Top Highlights

• Synonyms for responsiveness include openness, alertness, sensitivity, approachability, and having positive reactions toward another, whereas being nonresponsive is described by words such as sluggish, slow, sleepy, unaware, or giving no response.
• Like Rogersʼs (1980) therapeutic conditions—empathy, acceptance, warmth, and genuineness—responsiveness is an attitude,
• According to Schore, negative life experiences have a significant impact on the right brain—the seat of emotional learning—and its connections with the body, the autonomic nervous system, and the hypothalamic–pituitary axis.
• Research has highlighted that emotional learning is implicit and procedural rather than declarative and language based and thus less amenable to change with insight, rational knowledge, and thought processes alone.
• Facilitating change in emotional learning requires therapists to be highly attuned and responsive to clientsʼ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes in the session to promote and encourage the acquisition of new emotional learning, interpersonal experiences, and memory reconsolidation in clients.