Toward a Sensitivity-based Implicit Measure of Patients' Important Goal Pursuits

When individuals arrive to receive help from mental health providers, they do not always have well specified and well established goals. It is the mental health providers responsibility to work collaboratively with patients to clarify their goals in the therapy sessions as well as life in general through clinical interviews, diagnostic assessments, and thorough observations. However, recognizing individuals important life goals is not always straightforward. Here we introduce a novel method that gauges a patient important goal pursuits from their relative sensitivity to goal related words. Past research has shown that a person active goal pursuits cause them to be more sensitive to the presence of goal related stimuli in the environment being able to consciously report those stimuli when others cannot see them. By presenting words related to a variety of different life goal pursuits very quickly for 50 msec or less, the patient would be expected to notice and be aware of words related to their strongest motivations but not the other goal related words. These may or may not be among the goals they have identified in therapy sessions, and the ones not previously identified can be fertile grounds for further discussion and exploration in subsequent therapy sessions. Results from eight patient volunteers are described and discussed in terms of the potential utility of this supplemental personal therapy aid.