Date of Award:

5-1978

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Psychology

Committee Chair(s)

E. Wayne Wright

Committee

E. Wayne Wright

Abstract

The purpose of the present investigation was two-fold: (1) to develop a training procedure which might be helpful in trying to teach beginning counselors how to recognize levels of anxiety by observing silent, nonverbal behavior of clients in association with EMG feedback, and (2) to assess the effectiveness of this procedure by using it to train a group of graduate psychology students. Graduate trainees exposed to the training procedure were compared with a control group of students to determine whether the training procedure effectively taught the skill.

Using the split image capabilities of a videotape recorder, video tapes were made of simulated interview situations in which clients were subjected to anxiety-inducing content and/or discussion. During each interview, EMG feedback, or 11 levels of muscle tension,'' were recorded in the upper right hand portion of the video monitor. The recorded interviews were made without audio recording so that only the clients' nonverbal behaviors, in association with visual EMG feedback, were used in the training procedure. The intent of the study was to develop the above procedure and then to determine whether graduate students trained via these video tapes would increase in their ability to recognize different levels of anxiety by observing client nonverbal behavior. A pretest-posttest control group design, with random assignment of subjects, was used to assess the effectiveness of the procedure.

The results of the study showed that subjects exposed to the procedure did not increase in their ability either to recognize three specific levels of anxiety or to rate closer to the correct anxiety level, when observing the nonverbal behavior of video clients. No differences were found between experimental and control subjects in their ability to discriminate differing levels of client anxiety, as shown by thirty, separate EMG readings, or in their ability to rate closer to the correct anxiety levels of clients 1 EMG readings.

It was concluded that video examples of nonverbal behavior, even in association with EMG feedback, are not effective in training graduate students to recognize levels of client anxiety, particularly when nonverbal cues are presented without verbal (audio) cues, and when this procedure utilizes induced rather than real anxiety and simulated rather than actual clinical interviews. It was therefore suggested that future research concerning the teaching of behavior cues of anxiety should include concurrent verbal feedback and should utilize clients who evidence anxiety in actual clinical interviews. Also, further research will be necessary to establish the electromyograph as an effective device in teaching psychology graduate students to recognize nonverbal cues of anxiety.

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