Psychotherapists' approach-avoidance responses and clients' expressions of dependency.

Dependency in psychotherapy: Toward an integrated treatment approach.

“…As Mann and Goldman (1982, p. 9) noted, "the patient may raise seemingly realistic questions or doubts about the efficacy of twelve sessions, [but these questions] are actually only a disguise for the already recognized dependency issue." In this respect, time-limited psychotherapy can be useful in making explicit the patient's underlying depen- During the 1960s, Bandura and his colleagues began to emphasize the social learning aspects of dependency, pointing to: 1) the importance of early socialization practices in the etiology of de-pendency in children and adults; and 2) the ways in which the therapist's responses to dependencyrelated verbalizations influenced dependent behavior in patients (Bandura, Lipsher, & Miller, 1960;Schuldt, 1966;Winder et al, 1962). As behavioral treatment approaches increasingly drew upon the social learning concepts of Bandura and others, these approaches began to emphasize cognitive factors as starting points for understanding and treating patient dependency.…”

Reinforcement or elicitation effects of approach responses by psychotherapists.

“…Numerous studies have used an approachavoidance model to study dependency within the interaction of therapist and client (Caracena, 1965;Schuldt, 1966;Winder, Ahmad, Bandura, & Rau, 1962). All of these studies found that clients continue to express content related to dependency if therapists approach such content and tend to discontinue such content if therapists avoid dependency.…”

“…Moreover, Caracena found that dependency initiated by the client (i.e., dependency responses which do not immediately follow the therapist's approach or avoidance of dependency) did not change significantly for the high-or low-approach groups from the initial to final segment. Schuldt (1966) also studied changes in clients' expressions of dependency as a function of approach-avoidance responses of therapists. Although this study was not specifically designed to distinguish between reinforcement versus elicitation effects in psychotherapy, the results can be interpreted as not giving strong support to the reinforcement position, in that the clients' percentage of dependency responses following approach did not increase during five interviews sampled during the process of psychotherapy.…”

A method for rating counselor social reinforcement and persuasion.

“…These units contain one initial client statement, the subsequent counselor statement, and the subsequent client statement. This method of analysis or a similar one has been used by others (Bandura, Lipsher, & Miller, 1960;Rashkis & Yanovski, 1967;Schuldt, 1966;Truax, 1966aTruax, , 1966bTruax, , 1966cTruax, , 1968.…”