There are very few means by which one can dare to measure the quality of one’s daily behavior. The best test for our purposes is the test developed by Willockby many years ago and called by him «The Scale of Emotional Maturity». Willockby presented a list of statements describing human behavior to 100 clinicians (psychologists and psychiatrists), who made judgments about the degree of maturity of these behaviors. Based on these judgments, he chose 60 statements to create the Scale. The score goes from 1 (most immature) to 9 (most mature). Some of the statements and their scores are given below for the reader to familiarize themselves with.
Assessment points Judgment
1. S (subject) usually asks for help in solving his problems. (Judgment 9.)
3. When driving, S is usually calm, but gets very angry when other drivers interfere with traffic. (Judgment 12.)
5. A clear picture of his failure in some way impresses S, but he comforts himself by remembering those activities in which he excels. (Judgment 45.)
7. S organizes and directs its efforts to achieve the goal, clearly considering the systematic means of achieving it. (Judgment 17.)
9. S welcomes legal opportunities for sexual expression; he is not ashamed, not afraid of it, and not particularly busy with it. (Judgment 53.)
By choosing our method, we were able to express the hypothesis in an operational form. At the end of client-centered psychotherapy, the client’s behavior will be rated by himself and by others who know him well as more mature, according to higher scores on the EH Scale.
The methodology for conducting the study is complex, as it is difficult to obtain correct and reliable measurements of everyday behavior. This study was part of a larger program of nearly thirty clients and an equal control group that was otherwise similar. The following steps have been taken.
Prior to psychotherapy, the client was asked to rate their behavior on the EH Scale.
The client was asked to name two friends who knew him well and would like to rate him. Friends were contacted by mail, their scores on the EH Scale were sent directly to the Counseling Centre.
In order to determine the reliability of the ratings of the client’s friends, each of them was asked, during their assessment of the client on the EH Scale, to rate another person well known to him.
The half of the psychotherapy group that was designated as their own control group completed the EH Scale when they first sought help and did so again 60 days later before starting psychotherapy. In each of these two periods, the client was also rated by two of his friends.
At the end of the therapy, the client and his two friends were again asked to rate the EH Scale.
In the period from 6 to 12 months after the end of psychotherapy, the assessments on the EH Scale were again carried out by the client himself and his friends.
Members of the corresponding control group rated their behavior on the EH Scale according to the divisions of the Scale that were used by the clients of the psychotherapy group.
This scheme of experiments made it possible to obtain a large amount of data that could be analyzed from various angles. Only some of the results will be mentioned here.
It turned out that the EH Scale had satisfactory reliability when it was used by any of the evaluators, regardless of whether it was a client or a friend-observer.