Exploring Factors Related to Psychotherapists' Deontological and Utilitarian Decisions : Emotions and Personality Features

Autor: Kumova, Filiz, KAYA, Sena
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
DOI: 10.17605/osf.io/tj6gz
Popis: In clinical psychology, the topic of ethical decisions is limited to a couple of descriptive studies conducted to determine the conflicting issues that arise despite the existence of a professional moral code. Moreover, these studies investigated only the effect of a limited number of demographic factors such as age, gender, experience etc., on these mentioned ethical decisions (e.g. Gibson & Pope, 1993; Pope, Tabachnick & Keith-Spiegel, 1987; Venkatesh & Lovibond, 2019 ). However, they failed to propose consistent and meaningful results with respect to these factors. Psychotherapy is a profession that involves the exchange of intense emotions by nature and with respect to this feature, the relationship between emotions, personality features and psychotherapists’ ethical decisions is a curiosity provoking topic which has not been explored yet. The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between emotions, personality features (such as neurotic personality development, obsessive -compulsive personality pattern, antisocial tendencies etc.) and psychotherapists’ ethical decisions by taking advantage of the cumulative research findings in both moral psychology and emotion-decision making literature. Except two national studies (Kumova & Bahçekapılı, 2020; Kumova & Bahçekapılı, in press) there were no any national or international studies conducted to identify the high conflict psychotherapist ethic dilemmas in which therapist decisions could be differentiated as deontological or utilitarian. Kumova & Bahçekapılı (2020) identified high conflict psychotherapist moral dilemmas in Turkish culture. In their second study (Kumova & Bahçekapılı, in press), they investigated the relationship between negative mood of the participants and deontological decision-making tendencies. Furthermore, with respect to the intense use of personality features such as empathic concern, psychopathy, analytical thinking and altruistic utilitarianism as correlates of deontological/utilitarian decision making, in the international moral psychology studies, they explored the relationship between psychotherapists' utilitarian/ deontological decisions and these mentioned personality features. However, the results revealed that there was not a significant relationship between mood of the participants and their deontological/utilitarian decision- making tendencies with respect to both conventional and process dissociation analyses. Furthermore, the results indicated that these personality features were not correlated with utilitarian/deontological decision-making tendencies in general, independent of the method they were calculated with. So the authors recommended further studies to be conducted in order to investigate the other possible correlated personality features of psychotherapists' deontological/utilitarian decisions in high conflict moral dilemmas. The present study was a replication of Kumova & Bahçekapılı (in press) with respect to investigating the relationship between the participants' mood and their utilitarian/deontological decisions in high conflict moral dilemmas. Furthermore, align with the authors' recommendations, the present study aimed to explore other personality features that would be associated with those mentioned decision making tendencies.
Databáze: OpenAIRE