impact of Focusing, and developments underway to improve the situation. In particular, the summary concludes:

    • “A considerable amount of diverse data suggests that Focusing is strongly related to therapy outcomes. The fact that this isn’t reflected in the literature can be attributed to a number of factors, including the cultural change in the research community after the cognitive revolution, the inherent difficulties in using the EXP scale (many subtle distinctions requiring much time to learn and also to score) which make research on Focusing more difficult, and finally the way in which the EXP scale has been used (sampling EXP behavior and averaging EXP scores) which has probably obscured the relationship between Focusing and therapy outcome, thus producing less powerful experiments and more type II error.

      It is therefore worth noting here that a group at The International Focusing Institute is currently addressing the problems with the EXP scale by creating a new version that is shorter, easier to learn and easier to score. The new EXP II scale is explicitly an ordinal scale for which averaging levels will be inappropriate.  The sampling problem is being addressed by making the scale much faster to score, and developing a sampling procedure that targets Focusing.  In short, we expect EXP II to be both easier to use and more sensitive, resulting in research designs that are both more powerful and also easier to implement.”

And there are a few older reviews of research:

Let’s hope this new work on the Experiencing Scale will become more broadly known in the world—both as the effectiveness of Focusing in psychotherapy, and to spur other uses like creativity. If you have research ideas for Focusing, I’d love to hear them! Getting some of the older studies updated would be very helpful in my opinion. I hope more studies will be one in the near future, and that students of Focusing will be able to participate.

Annette Dubreuil
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