College of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University
YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOfU6nnQiAU (Chinese content compiled by SimpleMind)
When it comes to counselors, the public often feel that this is a particularly easy job to make a lot of money: you just need to talk to people, or even bullshit, you can easily earn hundreds to thousands of dollars per hour, almost catching up with the live Internet celebrity.But in fact, there have been many experiments long ago, using the scientific method to prove thatCounseling is fundamentally different from ordinary chat in its interaction with the brain, which not only changes the emotional activity of the brain, but can even shape the brain.It's really not the simple "talk therapy" that you think of without injections or medication, sitting down and just chattering with you!
Counseling and escorting on brain interactionThere is a fundamental differenceA study from the School of Psychology and Cognitive Science at East China Normal University used brain science experiments to demonstrate thatThere is a fundamental difference between counseling and escorting in terms of brain interaction. Previous research has identified a great deal of behavioral synchronization between counselor and client in counseling, such as tone, head movement, body movement, facial expressions, breathing rate, and skin electricity, etc. This synchronization can be effective in facilitating the counseling relationship and helping to establish a working alliance between the client and counselor.It is important to understand that the working alliance is an efficacy factor that spans different counseling schools, usually refers to the degree to which the counseling partners engage in collaborative and purposeful work, and has a stable moderate correlation with counseling outcomes.However, the brain mechanisms behind these behavioral synchronicities are poorly understood, and some researchers have proposed hypothetical models suggesting that behavioral synchronization between counselor and client may promote mutual brain synchronization, and that this brain synchronization provides the basis for the establishment of a working alliance.That is, the better the brain match between the counselor and the visitor, the stronger the alliance.Assumptions are assumptions, what is the truth?This study used functional near-red spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine the working alliance and interpersonal brain synchronization (IBS) between counselor and client in a counseling situation and compared it to the interaction between the two parties in a chat situation.Thirty-four visitors were randomly assigned to either the counseling group or the chat group, and three female professional counselors provided 40 minutes of counseling or chaperoning to these visitors in the laboratory (Figure below).At the end of the psychological consultation or chat, data were analyzed on the working alliance of the visitor's self-assessment and the brain synchronization of both sides of the interaction.It turns out thatCompared to the chat group, subjects in the counseling group established a better working alliance after 40 minutes, matched by a stronger brain synchronization in the right temporoparietal joint area (rTPJ) (see figure below).In addition, this brain synchronization is associated with the associative component of the working alliance.The right temporoparietal joint (rTPJ) is a brain region associated with social connectedness, cognitive empathy and theory of mind.This further supports the fact that the counseling group established a stronger emotional connection than the chat group(A component of the Working Alliance).In other words, counseling causes a different kind of brain activity than ordinary chatting.Moreover, the brain activity caused by counseling not only helps us build better working alliances and stronger emotional connections, but also improves our mood.
Psychological counseling can change the brain's Activity and shapeA video on YouTube called Dana Foundation, using scientific data, proves to us thatCounseling can help visitors to curb negative brain activity and even change the shape of the brain. The video describes how specific areas of the brain that control emotions are altered to varying degrees when we have counseling sessions.For example, by using fMRI brain imaging techniques to detect behavioral brain activity in depressed patients, counseling can effectively reduce the activity in the part of the brain that controls sadness and depression in the amygdala - the hippocampus and the middle prefrontal cortex.Through counseling, we can achieve a certain degree of suppression of these negative emotions, so that our intense emotions can be relieved and our mood gradually calmed down.At the same time, the video reveals the basic fact thatOur brains, like our bodies, can be "reshaped" through exercise, and if we regularly perform a brain activity, we will also grow the volume of the relevant control areas in the skull.For example, chronic anxiety and fear can increase the size of the amygdala, which controls our feelings of terror. Conversely, people with a larger amygdala are also more likely to suffer from depression (Leuchter et al., 1997).In this case, the internal shape of our brain can be reshaped by psychological interventions for the symptoms.In the experiment shown in the video, people with social phobia experienced a reduction in social phobia symptoms after receiving an online counseling session, and they showed varying degrees of reduction in amygdala volume.In other words.Counseling is also a training to strengthen our brain.If we attended more counseling, our brains would also become stronger and more resilient, and our problems would be solved better and faster.
This article comes from the WeChat public number: EVERLOYAL
English 
Chinese 
