Counselor anxiety in relation to amount of clinical experience and quality of affect demonstrated by clients.

Abstract

A counseling paradigm employed 2 actors role playing as clients, and 20 counselors. Independent variables were hostile or friendly client behavior and amount of counselor experience. There were 4 measures of the dependent variable of counselor anxiety: palmar sweating, eyeblink rate, client-actor estimates of counselor anxiety, and independent judgments of verbal anxiety of counselors' protocols. Results revealed that hostile client behavior led to significantly greater anxiety than friendly behavior. Amount of graduate training and counseling experience had little effect on the degree of counselor anxiety in either hostile or friendly interviews. Modification of some of the measures, lengthening of interviews, increasing group sizes, or finding more discriminate groups might have changed this last finding. Palmar sweating was of questionable utility as a measure of anxiety.

Teaching graduate trainees how to manage client anger: a comparison of three types of training

“…Given the reported difficulty therapists have listening and responding to client anger (Bandura et al, 1960;Davis et al, 1985;Gamsky & Farwell, 1966;Hill et al, 2003;Matsakis, 1998;Russell & Snyder, 1963;Sharkin & Gelso, 1993), these findings suggest that it may be useful for graduate programs to be quite intentional about including practice with such provocative situations in their training of therapists. Such interventions may well have salutary effects on therapists' ability to handle client anger.…”

“…Therapist-trainees often experience intense anxiety when dealing with client anger (Russell & Snyder, 1963), especially if this anger is directed toward them personally (Davis et al, 1985). When faced with client anger, trainees may respond defensively (Peabody & Gelso, 1982;Yulis & Kiesler, 1968), use avoidance behaviors (Bandura, Lipsher, & Miller, 1960;Cormier & Cormier, 1979;Gamsky & Farwell, 1966), attempt to reduce the anger by focusing on content (Hammond, Hepworth, & Smith, 1977), resort to problem solving rather than addressing and exploring the client's anger (Davis et al, 1985;Hector, Davis, Denton, Hayes, Patton-Crowder, & Hinkle, 1981), or respond to therapist-directed anger with reciprocal anger (Bandura et al, 1960;Fremont & Anderson, 1986;Heller, Myers, & Kline, 1963;Sharkin & Gelso, 1993).…”

The induction and attenuation of state anxiety in helping profession trainees during the initial counseling interview

“…In this instance, the subject was responsible for conducting a 15 123 minute initial interview according to instructions previously received. However, the client is a confederate, who has par ticipated in a series of training sessions with the experi menter, without the knowledge of the subject, A number of studies have used actors playing clients (Carter and Papas, 1975;Diblin, 1970;Heller, Myers & Kline, 1963;Russell and Snyder, 1963), in what seems to be a normal counseling situa tion to the subjects. This permitted the manipulation of an independent variable which was uncontaminated by the fact that the counselor knew that he/she was the sole purpose for the study (See Appendix C for actor training procedures).…”

“…Heller, Myers, and Kline (1963) used student actors to portray several standardized client roles from which inter viewer behavior was assessed. Russell and Snyder (1963) trained students from a theater arts course to display specif ic affect states. Diblin (1970) and Carter and Papas (1975) each used confederate clients to avoid the confounding effects upon interviewer behavior of actual clients presenting diverse problems.…”

“…Russell and Snyder (1963) explored anxiety in counselors through the measurement of 16 criteria on the Judgement of Verbal Anxiety Scale. In their research, they postulated that trainee anxiety would be manifested in any or all of the following ways:…”