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Client anxiety level and the treatment of the unassertive individual

University of British Columbia

The present investigation was conducted to evaluate the hypothesis that in the context of assertion training, client anxiety will interact with treatment modality in such a fashion that high anxiety individuals will benefit more from a cognitively oriented treatment than traditional skills training procedures, whereas low anxiety individuals will obtain equivalent therapeutic gain from the two treatment approaches. Twenty-eight male and female college undergraduates seeking assertion training were dichotimized into low and high anxiety categories on the basis of the discomfort scale of Gambrill and Richey's Assertion Inventory. Subjects within both categories were then randomly assigned to two treatment conditions: behavioural skills training (ST), and cognitive behaviour modification (CBM). The ST condition included components of instruction, modelling, social feedback, and behavioural rehearsal. The CBM procedure was derived originally from the self-instructional training procedure employed by Meichenbaum in the treatment of test anxiety. It included components of didactic presentation, training in the discrimination and systematic observation of self-statements, training in the modification of maladaptive cognitive processes, and the implementation of cognitive coping strategies and task-relevant self-statements. Both treatment conditions were run in a group format and consisted of six, two hour sessions. All subjects were assessed prior to and after treatment on self-report and behavioural measures of assertion and anxiety. Experimental support was obtained for a modified version of the original hypothesis. While high anxiety subjects tended to benefit more from CBM than from ST in the phenomenal realm, this trend was reversed on the behavioural measures where ST was more effective. Results of the study are explained in terms of a theoretical analysis of the nature of anxiety, and implications for future treatment programmes are discussed.

Text

2010-02-26

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/21099

Psychology

University of British Columbia

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