63 societies
A professional association connecting management researchers, teachers, doctoral students and practitioners.
Why it matters: A workplace Circling study could examine whether interpersonal disclosure changes speaking up, coordination or team performance, while accounting for managerial authority and pressure to participate.
Fields: Team science
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A professional association connecting dance/movement therapists with educators, students and researchers.
Why it matters: Its research community could help code movement and non-verbal responses during Circling or design a movement-based comparison group, although dance therapy has different aims and training requirements.
Fields: Focusing, body therapies
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A professional membership association gathering group psychotherapists and supporting their education and research.
Why it matters: Its community can help study group climate, facilitator behaviour and member feedback in circles, including whether apparent progress lasts after a group ends.
Fields: Group therapy, T-groups
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A professional association for healthcare practitioners who use or study clinical hypnosis.
Why it matters: Its clinical community offers a comparison for how wording and rapport shape responses to a facilitator, although a Circling study would need a clear question about suggestion or hypnosis.
Fields: Hypnosis, dream sharing
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A membership society bringing psychodrama practitioners together with group therapists, educators and researchers.
Why it matters: Its community studies and practises enactment within groups, offering ways to compare spoken feedback in Circling with role reversal and embodied exploration of relationships.
Fields: Improv, psychodrama · Group therapy, T-groups
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An ASA membership section connecting sociologists who study how emotions relate to interaction, identity and social life.
Why it matters: An ethnography of Circling could examine which feelings are welcomed, how authenticity is recognised and how emotional skill affects status within the group.
Fields: Sociology of emotion
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A membership organisation linking people who teach, study and use improvisation in education, organisations and other settings.
Why it matters: Applied improvisers offer collaborators for a comparison group built around unscripted responses, turn-taking and uncertainty, allowing a study to ask what Circling adds to another participatory group activity.
Fields: Improv, psychodrama
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scientific association gathering researchers of personality differences, processes and development.
Why it matters: Its researchers can help distinguish feeling authentic in a circle from stable personality differences and lasting change, using repeated measurements and reports from outside the group.
Fields: Authenticity
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scholarly society gathering consciousness researchers across neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and related disciplines.
Why it matters: Researchers could present careful descriptions or experiments on changes in awareness during Circling, but the work would need to address a consciousness question rather than only report satisfaction.
Fields: Micro-phenomenology · Hypnosis, dream sharing · Predictive processing
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A membership association linking researchers, teachers and practitioners concerned with communication in healthcare.
Why it matters: Its researchers can help evaluate whether reflective groups improve observable listening or patients’ experiences, offering methods for testing transfer from a circle into professional work.
Fields: Reflective groups
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A European professional association linking body psychotherapists, national associations and training organisations.
Why it matters: Researchers could compare how bodily sensations are noticed and spoken about in therapy and in a circle, while keeping therapeutic interventions distinct from a non-clinical practice.
Fields: Focusing, body therapies
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A professional association connecting Gestalt therapists, organisational practitioners and training bodies across Europe.
Why it matters: Its research community offers a close comparison for studying present-moment contact, bodily awareness and relationship ruptures in Circling, while keeping clinical treatment and peer practice distinct.
Fields: Psychotherapy process
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scholarly membership association connecting social psychologists through meetings, training and publications.
Why it matters: Its group and identity researchers can help test whether participation in a circle changes lasting belonging or loneliness, including effects beyond the circle’s own membership.
Fields: Loneliness, belonging
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A membership organisation linking restorative-justice practitioners, researchers and policymakers in Europe and beyond.
Why it matters: Its community offers methods and ethical questions for studying responses to harm, consent and accountability; an ordinary circle should not be equated with a restorative process involving those harmed.
Fields: Dialogue and repair
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scientific membership society connecting researchers, educators and practitioners interested in development throughout adulthood.
Why it matters: It is a place to question claims that Circling changes adult meaning-making, using independent assessment and follow-up; the society’s remit is broader than any one theory of developmental stages.
Fields: Ego development
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A membership society connecting people who study or practise group analysis in clinical and other settings.
Why it matters: Its group analysts can help examine who speaks, who stays silent and how relationships develop across a circle, including processes involving the whole group rather than a single pair.
