Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of counselor's anger proneness and anger discomfort on counselor's reactions to an angry client. The effects of counselor experience, gender, and age on couselor's reactions were also examined. Counselor's reactions include inaccurate perception of angry client's statements, anxiety with, anger toward, and avoudance response to an angry client. Fifty-five counselor trainees participated in this study. Counselor first completed the measures of counseling experience, anger proneness and anger discomfort, after which they viewed and gave their reactions to an angry client-actor on videotape. The findings of the study were as follows: 1) Counselor's anger proneness was not related to counselor's reactions to an angry client significantlys. Counselor's anger discomfort was positively related to state anxiety and distortion of inaccurate perception. 2) Counselors with high anger proneness and high anger discomfort showed more state anxiety than counselors with high anger proneness but low anger discomfort did. 3) Some experience factors were negatively related to state anxiety and avoidance response but were positively related to distortion of inaccurate perception. Age was negatively related to state anxiety but was positively related to distortion of inaccurate perception. Female counselors showed more state anxiey than male counselors did. 4) Anger discomfort partialled out the variance explained by some experience factors, gender, and age still accounted for a significant amount of variance for state anxiety. After partialled out the variance explained by some experience factors and age, anger discomfort still accounted for a significant amount for distortion of inaccurate perception. Several discussions on the implication and limitation of the study were presented.