Counselor trainees play a dual role -subordinate in relation to their supervisors, superordinate in relation to their clients. The purpose of this study was to investigate if and how role conflict affects trainees' self-statements, anxiety level, and performance. A sample of graduate student counselors responded to a counseling dilemma and then were exposed to one of four experimental manipulations: conflict (the supervisor recommended action contradictory to the trainee's intended action), no conflict (the supervisor supported the trainee's intended action), neutral (the supervisor stated that the trainee's intent and the opposing option were equally valid), or control (no supervisory input). Results suggested that role conflict may produce few adverse effects on beginning trainees' self-evaluations, affect, or behavior. Trainee performance, however, was inversely related to anxiety level, and anxiety was inversely related to the strength of trainees' self-efficacy expectations. Limitations and suggestions for further research are discussed.

In this study several competing process models of the counselor's clinical judgment were evaluated for their capacity to account for variance in prognostic judgments and further tested for parsimony. Subjects were presented with hypothetical client observations that were varied along three dimensions: personality, academic achievement, and disability. On the basis of this information, counselors were asked to make an inference about the client's level of current functioning, to make causal attributions, and finally to make a clinical prediction about the client's likelihood of progress in counseling. Results of sequential, path-analytic tests of competing models for completeness and parsimony suggest two conclusions: (a) models of the clinical judgments of counselors must attend to the role of certain inferences that mediate between client observations and prognostic judgment; and (b) causal attributions may not play as significant a role in making prognostic judgments as was originally anticipated. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

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