Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 1981, Vol. 49, No. 4, 571-582 Copyright 1981 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-006X/8I/4904-057UM.75 Correlations of Male College Students' Verbal Response Mode Use in Psychotherapy With Measures of Psychological Disturbance and Psychotherapy Outcome Susan H. McDaniel Center for Family and Child Development Rochester, New York William B. Stiles Miami University Karen J. McGaughey Piedmont Area Mental Health Center, Monroe, North Carolina Verbal response mode use by 31 male college student clients in three sessions of time-limited psychotherapy (selected from an average of 17.2 sessions) was compared with measures of clients' psychological distress, disturbance, and change, which were gathered at intake, termination, and 1-year follow-up as part of the Vanderbilt Psychotherapy Project. Results showed that (a) clients who were more distressed tended to use a higher percentage of Disclosures (revealing subjective information) and a lower percentage of Edifications (conveying ob- jective information), perhaps reflecting greater preoccupation with inner troubles; and (b) clients who improved more were those who participated more, as mea- sured by their estimated total number of utterances, a product of talking more in each session and remaining in therapy for more sessions; but (c) there was no relationship between clients' percentage of Disclosures and their improvement in psychotherapy, as hypothesized, even though percentage of Disclosures was correlated with process ratings of intrapsychic exploration. Studies of verbal interaction in psycho- therapy have shown that clients tend to use a very similar profile of verbal response modes (VRMs; Stiles, McDaniel, & Mc- Gaughey, 1979; Stiles & Sultan, 1979), even though therapists' verbal interventions vary drastically depending on their theoretical orientation (Brunink & Schroeder, 1979; Hill, Thames, & Rardin, 1979; Stiles, 1979; Strupp, 1955). About 75% of client utter- This article is based on the first author's PhD disser- tation, which was supervised by the second author. Permission to use data from the Vanderbilt Psycho- therapy Project, which was supported by Research Grant MH 20369 from the National Institute of Mental Health, was given by Hans H. Strupp, principal inves- tigator. We thank Hans H. Strupp and the members of his research team, particularly Stephanie Samples, for their help throughout this study. Thanks also go to Laurie Arneke, Kim Bullock, Molly Hunter, and George Ploghoft for coding the tapes and to Beverly Gomes-Schwartz, Denisc L. Gulledge, Leon- ard G. Rorer, and Hans H. Strupp for their comments on drafts of this article. Requests for reprints should be sent to William B. Stiles, Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45056. ances were Disclosure or Edification in grammatical form and communicative in- tent, as denned by a general-purpose VRM taxonomy (Stiles, 1978, 1979), which also distinguishes six other modes: Acknowledg- ment, Question, Advisement, Interpretation, Confirmation, and Reflection.' Client Dis- closures and Edifications thus form a com- mon core of psychotherapeutic process across types of therapy. However, the relative pro- portions of these modes may vary from ses- sion to session or from client to client, and these variations may reflect differences in clients' levels of adjustment and in the ef- fectiveness of the therapeutic process. The present study focused on clients' use of Dis- closure and Edification in time-limited psy- chotherapy in an attempt to identify process correlates of clients' psychological distress and disturbance and of psychotherapy out- 1 Most of these other modes are used more frequently by psychotherapists than by clients (Stiles, 1979; Stiles & Sultan, 1979). However, the taxonomic definitions are the same for all discourse, so that verbal behavior can be compared across roles and tasks (Stiles, 1978, 1979). 571