A Research Of Intervening Expectations For Counseling

Expectations for counseling are clients’cognition and emotional attitudes that will be brought into the counseling, including the cognition and emotional attitudes of the counseling process, outcome, counselors and clients, as well as any other aspects of counseling, like time setting. Some studies have indicated that some expectations of clients can promote the counseling process or improve counseling results, while some may affect in the opposite way. Therefore, one of the ways to promote the counseling outcome is to intervene clients’expectations for counseling. The previous researches about intervening the expectations exist many problems, such as lack of the support of some theories, making the findings unconvincing.This study, based on the Social Impact Theory, assumes that the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) may be theory, which can explain the mechanism of changing the clients’expectations. And we conduct an experiment to test the assumption.This study is a2x2x2completely randomized experiment of three factors. Subjects will finish the measurement after the experiment and the following measurement two weeks later. Independent variables are information quality, the degree of personal involvement and the credibility of information sources, and each has two levels of high and low. Dependent variables are subjects’cognitive responses, attitude reactions and futural behavioral tendency, which are measured by these tools: thought-listing procedure, Semantic Differential Scaling, scales for credibility of information sources, scales for behavioral tendency. Two weeks after the experiment, use the Expectations About Counseling-Brief Form(EAB-BF) to test the changes of expectations are enduring or not.The results show that the main effects of the information quality to influence subjects’cognitive responses, attitude reactions and futural behavioral tendency are significant; the interaction of information quality and the credibility of information sources to attitude changes is significant.The conclusions are:(1) The information quality can significantly impact the subjects. The higher the information quality is, the more approval ideas and more positive attitude participants will have, and also they are more likely to participate in counseling according to the description. And vice versa. (2) Under the condition of the higher information quality, these changes of subjects’ attitudes are influenced by the credibility. Higher credibility, more obvious the changes are.(3) Under the condition of lower credibility, these changes of subjects’ attitudes are influenced by the information quality. Higher quality, more obvious the changes are.