Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Cultivating loving and supportive relationships is important for the mental and physical health of Canadians. Epidemiological studies have found that those individuals that have a relationship that they perceive as close, loving, and committed tend to be happier and healthier, both mentally and physically, than those who do not have this type of relationship in their lives. Emotion-Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT-C) is a well established and empirically validated approach to treating couples in distress. It has been recommended as a treatment for couples that are simultaneously struggling with relationship difficulties and health issues, such as depression, post traumatic stress disorders, and chronic illness, among others. The purpose of the current study is to test one of the major assumptions of the EFT-C approach; namely, that helping partners to access and express their underlying vulnerable emotions is key to fostering closer, more satisfying and supportive relationships. The videotaped therapy sessions of 32 couples that underwent 10-12 sessions of EFT-C as part of the York Emotional Injury Project will be screened for examples of vulnerable emotional expression. For each of the 64 partners, the two most vulnerable emotional expressions will be identified and coded on the Couples Vulnerability Rating Scale (McKinnon & Greenberg, 2008). It is hypothesized that come the end of therapy, couples that displayed higher levels of vulnerable emotional expression during treatment will show the greatest improvement on measures of trust and relationship satisfaction. The findings of this research will help to improve our understanding of how close and satisfying relationships are fostered, and will serve to inform future guidelines for the practice of couple therapy.