Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

This study will look at how an individual's self-identified gender affects the outcome of Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) for depression. EFT aims to help clients become aware of and work through their emotions. Several studies have demonstrated that gender may contribute to the outcome of psychotherapy since one's expression of emotion is often relative to one's self-identified gender. Therefore, it is particularly relevant to consider the effects of gender on the outcome of EFT since the emphasis of this treatment is on emotion. To conduct this study, I plan to measure the affect of several EFT sessions, where half the therapist and client dyads are gender matched and the other half are not. Understanding how the expression of emotion interacts with gender to predict success of therapy could be extremely useful when preparing a client's treatment plan. Specifically, results could suggest how EFT could be modified to best suit a client's self-identified gender, or, if gender matching of client and therapist appear to affect therapy outcome, this should also be considered. The relevancy of this study is therefore to not only gain a better understanding of how affect is expressed in EFT, but also, to help maximize the effectiveness of EFT.