Marianne Welmers

Chapter 3 82 in building alliances as reported by family members and by themselves. Our findings on neuroticism were also in line with our expectations, and in contrast with findings of Chapman et al. (2009) in their trainee sample. Our findings indicate that therapists who perceive themselves as emotionally stable rather than neurotic have stronger alliances as perceived by themselves and family members. This seems to apply even for extremely emotionally stable therapists, because in our sample therapists reported their levels of neuroticism to be almost a standard deviation lower than that of the general Dutch population. We furthermore found that therapists’ extraversion and conscientiousness negatively predicted both therapists’ and family members’ reports of the alliance. The negative contributionof conscientiousness couldbe explainedby the fact that highly conscientious people are predominantly task-oriented, orderly, and less inclined to operate off the beaten track (Hoekstra & De Fruyt, 2014). This may hamper therapists’ abilities to be flexible and accommodate treatment protocols to their clients’ differing needs. Our finding on extraversion was surprising, given that extraverted individuals tend to be sociable, warm and optimistic. Our finding is also in contrast with previous findings of Chapman et al. (2009), indicating that extraversion did not impact the alliance. However, in our sample therapists rated their levels of extraversion almost a standard deviation higher compared to national norms. It is thus not precluded that average extraversion may help therapists in bonding with their clients, but that higher levelsmay become counterproductive. Perhaps a highly extraverted therapist, who is likely to be very talkative, energetic, and optimistic, can be overwhelming and difficult to relate to for clients, who may feel rather depressed and pessimistic when receiving help for serious child and parenting problems. Another explanation that highly extraverted therapists were found to have less strong alliances with families in our sample, could lie in cultural background: perhaps extraversion is valued less in some cultures than in others (Hofstee et al., 1997). We found no contribution of therapists’ years of clinical experience to alliance. Initially, there was a significant association when clinical experience was first added to both our regressionmodels, but it disappeared when we added alliance building behaviors to these models. This indicates that any assumed contribution of the therapists’ clinical experience to alliances should rather be explainedbywhat therapists’ doduring a session to strengthen the alliance. It could thus be reasoned that therapists’ clinical experience contributes to their in-session alliance building behavior. Indeed, Raytek et al. (1999) found that in a conjoint couple alcoholism treatment more experienced therapists showedmore alliance fostering behaviors and less nonfacilitative behaviors as compared to less experienced therapists. A previous study on therapists’ contributions to alliance in home-based family treatment showed that therapists’ clinical experience positively impacted only early treatment