Does closeness built in a circle carry into people’s existing relationships?
The one pre–post study found more closeness toward fellow participants, but no measurable change in relationships outside the course.
Builds on six works
Practitioners often describe Circling as training for everyday relating. If its effects stay inside the room, it is a good evening; if they transfer, it is an intervention.
Gärdenfors & Jönsson (2022) found that closeness and responsiveness rose toward fellow participants after an Authentic Relating weekend, but relationships outside the course showed no significant change. The sample was small and the follow-up short.
Outside relational practice, two qualitative studies follow meditation into working life. Lychnell (2017) describes how seven managers brought a meditative attitude to hard situations at work, and Lychnell (2020) found that support in the company, including a holding environment, helped managers carry a mindfulness programme into everyday work.
Follow participants and one person close to each of them, such as a partner or friend, for several months. Combine experience sampling of everyday interactions with partner-reported responsiveness, and compare with a waitlist group.
Self-reports of relating better are easy to inflate. Reports from the people around participants are harder to fake.
Cautions: Small sample · Self-selected participants · Self-report only
After a two-day Authentic Relating course, participants felt markedly closer to a fellow participant. Ratings of a close friend who hadn’t attended didn’t change two to four weeks later.
Cautions: Studied by its developers · Commercial interest · Same study as another entry · Self-report only · No later follow-up
Ten weeks of online partner practice (Affect Dyads) reduced loneliness compared with a waitlist. Against mindfulness training, the advantage showed only in momentary, everyday loneliness.
Cautions: Self-selected participants
Seven CEOs and business owners, followed for two years, brought a meditative attitude to hard situations at work. Their focus shifted from attending to suffering, to witnessing what is, to responding with authenticity.
A longitudinal case study of a workplace mindfulness programme. Managers developed perspective-taking, empathy and authentic functioning, and features of the company helped them carry these into everyday work.
Cautions: Self-report only
Two diary studies linked disclosure and feeling that a partner responded with understanding to greater intimacy, with emotional disclosure more strongly linked than factual disclosure.
Cautions: Same study as another entry · Self-selected participants
A preliminary evaluation of encounter groups reported both benefits and harms and examined how outcomes related to leaders’ behaviour.