Music Therapy Assessment of Automatic Thoughts: Developing a Cognitive Behavioral Application of Improvisation to Assess Couple Communication

This article is a description of the Music Therapy Assessment of Automatic Thoughts (MTAAT), a cognitive behavioral intervention designed to help couples improve comnlunication. This method was designed to be a part of the type of communication training exercises that may take place in marriage counseling. It involves spouses taking turns improvising on percussion instruments to depict musically what they perceive as their typical pattern of communication. While one improvises, the other writes thoughts that result from what the other is musically "saying." These are designed to serve as assessments of the automatic, conscious thoughts each spouse has when communicating. The results of an initial clinical application suggest that the MTAAT may successfully enable couples to communicate musically with one another and may reveal a degree of interpersonal knowledge about their relationship and the types of automatic thoughts they have while communicating verbally with one another. The authors suggest the need for research on the applicability of the MTAAT in a marriage counseling setting and other settings where therapists use cognitive behavioral music therapy interventions.