A Comparative Study On Counselors’ Hypothesis Psychological Distance Towards Client Under Different Psychological Counseling Theories

Psychological Distance is a kind of subjective experience produced when people get close to or get away from the reference point of a certain event, including temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance and hypothetical distance. Construal Level Theory (CLT) says that the closeness of psychological distance has a two-way correlation with people’s characterization level, which can be used to explain various psychological distances.Among them, hypothetical distance refers to the probability of the occurrence of a certain event or the probability of a certain event’s occurrence to an object, or the distance between the it and the reality world. Domestic studies generally regard hypothetical distance as a kind of possibility but often ignore its connotations for real world. In contrast, among foreign studies, both the two elements are part of hypothetical distance. In this study, the author explores the psychological distance from a hypothetical perspective, namely, whether the counselor’s characterization of visitors is close to real experience or gets away from the reality and depends on imagination and hypothesis.It seems to be a long-term phenomenon that different schools of psychological counseling hold different views. In history, new theories emerge in an endless stream, and there are hundreds of them. Under the theoretical backgrounds of different schools, the counselors also offer advice to visitors from different perspectives and have different characterization levels. Thus, different theoretical schools will produce different psychological distances to the visitors.Under the different psychological consultation theories, counselors’hypothesis psychological distance towards client can be comparison to explain their huge difference. Different concepts and assumptions describe person in different hypothesis psychological distance. Along with the consultation process, the angle information gradually blurred, then different consulting schools enter a similar process.And this article is intended to answer "how to see" rather than "how to do". This is the nature of the difference and common character of different schools.By adopting situational simulation method, the author conducts CQR quantitative research to compare the psychological distances of various psychological counseling schools. The object of this research are Psychological counseling theories,but not the counseling practice. The author first makes limited statements to the core concepts of different schools to interpret the story context. Further, the levels of counselors’ characterization on visitors under different situational statements are analyzed and compared.