The potential research and clinical applications of the new normative data of the referential process Italian measures.

According to Bucci’s multiple code theory (1997, 2016) for a significant change the patient- therapist relationship should foster a referential process shaping in three alternating phases: (a) Arousal: experiencing emotion schemas, (b) Symbolizing: translating into words the emotional experiences, and (c) Reorganizing: recognizing, understanding and expanding the emotional significance of patient’s narratives. In addition to computerized Italian measures of referential process already in use – for example Disfluency (DF), which models the Arousal phase, and the Weighted Referential Activity Dictionary (WRAD), which models the Symbolizing phase of the process - recently has been developed the Weighted Reflection and Reorganization List (WRRL; Negri et al. 2019), which models the Reorganizing phase. This study aimed to (a) validate qualitatively and quantitively the WRRL and (b) collect the normative data of the referential process Italian measures.
The central tendency and variability indexes of all the computerized Italian measures have been calculated on 265 psychotherapy sessions. Moreover, all conversational turns of all sessions were divided in two groups: Reorganizing Turns Group with low WRAD and high use of abstract reflection words (Reflection) and Non-reorganizing Turns Group with high WRAD and low Reflection.
WRRL was significantly higher in the Reorganizing Turns Group (t = 3.246, p < .001); WRRL correlated negatively with WRAD (r = -.148, p < .05) and DF (r = - .274, p < .001), and positively with the use abstract reflection words (r = .547, p < .001).
These results represent a first quantitative validation of WRRL as a reliable measure of reorganizing phase. Furthermore, the new normative data can be used to quantitatively and graphically compare single psychotherapeutic processes with the sessions normative sample. These norms enlarge the potential applications of the measures for clinical practice and for process-outcome research.