Circular questions are more effective in fostering mentalization than lineal ones

Aim: According to Tomm (1988), lineal questions while interviewing a patient are based on a positivistic view of the mental phenomena and the therapist takes a role of detectivewhen a therapist uses them she/he assumes that trying to unravel a mystery. The assumption behind this type of questions is that the problem is inside the patient , and that the clinician can understand understandable it through the contents and ways of expressing themof the patient. Circular questions also aim to gather information about the problem, but the assumption is that everything is connected to everything and that the only way to investigate mental phenomena is to analyze "patterns that connect" persons, events, feelings, and so on. We decided to investigate if this type of questions could be more useful than the first ones to improve the ability of understanding others' emotional states, as maintained by according to systemic and intersubjective approaches approaches to psychological intervention. Method: We administered the Basic Empathy Scale (BES) to evaluate the basic level of empathy of each 80 participants. Then we addressed to a half of them some circular questions about their personal history; to the other half we addressed the same questions but in a linealr form. Two samples were composed randomly: the control group, assessed with direct questions; the experimental group, assessed with circular questions. At the end, both the groups took the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). Results: The analysis showed a highlyThe group answering circular questions had a very higher score in the RMET than the other group. significant difference between the means of the two groups in RMET scores -- higher for the experimental group than the control one. No significant difference between groups was highlighted for in the BES resultsscores, which also do not correlate with RMET scores. Discussion: Circular questions seem to highly improve foster the empathy mentalization of the subject, representing a potential asset to the therapeutic process.