Pretreatment Expectations of New Zealand Clients Receiving Cognitive-Behavioural Psychotherapy: Comparison With a North American Sample

Abstract

A study of New Zealand clients' expectations of psychotherapy was conducted using the Psychotherapy Questionnaire (PQ). The PQ was administered to 141 New Zealand clients attending their first appointment with a clinical psychologist. The New Zealand clients' expectations were compared to previous research using a sample of USA clients who also completed the PQ prior to their first visit with a therapist. Those differences between the NZ and USA samples were consistent with previous research comparing the expectations of non-American samples. In general the NZ sample expected to be more passive in therapy than the USA sample and did not expect to have to discuss difficult or uncomfortable topics. Despite these differences there were suggestions that NZ and USA clients may have more similarities than differences with regard to their expectations about psychotherapy.

The Role of Expectations in Treatment Outcome and Symptom Development in Anxiety Disorders

“…Process expectations include the participants' (i.e., therapist and client) roles referring to anticipations regarding therapist characteristics (i.e., expertness, attractiveness and trustworthiness), therapist and client behaviour and attitudes expected to be displayed throughout therapy (e.g., [7][8][9]). Process expectations also include anticipations referring to therapeutic process and procedures (i.e., duration, the function and general process of therapy) (e.g., [7,10,11]). There have been several reviews on expectations (e.g., [1,3,7,10,12,13]) and some appear to indicate that the data is inconclusive.…”