PSYCHOTHERAPY: THEORY, RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

VOLUME 11, #4, WINTER, 1974

EFFECTS OF PSYCHOMOTOR GROUP THERAPY ON RATINGS OF SELF AND OTHERS
MELVIN L. FOULDS
Bowling Green State University
Increasingly, counselors and psychotherapists
are accepting the gestalt concept of the human
organism as a mind-body unity and integrating
this into their therapeutic practices. From this
viewpoint, the body is seen as the source of truth
and wisdom, with each person's entire life history
recorded now in specific parts of the body,
in the ways the body is held and moved and in
one's physical, emotional, and interpersonal
functioning. The new body psychotherapies
(Brown, 1973; Schutz, 1971) stress the need to
directly focus on and work with the entire body
in various ways to enhance the spontaneous flow
of biological energy, increased organismic selfregulation,
and the processes of personal growth
and therapeutic change.
While many body-oriented techniques and
methods for fostering personality and behavior
change are currently being advocated and practiced,
there is a paucity of research data from
investigations of the effects of such procedures.
One form of body therapy, systematic
psychomotor techniques and training (Pesso,
1969, 1972), is a motorically based and largely
nonverbal approach to personal growth that has
been found to increase internality and to decrease
the need for approval (Foulds & Hannigan,
1974). This study sought to determine the
effects of psychomotor group therapy on perceptions
of self and others. Since highly adequate,
self-actualizing individuals are believed to have
essentially positive views of self and others
(Combs & Snygg, 1959; Maslow, 1962; Rogers,
1963), it was predicted that the degree of affect
that growth-seeking college students attach to
perceptions of themselves and others, as measured
by semantic differential rating scales,
would change significantly in a positive direction
following psychomotor group therapy.
METHOD
PATRICIA S. HANNIGAN
University of Toledo
Subjects
The Ss in this study were 18 males and 18
females who contacted the counseling center and
asked to participate in a psychomotor group.
This event had been announced in the school
newspaper and by the word-of-mouth of participants
in previous groups, for the senior author
had been leading psychomotor groups on
campus for several years. The Ss ranged from
freshmen to graduate students and from 19 to 28
years of age. Each S took part in a screening
interview to assess motivation for personal
growth and to describe the goals and orientation
of the group and the kinds of techniques and
methods that would be used. We explained the
design of and requested the S"s participation in
the research study. The interview offered the S's
an opportunity to explore and express thoughts
and feelings concerning the group, and to make a
commitment concerning his/her participation.
Instrument
The Affect Scale (Girona, 1969) is a selfreport,
semantic differential (Osgood, Suci, &
Tannenbaum, 1957; Snider & Osgood, 1969)
instrument designed to measure attitudes toward
Myself and Others. This scale consists of 29
pairs of adjectives, all of which lie on a single
evaluative dimension, with one member of each
pair connoting a favorable evaluation or positive
affect and the other member connoting an unfavorable
evaluation or negative affect. The connotative
meanings of these adjectives have been
standardized for populations with a high school
education or better (Jenkins, Russell, & Suci,
1958). The adjectives are arranged in the form of
7-point Likert type scales, and the total possible
score may range from 29 to 203 representing
minimum and maximum positive affect. Ratings
of Myself and Others are made on separate
351
352 MELVIN L. FOULDS AND PATRICIA S. HANNIGAN
pages, and scores are then derived for each and
for Myself plus Others. Data reported by Girona
(1969) suggest that the Affect Scale is a reasonably
valid and reliable instrument.
Procedure
Experimental and control groups were formed
by the random assignment of the 36 5s by sex to
each of two subgroups containing 9 males and 9
females. A toss of a coin decided which would
be the treatment group, and this group was then
randomly divided by sex into two subgroups of
equal size. 5s were notified of their status, and
those in the control group were assured participation
in the next psychomotor group to be held the
following quarter. Eight weekly sessions of four
hours each were held in the evening for each
experimental subgroup. The senior author, a
therapist with five years experience conducting
psychomotor groups in both university and private
practice settings, led the group therapy sessions.
