The effects of first-session interviewer self-disclosures that differed in three levels of intimacy--low, medium and high--and three kinds of temporal focus--historical (past tense and external to the interview process), current (present tense and external to the interview process), and existential in which the interviewer disclosed immediate…

An experiment was conducted in which perceptions of an individual responding to an initial disclosure were examined. Observer subjects (N=315) read a brief description of a first encounter between two women. During the meeting one of the women made either an intimate or a non-intimate disclosure (low vs. high initial intimacy). The other woman…