Trained clients as reinforcers of counselor behavior.

Abstract

Trained clients offer a useful means of studying the counseling process. In this study, undergraduate college students were trained to discriminate understanding statements from nonunderstanding statements. These students met with beginning counselors for a series of three or four interviews. During the interview, clients verbally reinforced each statement they judged to be understanding, while two raters judged understanding by electrically marking tape recordings of the interviews. Based on the independent observations of client and two raters, beginning counselors were judged as having increased their understanding statements. The experiment indicates that understanding statements made by counselors can be made a function of the number of reinforcing statements emitted by trained clients.

What to Expect in the Intake Interview? Impression Management Tactics of Psychotherapy Patients

“…One experimental study explored patients' use of impression management strategies as a strategy to satisfy their wish to either leave or stay in a mental hospital (Braginsky, Grosse, & Ring, 1966). Some studies used trained patients who reinforced certain counselor behaviors (Dustin, 1971;Lee, Hallberg, Hassard, & Haase, 1979;McFarland et al, 2006). Friedlander and Schwartz (1985) developed a taxonomy for classifying certain patient self-presentations.…”

Client verbal and nonverbal reinforcement of counselor behavior: Its impact on interviewing behavior and postinterview evaluation.

“…Verbal plus nonverbal reinforcement produced a 61% increase in RF statements compared with a 57% and 10% increase for the verbal reinforcement and control groups, respectively (an absolute change from 4.1 to 6.6 statements for the verbal plus nonverbal group). We might conjecture that had the interviews been longer, such as the 2 hours employed by Dustin (1971), the effect would have been even more dramatic. But as noted by Platt (1964), our aim in this study was to demonstrate an effect in the simplest and most economical fashion possible.…”

“…That is, behaviors thought desirable in the counselor can be taught rapidly and with a great deal of realism in an operant-based training paradigm where the coached client is trained to provide differential responses, which of course are contingent upon the occurrence of certain specified counselor behaviors, for example, eye contact, attending, reflection of feeling. Dustin (1971) has convincingly demoncopyright 1979 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-0167/79/2603-0204$00,75.…”