Fields: Group therapy, T-groups
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A membership association connecting researchers and practitioners concerned with conflict and negotiation.
Why it matters: A study of disagreement in Circling could ask whether particular listening and feedback practices support repair, while distinguishing improved understanding from agreement or resolution.
Fields: Dialogue and repair
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scholarly association connecting researchers of personal relationships across several social-science disciplines.
Why it matters: Experiments on disclosure and responsive listening in a circle would fit its relationship focus, especially if they measure whether closeness persists beyond the session.
Fields: Relationships · Sharing emotions
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An interdisciplinary scholarly association examining religion through cognitive and evolutionary approaches.
Why it matters: A Circling project could investigate how ritual, shared attention and learned expectations shape experience, provided it makes testable claims rather than using the meeting to validate a spiritual account.
Fields: Religion and ritual
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An association gathering dream researchers, therapists, educators, artists and people interested in their own dreams.
Why it matters: Dream discussion offers a concrete comparison for Circling: one person recounts an experience while others try to understand it, making listener responses and felt understanding suitable research questions.
Fields: Hypnosis, dream sharing
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A federation connecting Balint societies and practitioners who reflect together on clinical relationships.
Why it matters: Balint groups offer a comparison for exploring a difficult encounter while others listen, helping a Circling study examine facilitation, reflective attention and changes beyond the group.
Fields: Reflective groups
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An academic association gathering researchers across interpersonal, mediated and other forms of communication.
Why it matters: Its interaction and technology communities suit studies of turn-taking, responses to disclosure and how video platforms change listening in a circle.
Fields: Conversation · Online relating · Listening
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scientific membership organisation for researchers and practitioners concerned with infant development.
Why it matters: Its interaction methods can inform coding of bids, missed responses and repair in Circling, but findings about infants cannot establish developmental repair in adult groups.
Fields: Infant attunement
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A membership organisation connecting researchers, clinicians, former group members and families concerned with coercive influence and abuse.
Why it matters: It offers contacts for researching pressure, dependency and harmful conduct in groups, including accounts from people who leave Circling; specific behaviours need investigation without assuming a group label.
Fields: Safety and harm
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A membership association connecting listening researchers with educators and practitioners across professions.
Why it matters: It is a close venue for comparing ways of listening in a circle and measuring both the speaker’s experience and the listener’s observable behaviour.
Fields: Listening
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A professional association connecting scholars and students who analyse the organisation of social interaction.
Why it matters: Recordings of circles could support detailed analyses of questions, pauses, misunderstandings and repair, showing how participants build an encounter turn by turn.
Fields: Conversation
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scholarly membership society for researchers studying the sense of presence in mediated environments.
Why it matters: Its concepts and measures can help compare feeling together in an online circle with being together in person, while separating social presence from immersion in a virtual space.
Fields: Online relating
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An interdisciplinary society bringing emotion researchers together across psychology, the humanities and other fields.
Why it matters: Its community offers competing accounts and measures of emotional sharing, useful for testing whether a circle changes a speaker’s feelings and what the listeners contribute.
Fields: Emotion regulation · Sharing emotions
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scientific membership society connecting researchers across laboratory, clinical and other approaches to psychedelics.
Why it matters: It offers contacts for studying how expectations and social settings affect reports of connection, though a project on Circling alone would sit outside its central drug research remit.
Fields: Psychedelics, breathwork
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An international association linking hypnosis researchers, clinicians and national professional societies.
Why it matters: Hypnosis researchers can help separate absorption, expectation and responses to a facilitator’s suggestions in Circling; that comparison does not establish that Circling is hypnosis.
Fields: Hypnosis, dream sharing
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A membership coalition connecting dialogue facilitators, researchers, public officials and community organisers.
Why it matters: It offers potential partners for comparing Circling with other facilitated conversations, especially where listening across differences must lead to decisions or action outside the meeting.
Fields: Dialogue and repair
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A professional association for drama therapists that supports training, research and exchange among practitioners.
Why it matters: Its researchers could help distinguish the effects of being witnessed from those of acting out an experience, providing a comparison for disclosure and responses in a circle.
Fields: Improv, psychodrama
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A member-led charity bringing together people interested in the dynamics of organisations, groups and society.
