Counselor's understanding of student's communication as a function of the counselor's perceptual defense.

Abstract

The threat element of a counselee's verbal expressions on the counselor's recall was investigated. The results showed that more anxious counselors were less accurate in their ability to recall words spoken and feelings expressed in simulated interviews. The "total" objective test scores, combining the results of all four affective states, yielded statistically significant results. Two discrete states, anger and minimal affect, showed impairment of recall of counseling data.Understanding the counselee is one of the essential elements of the counseling process. Understanding occurs on several levels, including (a) the words spoken, (b) the verbalized feelings, and (c) nonverbal communications. Counselors have differential abilities to understand counselees on these levels. Betz (1962) found that more effective counselors were especially perceptive of the individualistic inner experiences of the client. These inner experiences are manifested by both verbal and nonverbal expressions. Since most of their training has revolved around verbal communication, counselors also need training to be sensitive to nonverbal communication of the clients (i.e., verbal intonation, facial expressions, bodily gestures, or nervous mannerisms.Not only should counselors be sensitive to others, but also they should be sensitive to their own needs. Rogers (1962) andTruax (1963) found self-congruence was related to counseling success. Without self-congruence, 1 The research reported herein was performed pursuant to a grant from the Office of Education,

Effects of Observation and Evaluation on Anxiety in Beginning Counselors: A Social Facilitation Analysis

“…Anxiety may also affect the communication ability of the counselor and reduce his or her influence. Several investigators found that counseling anxiety (a) activates speech productivity while disrupting its flow (Bandura, 1956;Gynther, 1957;Pope, Blass, Siegman, & Roher, 1970;; (b) reduces the counselor's accurate perception of the client (Bergman, 1966); (c) decreases the counselor's recall of words and feelings expressed in a session (Milliken & Kirchner, 1971); and (d) elicits over-elaboration or argumentative behavior from the counselor (Lister, 1966). Thus, researchers seem to agree that counselor anxiety reduces counselor effectiveness for a myriad of reasons.…”

Guidelines for the functioning of a helping service

“…Whether we desire it or not, the limits on personal openness and the accuracy with which we understand ourselves and our own experience set limits on the closeness and the understanding we can achieve with others. What we avoid and distort in our lives, we avoid and distort in others (Bandura, 1956;Bandura, Lipsher, & Miller, 1960;Milliken & Kirchner, 1971). As helpers we implicitly assert ourselves as living better than those around us (Carkhuff, 1969;.…”

Repression and the absence of retrieval cues

“…There have been numerous other publications purporting to demonstrate the process of repression under a wide variety of experimental situations (e.g., Penn, 1964;Aborn, 1953;and Truax, 1957). One study by Milliken and Kirchner (1971) instructed counseling graduate students to identify with a counselor in a videotape simulation of a counselor-client interchange. The client in the videotape role played four different affective states and the identifying counselor was required to recall from each of the four interviews.…”

“…Past research has directed little attention to this issue. In fact, all of the repression literature cited above avoided the issue by either using participants of the same sex (e.g., Milliken andKirchner, 1971, andD'Zurilla, 1965) or participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups without regard to sex (e.g., Flavell, 1955, andZeller, 1950).…”