Therapist responses to traumatized female patients' anger and sadness: A countertransference study

This research involved 62 participants who were recruited from the San Diego area. Participants were licensed clinical psychologists and unlicensed graduate students in the field of clinical psychology. The largely Caucasian sample included twenty-three male participants and thirty-nine female participants.; Participants were recruited predominantly from the San Diego Psychological Association Handbook. If a participant agreed to be involved in the study after completing informed consent procedures, they were shown 8 brief vignettes of fictitious client scenarios. Each participant responded to the vignettes as if they were actually in therapy with the client. The therapist responded to the vignettes and completed 3 measures—the Multidimensional Anger Inventory (Siegel, 1996), the Violence History Questionnaire (Dalenberg, 1983) and the Paulhus Deception Scale (Paulhus, 1999). In addition to the measures and the spoken responses to the vignettes, therapists also rated the level of impairment of each “client” in the vignettes and indicated their satisfaction with their own responses.; The design included 4 manipulated variables and 1 static variable. The vignettes portrayed either a sad or angry female client whose emotion was directed at her therapist or another important person in her life. The type of event that provoked the emotion in the fictitious client was designed to be either moderate (an event rated by pilot subjects as likely to lead to client emotional response) or minor (an event rated by pilot subjects as unlikely to lead to client emotional response). Finally, the participant was introduced to the client as either having a trauma history or not. The static variable was the license status of the participant.; To test the 12 research hypotheses the researchers used repeated measures ANOVA and simultaneous multiple regression. It was revealed that the angry vignettes received more blaming responses, more threats to end therapy, and less encouragement of feelings than did the sad vignettes. Sad vignettes received more countertransferential disclosures and more apologies than did the angry vignettes. Mild provoking events produced more blame responses, and evoked less encouragement and responsibility taking from the therapist. The presence of a trauma introduction within the licensed group led to more generalizations to history of the patient. Licensed participants were slightly more threatening of termination of the patient than were unlicensed participants.; Results were discussed in terms of the empirical and theoretical literature on countertransference. Strengths of the study included a more ecologically valid design than previous studies and good agreement among coders. Weaknesses included the largely Caucasian sample, and the limitations imposed by the specifics of the “client” vignettes (showing White female clients).