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Contents
- Abstract
- Current Study
- Method
- Participants
- Measures
- Attachment
- Anticipated risks and anticipated benefits
- Attitudes toward seeking professional help
- Intentions to seek counseling for psychological and interpersonal concerns
- Procedure
- Results
- Descriptive Statistics
- Testing Mediated Structural Models
- Measurement model
- Structural models
- Significance levels of indirect effects
- Discussion
Figures and Tables
Abstract
This study examined the mediating effects of anticipated risks, benefits, and attitudes toward seeking counseling on the link between adult attachment and help-seeking intentions for psychological and interpersonal concerns in a sample of 821 undergraduates. The structural equation modeling results indicated that the link between higher attachment avoidance and less intent to seek help was mediated by lower anticipated benefits, higher anticipated risks, and less positive attitudes toward seeking help. Conversely, the link between higher attachment anxiety and greater intent to seek help was mediated by higher anticipated benefits and risks and more positive attitudes toward seeking help. Thus, attachment contributed to perceptions of the benefits and risks of counseling, which, in turn, influenced help-seeking attitudes and, eventually, help-seeking intentions.
Counseling suffers from one serious limitation: It can only help those who seek it out. Research suggests that over two thirds of individuals who could benefit from counseling never enter a therapist’s office (Andrews, Issakidis, & Carter, 2001). To reach those who need services, the field needs to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing an individual’s decision to seek help (Komiya, Good, & Sherrod, 2000). One promising avenue for developing a more complete picture of this decision-making process is to study variables that influence how people perceive counseling, in terms of both its potential benefits and its potential risks (Vogel & Wester, 2003; Vogel, Wester, Wei, & Boysen, 2005).
Adult attachment has been presented as one possible explanation for how individuals evaluate the potential benefits and risks of seeking help when confronted by psychological stressors (Feeney & Ryan, 1994; Lopez, Melendez, Sauer, Berger, & Wyssmann, 1998; Vogel & Wei, 2005). As originally conceived, attachment theory (Bowlby, 1988) hypothesized that evolution furnished human infants with an innate biological drive aimed at maintaining proximity...