Why it matters: Its listening posts and group-relations events offer comparisons for how authority, anxiety and shared interpretations develop in a circle, with a broader focus on social and organisational life.
Fields: Group therapy, T-groups
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An international scientific society gathering researchers who study the human brain through imaging and related methods.
Why it matters: It offers methodological expertise for imaging studies of disclosure or feeling understood, but its broad brain-mapping remit makes the connection to Circling indirect.
Fields: Feeling understood
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A Brandeis-based membership organisation linking researchers and practitioners working on relationships and coordination across roles.
Why it matters: Its researchers offer measures of communication across work roles, useful for testing whether relational exercises in a circle change everyday teamwork rather than only how a session feels.
Fields: Team science
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scientific society bringing together researchers of the brain processes involved in social life and emotion.
Why it matters: An experiment separating disclosure, accurate understanding and the reward of being heard would suit its remit; a brain measure would need to add information beyond participants’ reports.
Fields: Empathy · Synchrony · Feeling understood
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scientific society connecting researchers who study feelings, motivation and other affective processes across disciplines.
Why it matters: A study could examine how naming a feeling or receiving a listener’s response changes emotion during a circle, separating reported warmth from accurate understanding or helpful behaviour.
Fields: Emotion regulation · Sharing emotions · Empathy
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An international membership association bringing experimental hypnosis researchers together with clinicians and trainees.
Why it matters: Its scientific programme is a place to discuss experiments on expectation, absorption and interpersonal suggestion that could clarify what a facilitator contributes to a circle.
Fields: Hypnosis, dream sharing
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scientific society connecting researchers who develop or use near-infrared methods to measure brain function.
Why it matters: It offers technical collaborators for recording several circle participants at once and checking whether apparent coordination comes from interaction, movement or shared signals.
Fields: Synchrony
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A professional society for psychologists and researchers studying people, teams and organisations at work.
Why it matters: Its researchers can help evaluate Circling used in workplaces, testing changes in team behaviour and performance alongside participants’ impressions of psychological safety.
Fields: Team science
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scholarly society linking researchers who use interpersonal theory to study personality, relationships and psychological difficulties.
Why it matters: It offers constructs for coding warmth, dominance and reciprocal responses in circles, helping distinguish a participant’s usual style from what develops with a particular partner.
Fields: How we see each other
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A membership society for researchers and students studying personality and social behaviour.
Why it matters: Studies of candid disclosure, perceived authenticity or how circle members judge one another could fit its programme, with comparisons that separate self-reports from behaviour.
Fields: Relationships · Authenticity · How we see each other · Conversation
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scientific society for researchers relating bodily signals to psychological processes.
Why it matters: A Circling study measuring breathing, heart activity or bodily attention would find methodological expertise here, including ways to distinguish shared responses to a prompt from coordination between people.
Fields: Interoception · Synchrony
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An international scientific society connecting psychotherapy researchers, clinicians and students across approaches.
Why it matters: Its researchers offer methods for coding live sessions, tracking relationship ruptures and recording deterioration, all useful for studying what happens in circles without assuming that Circling is therapy.
Fields: Psychotherapy process · Group therapy, T-groups · Safety and harm
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scholarly society connecting researchers across disciplines concerned with children’s development.
Why it matters: Researchers of early interaction offer methods for following responsiveness over time; the fit is indirect because Circling involves adults rather than developing children.
Fields: Infant attunement
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scientific society linking researchers of social behaviour and its biological bases in humans and other animals.
Why it matters: Its human-interaction researchers could advise on testing bodily coordination and social responses during Circling, though much of the society’s work concerns other species or laboratory tasks.
Fields: Empathy · Synchrony · Feeling understood
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An American Anthropological Association section connecting anthropologists who study religion.
Why it matters: It offers ethnographic approaches to shared silence, ritual and spiritual interpretation, useful for examining how circles teach participants to recognise and describe connection.
Fields: Religion and ritual · Sociology of emotion
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An interdisciplinary membership organisation linking clinicians and researchers interested in integrating approaches to psychotherapy.
Why it matters: Its community could help test whether responsiveness, emotional exploration or other shared processes explain changes during Circling, while distinguishing those processes from a complete treatment.
Fields: Psychotherapy process
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An APA division bringing together psychologists who research or work clinically with religion and spirituality.
