Speaker
Description
In Austria, Jakob Levy Moreno wrote 1924 “Das Stegreiftheater” (The Theatre of Spontaneity). In 1931, in the U.S., he coined the term group psychotherapy and had a controlled trial on psychodrama in 1951, earlier than Eysenck. The last meta-analysis found a medium effect size of d=.501 (.36, .64) for increasing mental health. Systematic reviews conclude that psychodrama helps patients in many situations. Change mechanisms like concretization externalize and embody the action insight. In process outcome studies, participants generally reported improvement in their personal therapeutic goals, a decrease in symptoms and life problems, and some showed a marked increase in spontaneity levels. Training research dealing with death showed that the psychodrama processed negative emotions related to death and has helped students become more confident. As a research tool adequate for psychodrama, the revised spontaneity assessment inventory (SAI-R) is further developing. In the non-clinical field, socio-, axio-, and cosmodrama work on peace and ecological challenges, and in 2000, UNESCO awarded the Education for Peace Prize. A project about gender-based violence successfully used psychodrama to troubleshoot victim-perpetrator relationships.
Psychodrama history is well documented by autobiographies of the Moreno family and by a biographer. Moreno founded many journals, but mostly in his own Beacon House publishing. That is why the journals do not appear well in the academic index, but there is an online bibliography and library.
| Are you currently an Early Career Researcher? | No |
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