Investigating Linguistic Feedback Markers in Therapeutic Discourse among Patients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder with a Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Approach

Therapeutic discourse is a special type of organizational discourse which is used by psychotherapists when treating their patients. This is highly significant in sociolinguistic studies, for which the present study attempted to shed some light on one aspect of this issue. One of the important communicative strategies in psychotherapeutic dialogues is implementing feedback markers. The present study aimed at analyzing different types of feedback markers used by male and female psychotherapists during psychotherapeutic sessions for patients suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. Our method is based on the logic of the quantitative and qualitative research within the framework of conversation analysis methodology. The data were collected by recording audio and video of psychotherapy sessions. The corpus contained 1333 markers derived from psychotherapeutic sessions including 630 minutes of conversation. The findings showed that the number of linguistic feedback markers produced by male psychotherapists was higher than those produced by female psychotherapists in psychotherapeutic sessions. While female psychotherapists used a large number of lexical feedback makers, male psychotherapists used plenty of non-lexical makers. The focal point of producing feedback markers are at the end of sentences and utterances carrying falling intonations and after pauses. In this study, ‘understanding and following patients’ remarks” is considered as the major and central meaning of feedback.