Client and therapist session satisfaction over the course of psychotherapy

The patterns of therapist and client session-by-session satisfaction of therapy over the course of treatment as they varied by eventual outcome were examined. The theoretical literature proposes one of two models for the pattern of session satisfacion evaluations over the course of therapy for successful dyads: either that is linearly increasing over time or that it has a culvilinear pattern (high-low-high) over time. The relative merits of each of these models were examined using 23 dyads seen at a university counseling center. The linear and quadratic correlations of client and therapist session evaluation with session number were calculated separately for each dyad. The highly successful group demonstrated the curvilinear pattern over time for both the client and therapist evaluations and the linear pattern for the therapist, while the least successful group did not.