The Effects of Expressive Arts on the Evoking of Automatic Thoughts during the Training at A Graduate Level of Personal and Professional Development of Cognitive-Behavioural Clinical Psychologists: A Qualitative Study

The clinical psychologist rooted in a cognitive-behavioural perspective of learning guides interventions on the principle that automatic thoughts have a controlling influence on emotions and behaviours and on the practice of accessing these thoughts and bringing them to the level of processing where they will be subjected to conscious analyses. Will expressive arts activities evoke automatic thoughts? Eleven graduate level cognitive-behavioural clinical psychologists in training described their unique subjective experiences with expressive arts activities during five sessions. Qualitative data collected from interpretations made by the participants themselves were subjected to triangulation and systematically converged in the way to confirm the theory that expressive arts do evoke automatic thoughts, lead to individual insights about personal problems and issues, and benefit the grasping of the theoretical concepts being trained.