Antecedents and consequences of open and closed questions in intake sessions of psychodynamic psychotherapy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Objective: To investigate whether there are different antecedents and consequences of different types of therapist questions as this has implications for conducting psychotherapy and for training therapists. Method: We examined the antecedents and consequences of questions for 88 clients working with 33 doctoral student therapists in psychodynamic psychotherapy. Questions were coded into open questions for thoughts (OQT), open questions for feelings (OQF), closed questions for facts (CQF), and closed questions other (CQO). The antecedents and consequences were assessed in terms of self-referring pronouns (SRP), self-referring emotion words (SRE), and number of words. Results: In terms of antecedents, when clients were using a high number of SRP, therapists were more likely to ask OQT and CQO than CQF. When clients were using a high number of SRE, therapists were more likely to ask OQF than CQF. In terms of consequences, clients spoke less after CQF than the other three skills, used fewer SRP after CQF than after CQO, and used more SRE after OQF than CQF. Conclusions: CQO were more similar in terms of antecedents and consequences to OQT and OQF than to CQF.