Psychomotor therapy involves emotion and
action. This body-oriented approach attempts to
sensitize the individual to her/his total organism
and to the environment. It focuses on feelingmind-
body relationships and expression through
movement. It stresses recovering information
that is stored in the body and expanding the range
of possible behaviors for the release of tension
and energy. Both increased personal control of
behavior in awareness and greater freedom and
spontaneity are goals of this process. The
psychomotor group consisted of a series of
movement exercises, most of which are nonverbal
with group discussion following each. The
exact procedures that were followed in this study
have been described in complete step-by-step
detail by Pesso (1969). Systematic psychomotor
training consists of three stages that may be
summarized as follows. The first stage is largely
intrapsychic. Fantasy exercises are used to elicit
various feelings and the reflex-like emotional
muscle movements that permit the fuller experiencing
of feelings. This is a release of tension
and energy. The second stage, basically
interpersonal, helps a person to become more
aware of the emotional impact of gestures and of
one or more persons around him/her. Group
members re-experience old unsettled conflicts
and/or traumatic events, with the addition of a
new outcome, through the use of regressive
techniques and the process of "accommodation'
' by other group members. The third stage is
both intra- and interpersonal and uses psychodramatic
exercises called "structures" in which
the target figures of all emotional expression are
polarized into good and bad figures. Negative
accommodators assist the experiencing and expression
of emotions, while positive accommodators
provide the needed corrective experiences
or new endings that can lead to psychological
growth.
Experimental and control 5 s were given pretests
immediately prior to the first group session
and posttests the day after the last group session.
Experimental 5s also completed the Affect Scale
six months later. Group means, standard deviations,
and t tests of significance of differences
between correlated means were then computed.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The results of the statistical treatment of the
data are presented in Table 1. Significant positive
changes were observed for the experimental
group in mean ratings of Myself, Others, and
Myself plus Others (p < .001) immediately following
psychomotor group therapy. Of the 18 5s
in this group, 15 ratings of Myself and of Others
and 16 ratings of Myself plus Others changed in
a positive direction on posttests. When both preand
posttest scores of the experimental group
were compared with six-month followup scores,
the findings revealed a slight (although nonsignificant)
loss over time of some of the gain
achieved at posttesting. Pretest-followup comparisons
revealed that 15 ratings of Myself and
of Others and 16 ratings of Myself plus Others
changed in a positive direction, with significant
positive changes in mean ratings of Myself
(p < .001), Others (p < .005), and Myself plus
Others (p < .001). The post-followup test comparisons
revealed no significant changes during
this period. Changes in control group mean
scores were not significant. No significant sex
differences in mean scores on any of the ratings
were found on any testing for either group.
The present findings indicate that growthseeking
college students perceive themselves
and other persons in more positive ways following
psychomotor group therapy, and the results
of the six-month followup testing indicate that
these changes hold over time. No followup data
are available for the control group, however,
EFFECTS OF PSYCHOMOTOR GROUP THERAPY 353
since they had been assured participation in the
next psychomotor group and thus lost their control
status. Some caution must be used, therefore,
in interpreting the followup findings. Also,
the present study was not designed to isolate the
exact process variables (and their interaction effects)
that could have contributed to the observed
changes. Research designs that control for
specific methods and procedures remain to be
implemented in future investigations.
While the hypotheses in the present study
were supported by the data, a number of questions
remain to be explored. Would the present
results be repeated in a replication study, and
would they hold for populations other than
growth-seeking college students? How do
member's expectations of psychomotor group
therapy affect outcome research? What kinds of
individuals benefit most from psychomotor
therapy and for whom is this form of bodyoriented
therapy contra-indicated? What are
some other effects of psychomotor group
therapy, and how long-lasting are they? These
and other questions remain to be answered
through future research efforts.
REFERENCES
BROWN, M. The new body psychotherapies. Psychotherapy:
Theory, Research & Practice, 1973, 10, 98-116.
COMBS, A. W., & SNYGG, D. Individual behavior. New
York: Harper & Row, 1959.
FOULDS, M. L., & HANNIGAN, P. S. Effects of psychomotor
group therapy on locus of control and social desirability.
Unpublished manuscript, Bowling Green State University,
1974.
GIRONA, R. The semantic differential as a tool in predicting
the potential effectiveness of student nurses. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, University of Florida, 1969.
JENKINS, J. J., RUSSELL, W. A., & Suci, G. C. An atlas of
semantic profiles for 360 words. American Journal of
Psychology, 1958, 71, 688-699.
MASLOW, A. H. Toward a psychology of being. Princeton:
Van Nostrand, 1962.
OSGOOD, C. E., Suci, G. C , & TANNENBAUM, P. H. The
measurement of meaning. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois
Press, 1957.
PESSO, A. Movement in psychotherapy: Psychomotor
techniques and training. New York: New York University
Press, 1969.
PESSO, A. Experience in action: Toward a psychology of
human movement. New York: New York University
Press, 1972.
ROGERS, C. R. The fully functioning person. Psychotherapy:
Theory, Research and Practice, 1963, 1, 17-26.
SCHUTZ, W. C. Here comes everybody. New York: Harper
& Row, 1971.
SNIDER, J. G., & OSGOOD, C. E. (Eds.) Semantic differential
technique. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.
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