Patterns of Expectations About Counseling: Relations to the Five-Factor Model of Personality

Casting No Shadow: Assessing Vocational Overshadowing

Vocational overshadowing has been defined as an underemphasis on career concerns when personal problems coexist. This study explored whether vocational overshadowing occurred based on observers’ perception of the setting (i.e., either career counseling center or mental health counseling center). Clinicians in-training viewed an analogue counseling session in which the only difference between the two vignettes was whether the session was conducted in a career counseling center versus a mental health counseling agency. The participants then completed measures of the working alliance, evaluation of session process, and level of client’s neuroticism. Clinicians in-training perceived the working alliance, session factors (i.e., depth, smoothness, and arousal), and client’s level of neuroticism similarly, regardless of the setting of the session. The only slight difference was in the participants’ perceptions of the session conducted in a career center. Implications of these findings for research, practice, and education were discussed.

Do psychologically-minded clients expect more from counselling?

OBJECTIVES

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between psychological mindedness and clients' expectations about counselling.

DESIGN

A cross-sectional design was employed to assess correlations among study variables.

METHODS

Participants were 104 counselling-centre clients at a mid-size, Southwestern US university. Participant volunteers filled out the Psychological Mindedness Scale, life orientation test-revised (LOT-R), and the expectations-about-counselling questionnaire.

RESULTS

Clients who reported higher levels of psychological mindedness (PM) reported greater expectations of self-involvement in counselling and greater expectations of positive outcome. In contrast, PM was not significantly related to clients' expectations about their counsellors' in-session behaviour or to expectations about their counsellors' general personality style. Dispositional optimism (LOT-R) did not play a major role in the relationship between PM and expectations about counselling.

CONCLUSIONS

High PM clients do seem to expect more from counselling than low PM clients, particularly in terms of self-involvement in the process and with respect to positive outcome. Consequently, therapists should consider assessing clients' PM, expectations, and the relationship between PM and expectations.

Personality traits and mental health treatment utilization

Recent theory and research suggest a relation between five-factor model personality traits and mental health treatment utilization, even after controlling for psychiatric disorders and global functioning. The current report further tests this hypothesis in a large clinical sample, using a wider array of treatment modalities than has been previously studied. Overall, results were limited and inconsistent. Although neuroticism was related to utilization across treatment modalities, many of these relationships resulted from its association with psychiatric diagnoses. Other traits showed limited and inconsistent relations to the use of psychosocial and psychiatric treatments.

Development and evaluation of new factor scales for the expectations about counseling inventory in a college sample

Given the lack of agreement over the factor structure and scoring system used with the Expectations About Counseling Inventory (EAC-B), the primary purpose of this investigation was to reevaluate the factor structure of the EAC-B and to construct factor scales based on that structure. After constructing these scales, the second objective was to evaluate the relationships among expectations about counseling, the five-factor model of personality (FFM), and gender-related variables. The responses of 460 undergraduate students to all 66 items on the EAC-B suggested three factors: facilitative conditions, counselor expertise, and client involvement. Expectations for facilitative conditions were positively correlated with extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, masculinity, and femininity; expectations for counselor expertise were negatively correlated with openness and agreeableness and positively correlated with masculinity; and expectations for client involvement were positively correlated with extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and femininity. Femininity was the strongest predictor of the facilitative conditions and client involvement scales when the effects of all the other variables were partialled out, whereas openness to experience and gender were the best predictors of counselor expertise when the effects of all the other variables were partialled out.