Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Rogers, Perls, and Ellis in Three Approaches to Psychotherapy: A Corpus-based Study

Public Deposited

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/g445cn558

Descriptions

Attribute NameValues
Creator
Abstract
  • Counselor education programs traditionally have student counselors role-play therapy sessions to enhance skills in rapport building, aligning with a theoretical orientation, and other essential communication skills. Students, however, are often left to determine their own choice of words when engaging in these practice sessions, and consequently, experience uncertainty regarding how their verbal interactions can impact the therapeutic relationship. To date, there remains a gap in the literature addressing specific word use by counselors in dynamic interactive counseling discussions. Utilizing linguistic analysis can help students carefully analyze their own verbal practices and study the speech of more experienced counselors. These two studies exemplify this focus by reviewing language used in the 1965 film series, Three Approaches to Psychotherapy (Shostrom, 1965). This film series, popular among counselor educators for training purposes, features three real life counseling sessions facilitated by renowned counselors Albert Ellis, Fritz Perls, and Carl Rogers. This dissertation research project has two arms: A and B. Both arms applied corpus linguistic analysis of the transcribed counseling sessions from the film. In Arm A, linguistic analysis was applied to study the levels of the therapeutic alliance by focusing on function words (such as pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and other terms that have a syntactical role in language) to determine the levels of language style matching (LSM) between each counselor and the client, Gloria. The study reviewed psychological-focused variables of LSM, analyzing each turn-by-turn statement with the computer software, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), to determine which dyad of counselor-client resulted in the highest level of symmetry and thus therapeutic alliance. The findings suggest that the dyad of Carl Rogers and Gloria yielded the highest LSM, followed by Perls, then Ellis. Arm B reviewed the linguistic variable of words utilizing the computer software, R. Frequently used key terms (or keyness) utilized by each of the counselors were reviewed to explore potential word differentiations of each counselor and their respective theoretical orientation. The data in these two studies provided insight into the selective words utilized by the founders of the three widely popular theories of person-centered counseling (Rogers), rational emotive behavioral therapy (Ellis), and Gestalt therapy (Perls). The findings suggest that each of the featured counselors utilized language that highly coincided with their respected theories. The results and implications from these two linguistic-focused studies can be applied to the areas of counseling and counselor education to improve training, recognize definitive differences among popular counseling theories, establish new evaluation tools for student counselors, and contribute to the field of professional counseling.
Contributor
License
Resource Type
Date Issued
Degree Level
Degree Name
Degree Field
Degree Grantor
Commencement Year
Advisor
Committee Member
Academic Affiliation
Rights Statement
Publisher
Peer Reviewed
Language

Relationships

Parents:

This work has no parents.

In Collection:

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
file details MirandRobertaA2022.pdf 2022-03-16 Public Download