The Experience of Depth Curiosity: The Pursuit of Congruence Despite the Danger of Engulfment

“Where have you been in this world?” a qualitative study of clients’ curiosity about their psychotherapists.

“…In most cases, participants' curiosity seemed motivated by a desire to know whether their therapists would be able to understand and relate to them. This finding seems consistent with research that has found that greater social curiosity helps individuals make more accurate personal judgments of others (Hartung & Renner, 2011) and aids in the recognition of similarities in others (Levitt et al, 2009). On the other hand, some literature has suggested that client curiosity about the therapist is motivated by the need to reduce early anxieties in the development of object relations (Ofer & Durban, 1999), and more recent conceptualizations of curiosity in general (e.g., Litman, 2019) have also implicated anxiety as a primary driver of curiosity.…”

“…Although novel, these results align with prior findings regarding clients' decisions to end their searches of therapist information online due to concerns that they had crossed a boundary (Kolmes & Taube, 2016). Concerns over jeopardizing relationships as a result of being curious have also been noted in prior studies (Levitt et al, 2009).…”

“…With regard to culture, we wondered whether a client’s curiosity about their therapist could be influenced by, or be at all related to, clients’ salient cultural identities (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, etc.) and by perceived cultural similarities and/or dissimilarities to the therapist, given past research showing the influence of culture (e.g., individualism vs. collectivism) on curiosity (Strong, 2013), the role of curiosity in intercultural relations (Levitt et al, 2009), and recent evidence that therapists are sometimes asked about their cultural background by clients and that therapists may be more likely to disclosure cultural similarities than dissimilarities to their clients in these instances (Sunderani & Moodley, 2020).…”

“…This added perspective suggests that clients may not simply be prone to thinking of their therapists' differing identities and lived experiences as social identities that exist separately from each other. Additional research is needed to examine the effects of this cultural focus, but at least some literature has noted the benefit of curiosity in driving cultural learning (Hartung & Renner, 2013) and in understanding rather than condemning cultural differences (e.g., Levitt et al, 2009).…”

Curiosity carry-over effect

“…For example, previous studies have found that curiosity can be associated with both positive and negative feelings (e.g. Levitt et al, 2009;Litman & Jimerson, 2004;Loewenstein, 1994). Some researchers also suggest that curiosity can be different depending on the type of stimulus (e.g., perceptual curiosity and epistemic curiosity; Berlyne, 1960); Furthermore, other researchers argued that curiosity is associated with different emotions depending on the stages of the psychological process (Noordewier & van Dijk, 2015).…”