Synonyms
Role-taking
Couple and family therapists use role-play interventions to provide clients with opportunities to practice new skills or patterns of interaction. Role plays appeared early in systems-based approaches to therapy, and possess a long history in the field as a pliable intervention useful for a variety of purposes.
Role plays are most strongly associated with cognitive-behavioral models and some family therapy approaches. Specifically, Cognitive-Behavioral Couples Therapy (Epstein and Baucom 2002) and Structural Family Therapy incorporate role-play interventions as substantive components in the therapy process. Research studies of behavioral couple therapy for substance abuse also highlight role-playing as a common intervention (Baucom et al. 1998).
Although role plays permit a wide range of expressions depending on the nature of the therapy and the purposes of the intervention, they tend to take on one of a few typical forms. These forms include communications skills...
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Baucom, D. H., Shoham, V., Mueser, K. T., Daiuto, A. D., & Stickle, T. R. (1998). Empirically supported couple and family interventions for marital distress and adult mental health problems. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66(1), 53–88. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.66.1.53.
Epstein, N. B., & Baucom, D. H. (2002). Enhanced cognitive-behavioral therapy for couples: A contextual approach. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Schlesinger, S. E. (1988). Cognitive-behavioral approaches to family treatment of addictions. In N. Epstein, S. E. Schlesinger, & W. Dryden (Eds.), Cognitive-behavioral therapy with families (pp. 118–150). New York: Bruner/Mazel.
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Isaacson, K., Furrow, J.L. (2019). Role Playing in Couple and Family Therapy. In: Lebow, J.L., Chambers, A.L., Breunlin, D.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_94
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_94
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