THE INFLUENCE OF ANXIETY MANAGEMENT TRAINING ON STUDENT-COUNSELORS\u27 INTERVIEW BEHAVIOR (STRESS, DEFENSIVE CLIENTS)

Student-counselors often find that supervised interview situations, especially those which occur with hostile or defensive clients, result in anxiety and anxious behavior. Such stress reactions may interfere with the effectiveness of the counseling and learning processes in which the student-couselor is involved. The study focused on the use of a revised form of Anxiety Management Training (AMT) in reducing student-counselor anxiety and, as a result, improving counseling performance. Previous research has failed to establish the effectiveness of alternative treatment approaches. Unlike AMT, these approaches generally do not take into account the cognitive as well as the physiological and behavioral aspects of stress reactions. In order to assess the influence of AMT, graduate counseling students were randomly placed, within scheduling limitations, into either an experimental or control group on each of two campuses (Sample I and II). With each sample, a pretest-posttest control group design was employed. The results of the study indicated that student-counselors reported significantly more anxiety, as assessed with the A-State scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), counseling hostile/defensive than friendly client-actors. Moreover, AMT was found to be significantly more effective than the control condition in reducing the elevated anxiety level with the hostile/defensive client, in Sample I and in the total sample. The results from rating interviews with Couseling Evaluation Inventory (CEI) showed that by posttesting, student-counselors were generally significantly less effective with hostile/defensive than friendly clients. Nevertheless, there was some indication that experimental subjects had become more effective with hostile/defensive clients as a result of AMT, while control subjects had become less effective. However, there was no significant difference. With one exception, there were also no significant differences on other measures of counselor effectiveness (viz., Percentage of Interruption) and anxiety (viz., Speech Disturbance Ratio) with hostile/defensive clients. AMT subjects in Sample II were found to be significantly more effective than control subjects on Accuracy of Recall of client data