PSYCHOTHERAPY ENGAGERS VERSUS NON-ENGAGERS

therapist behaviors which may be beneficial for the training of therapists, and since it is
an observer-rated measure, the ratings may be more objective. However, the HSS does
have limitations as well. Since it only measures verbal response modes, it does not
provide information about therapist non-verbal behavior, the topic of what is being talked
about during therapy sessions, or covert processes (attitudes, intentions, etc.). In
addition, since the HSS is an observer-rated measure, it does not provide information
from the perspective of the therapist or the client.
History and development of the HCVRCS/HSS. The HSS was originally
developed in 1978 as the Counselor Verbal Response Category System (Hill, 1978). The
system was developed to classify the different types of therapist verbal responses during
a counseling session. The categories are intersubjective, meaning that they are based on
the syntactic or grammatical structure of the language, which implies a relationship
between the communication and the recipient (e.g., a question), rather than based on the
topic of discussion or the extralinguistic characteristics (e.g., vocal noises, tonal qualities,
speech disfluencies) of therapist verbal communications (Hill, 1986).
The original HCVRCS (Hill, 1978) was developed by incorporating components
from 11 existing systems in six stages. In the first stage, two people examined
similarities and differences between the categories in the 11 systems and found that all
the categories in the 11 systems could be covered by 25 distinct categories (e.g.,
reassurance, persuasion). Definitions were written for each category, and several
examples from the 11 systems were included in the description of each category. In the
second stage, two judges used the 25-category system to categorize counselor responses
on two practice sessions and deleted two categories and added one category (deleted
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