Why it matters: Its researchers offer ways to study spiritual interpretations of Circling, including how beliefs and expectations relate to reported experiences; its scope also includes clinical questions outside the practice.
Fields: Religion and ritual
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A scholarly society connecting researchers who investigate religion through social-scientific methods.
Why it matters: An ethnographic or survey study of Circling could fit by examining how shared rituals and learned language shape experiences of connection, without treating spiritual interpretations as established explanations.
Fields: Religion and ritual · Sociology of emotion
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An international association bringing together infant mental-health researchers, clinicians and educators.
Why it matters: Its relationship-focused community can inform observation of attunement and repair, while the infant–caregiver relationship differs substantially from the relationships among adults in a circle.
Fields: Infant attunement
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An ACM conference bringing together researchers and practitioners who design and investigate interactive technologies.
Why it matters: A study of video-circle interfaces could fit by testing how camera layout, delays or turn-taking tools affect participation, accessibility and felt connection.
Fields: Online relating
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A recurring OPEN Foundation conference gathering researchers, clinicians and policymakers concerned with psychedelics.
Why it matters: Researchers studying social context and group experiences around psychedelics could help design comparisons with intense experiences in Circling; shared descriptions do not imply shared drug effects.
Fields: Psychedelics, breathwork
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A recurring interdisciplinary meeting for researchers developing and testing active-inference models.
Why it matters: A formal model of how circle participants revise expectations about each other could fit here; the link is theoretical unless the model is tested against interaction data and simpler alternatives.
Fields: Predictive processing
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A research and training network connecting people who use detailed interviews to investigate lived experience.
Why it matters: Its interviewers and analysts offer methods for reconstructing a particular moment of feeling met in Circling, with attention to how the interviewer’s questions may shape the account.
Fields: Micro-phenomenology
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A non-profit organisation supporting dialogue facilitators and communities through training, consultation and evaluation.
Why it matters: Its structured dialogue offers a comparison for how questions and speaking agreements affect listening across disagreement; it is chiefly a practice and training partner.
Fields: Dialogue and repair
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An educational charity connecting academic research with public enquiries about minority religions and related movements.
Why it matters: Its researchers can help investigate power and disputed accounts of harm in Circling communities while separating specific conduct from stereotypes about unfamiliar groups.
Fields: Safety and harm
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An institute connecting contemplative practitioners with scientists and scholars through research grants, dialogues and residential programmes.
Why it matters: Its research institutes offer collaborators for comparing attention practised alone with attention shared in a circle, and for interviewing participants about particular moments of experience.
Fields: Meditation research · Micro-phenomenology
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An institute bringing applied behavioural-science practitioners together through T-group learning, organisational development and publications.
Why it matters: Its Human Interaction Labs offer a close practice comparison for immediate interpersonal feedback and learning in groups; shared features do not establish equivalent outcomes for Circling.
Fields: Group therapy, T-groups
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An institute combining social research, organisational consulting and experiential learning about groups and institutions.
Why it matters: Its group-relations work offers a comparison for studying authority, roles and responses to facilitators in Circling; experiential learning events should not be treated as outcome evidence.
Fields: Group therapy, T-groups
Checked 1 Nov 2026
An organisation supporting Focusing through teaching, practitioner connections and meetings about Gendlin’s work.
Why it matters: Its community offers a close comparison for attending to bodily felt meaning while another person listens; researchers could examine how such attention develops during a circle.
Fields: Focusing, body therapies
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A University of Michigan programme combining intergroup-dialogue teaching, facilitator development and research.
Why it matters: It offers a comparison for listening and disclosure across social differences, helping a Circling study distinguish feeling understood from changes in prejudice, power or collective action.
Fields: Dialogue and repair
Checked 1 Nov 2026
A non-profit organisation supporting healthcare staff and organisations through Schwartz Rounds and other programmes centred on compassion.
Why it matters: Schwartz Rounds provide a comparison for reflecting together on emotionally difficult work, allowing researchers to compare listening, voluntary participation and later workplace outcomes with Circling.
Fields: Reflective groups
Checked 1 Nov 2026
Meeting dates move, so the organisation’s own site is the authority. Every entry shows when we last checked it.