A model and a metalanguage for research on psychological counseling.

Abstract

A model of two-person interaction in psychological counseling, which is derived from Alfred Schutz's phenomenological theory of social relations, and a computer-assisted metalanguage based on case-grammar theory are presented, and their applicability to the analysis of natural language in counseling is argued. The model specifies that counselor and client work to make each other's natural-language displays informative by tacitly expecting that any display of talk or other conduct will have as its context of interpretation the counselor or client's prior knowledge of (a) typical relationships of social interaction and (b) methods of speaking that provide a recognizable structure to an utterance. Some preliminary findings are presented from a metalanguage analysis of the patterns of verb usage by a counselor and client in an actual series of counseling interviews. The findings are discussed in terms of the model and are treated as initial evidence of concerted action and of how the informative display of recognizable linguistic structures may act to bring about such coordinating actions.

The effect of similar counselor-client sense modality preference on counselor attractiveness

“…Patton et al (1977) supported the concept of natural language analysis and preliminary data showed a pattern with substance in the classification of language use in therapy.…”

Language in Psychotherapy

“…Again, the unit becomes recognizable as a method of expressing relations among names if intended so by one person and interpreted as such by another. Patton et al (1977), in specifying the process of combining named things, have identified the verb phrase as an "interpretive relator"; that is, one uses words as verbs in order to impute relations among other words used as names. The verb interprets how one name is to be used in relation to another.…”

“…Based on our theory of meaning in language and prior work, we constructed a model of the psychological treatment process (Meara & Patton, 1984;Patton et al, 1977;Pepinsky, 1974;Pepinsky, 1984;Pepinsky & DeStefano, 1983;Rush et al, 1974). In the model, psychological treatment is construed as a process of social influence that is interactively persuasive.…”

“…Studies conducted by Bieber (1978), , May (1977), and Patton et al (1977) drew from a common data set. This set consisted of three different counselor-client pairs, two of whom were engaged in psychological treatment in a university counseling center, and the third pair of whom were in a large comprehensive community mental health center.…”

“…In the first study, Patton et al (1977) focused exclusively on the verb phrase as the central interpretive relator, as used by one of the clientcounselor pairs described above. In this pair, the counselor's stated theoretical preference was client-centered.…”