Content area
Abstract
It is widely believed that clients learn new behaviors, skills, or attitudes from counseling. Indeed, counselors strive to teach clients concepts that enable problems to be approached in less self-defeating ways. Having acquired these new therapeutic concepts, clients would presumably be better capable of solving the problems which prompted their seeking help. Despite the acceptance of this basic formula for client change, virtually no research has investigated the parameters that govern the learning of concepts presented to a client by a counselor. This lack of research may stem from an absence of any clear theoretical account of the way that clients attend to, process, and remember important counselor statements.
Numerous studies of prose and sentence learning, however, suggest a framework for studying clients' learning of and memory for counseling content. This study extended that research in verbal learning and memory to explain the factors governing clients' memory for the contents of counseling. A theoretical framework was proposed and its relevance for counseling was tested.
In attempting to demonstrate the relevance of this verbal learning research, counseling interventions were designed to enhance clients' memory for key counseling concepts provided during an interview. As predicted, treatment group subjects who received these memory enhancing interventions demonstrated significantly better post-counseling recall of the to-be-remembered therapeutic concepts than their control counterparts. In addition, treatment group subjects were significantly more skilled at using these concepts to solve written vignettes depicting a college student with similar personal concerns. These results suggested that models of memory for prose materials may be used to study clients' memory of key counseling concepts. Furthermore, this study indicated that improved memory for counselor statements may increase clients' problem-solving skills and may thereby be related to the process of therapeutic change.
