The relationship between emotions and psychotherapists' ethical decisions

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. 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 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 and psychotherapists' ethical decisions by taking advantage of the cumulative research findings in both moral psychology and emotion-decision making literature. 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. There was a similar problem regarding the identification of high conflict classical moral dilemmas in the Turkish culture as well. So as the first step, high conflict psychotherapist and classical moral dilemmas were identified by a pilot research. The deontological/utilitarian decision-making tendencies of psychotherapists were compared with those of undergraduate psychology students with respect to both psychotherapist and classical moral dilemmas. Also, an 'other profession' group was added to the study for comparisons regarding the classical moral dilemmas. The relationship between negative mood of the participants and deontological decision-making tendencies was explored. 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, these variables were also added to the present study. Investigating the above mentioned relationships in a different culture was considered to be an important topic as well. 406 undergraduate psychology students, 177 psychotherapists and 370 people with different professions (953 in total) participated in the current study. The data were analyzed for each of the three groups and the joint sample. Research 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 scenario types. This result was valid for both conventional and process dissociation analyses. According to the process dissociation analysis results, psychotherapists' both deontological and utilitarian inclinations were higher than those of the other two groups with respect to the classical moral dilemmas. In psychotherapist dilemmas, psychotherapists' deontological decision-making tendency was found to be higher than that of the student group with respect to both conventional and process dissociation analyses. In the conventional analysis, the deontological/utilitarian tendencies of psychotherapist and student groups were not differentiated with respect to the classical moral dilemmas. None of three groups was differentiated on the basis of empathic concern when the age variable was controlled. Results showed that the psychology student group's both Machiavellist and antisocial tendencies were higher compared to the other two groups. With respect to the other profession group; the results indicated a positive relationship between utilitarianism and Machiavellist- antisocial tendencies but a negative correlation between utilitarianism and altruistic utilitarianism on the basis of conventional analysis. A positive correlation was found between deontological tendencies of the mentioned group and empathic concern on the basis of both conventional and process dissociation analyses. In the process dissociation analysis, there was also a negative relationship between both utilitarian/deontological inclinations and psychopathic tendencies. Furthermore, results yielded a positive correlation between utilitarianism and analytical thinking with respect to the process dissociation analysis. No relationship was found between utilitarian decision-making tendencies and altruistic utilitarianism in the process dissociation analysis. With respect to the psychotherapist dilemmas, the results indicated that these personality features were not correlated with utilitarian/deontological decision-making tendencies in general, regarding both the psychotherapist and student groups, independent of the method they were calculated with. This result was valid for also the classical dilemmas with respect to the psychotherapist group. Moreover, Turkish version of Oxford Utilitarian Scale was developed by the present study. The possible reasons and implications of these results were also discussed in the present study.