Cross-racial psychotherapy: What the therapists say.

Abstract

Two groups of psychotherapists, 41 white and37 black, averaging 8.2years' experience, completed a 41-item questionnaire regarding psychotherapy with same-and opposite-race clients. White therapists do not experience racial issues in psychotherapy with the same salience that black therapists do, yet they report higher levels of subjective distress in cross-racial treatment. This distress is focused on "negative attitudes" of clients, therapists' feelings of not being able to help or confront opposite race clients, or being oversolicitous or too distant with opposite-race clients. Both therapist groups reported equivalent abilities to empathize with opposite-race clients, but black and white therapists differed on a number of questions of racial attitudes and stereotyping. Based on responses to these parallel questionnaires of racial attitudes and same-and cross-race psychotherapy, we think that black and white psychotherapists differ in their experiences of and attitudes toward cross-racial contact and psychotherapy.

Do therapists address ethnic and racial differences in cross-cultural psychotherapy?

“…Therapists reported a high level of comfort in addressing cultural differences. We were somewhat surprised that more therapists did not report discomfort, particularly given previous research that found White therapists experience subjective distress addressing race in therapy (Knox, Burkard, Johnson, Suzuki, & Ponterotto, 2003; Turner & Armstrong, 1981). There are several possible explanations for this finding.…”

A Meta‐Review of Research on Cross‐Cultural Counseling and Psychotherapy

“…Recent analogue and survey studies examining the cross-cultural counseling process continue to produce conflicting results. Evidence of a racial or ethnic similarity effect on process is found in recent studies by Sladen (1982), Lee, Sutton, France, and Uhlemann (1983), and Turner and Armstrong (1981). Sladen (1982) exposed 12 Black and 12 White middle-class college students to 12 tape-recorded counseling sessions in which the socioeconomic status of the client and the race of the counselor and client were varied.…”

Anxiety, Productivity, Performance, and Culture in the Rorschachs of a Multiethnic Group of Adolescents

“…They found that the African-American adolescents in their sample gave fewer responses than their white subjects. Frank (1992), after a detailed review of comparative studies on Rorschach response productivity and content by Price (1962), Ames and August (1966), Edwards (1974), Turner and Armstrong (1981), and Howes and De Blassie (1989), calls attention to the fact that in these authors' research the frequency of contents seen as dark or black in African-American samples was unremarkable. If the frequency of achromatic color determinants in their contents were high, one could say that African-Americans have a higher level of depressive personality characteristics than white people.…”