EFFECTS OF POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE REFRAMING ON CHANGE IN SHORT TERM COUNSELING

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness in facilitating change by a counseling strategy that included interpretating the client\u27s disliked behavior positively (and thus paradoxically) compared to the effectiveness of a more traditional short term counseling strategy of casting the undesired behavior in a problematic and undesirable framework. The kind of paradoxical method looked at in this study consisted of messages to clients that were incongruent with the context of the counseling process. The context of the counseling process was that the client had identified some behavior or state that he or she did not like, and the overall objective of the counseling interaction was to facilitate change. Paradoxes involving the context of counseling take two general forms, incongruence with the client\u27s evaluation of the disliked current state or behavior, and incongruence with the expectency for change. Some counseling theorists suggest that argeeing with clients that the behavior they dislike is disagreeable and urging them to change only increases their resistance to change, while being permissive and even positive about the disliked behavior and/or urging clients not to change mobilizes clients\u27 ability to change. Many factors have been suggested to account for this unexpected phenomena, including siding with resistance, wresting control of the relationship from the client, psychological reactance, and impression management. The data was generated by 30 students who volunteered to take part in short term counseling, who identified themselves as being depressed, and who expressed a desire to make modest gains in overcoming these feelings. They were randomly assigned to two interview conditions and one no-interview control condition. In one treatment condition, interviewers gave a positive interpretation of the clients\u27 depression, whereas in the other treatment condition, interviewers gave negative interpretations of the clients\u27 depression. Monitored over an eight-week experimental period were clients\u27 change scores on perceptual measures of level of depression, personal impression, problem controllability, and expectation and motivation to change. Both interpretation conditions effected a dramatic drop of students\u27 level of depression, but the change in the positive interpretation condition was significantly greater one month after counseling was discontinued, than was change from the negative interpretations. By the time the one-month after treatment follow-up had been administered, the positive interpretation clients had shown a durable, resilient change in their level of depression, whereas the negative interpretation clients had increased their level of depression almost to pre-test levels. The positive interpretations appeared to effect a more durable and resilient change than did the negative interpretations. As a result, the hypotheses were generally confirmed