TPC-Journal-V5-Issue3

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 3 420 counseling competency accreditation standards (Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs [CACREP], 2009). State licensing boards have established regulations requiring multicultural training, and mental health professions have introduced multicultural competency principles into their professional codes of ethics (Chao, 2012). In addition, quantitative and qualitative studies have shed light on factors that influence counselors’ effectiveness in understanding and working with culturally diverse clients (Worthington et al., 2007). Much of this literature can be organized into the following two broad categories: outcomes research associated with cultural responsiveness and correlates of MCC (Ponterotto, Fuertes, & Chen, 2000; Worthington et al., 2007). Concerning cultural responsiveness, studies (e.g., Atkinson & Lowe, 1995; Worthington et al., 2007) have revealed that counselors who understand, acknowledge and address cultural issues in counseling (i.e., cultural responsiveness) are more effective in their work with ethnic minority clients. Specifically, results have revealed that cultural responsiveness increases client satisfaction, self-disclosure, eagerness to continue counseling and perceptions of counselor efficacy (Atkinson & Lowe, 1995; Ponterotto et al., 2000). In the majority of MCC quantitative studies, researchers have utilized self-report instruments to uncover factors that influence MCC (Ponterotto et al., 2000; Worthington et al., 2007). These factors have included demographic variables (e.g., age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation; Constantine, 2001; Fassinger & Richie, 1997; Ivers, 2012; Ottavi, Pope-Davis, & Dings, 1994); multicultural training (Dickson & Jepsen, 2007); and hypothesized correlates of multicultural counseling competencies, including racial identity development (Chao, 2012), gender role attitudes (Chao, 2012), attitudes associated with racism and discrimination (Constantine, 2002), worldview (Sodowsky, Kuo-Jackson, Richardson, & Corey, 1998), social desirability (Sodowsky et al., 1998), empathy (Constantine, 2001), emotional intelligence (Constantine, 2001), theoretical orientation (Constantine, 2001), and mortality salience (Ivers & Myers, 2011). One variable that has received limited attention in the multicultural counseling competency literature, despite its association with culture, is bilingualism. Bilingualism and Culture The interconnection between language and culture gained popularity in the 1930s with the writings of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (Whorf, 1956). Whorf (1956) contended that language and thought are inextricably connected—that language determines people’s thoughts, their conceptualizations and ultimately their culture. This view, known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, was widely accepted from the 1930s through the 1960s. However, due to competing models (e.g., Chomsky’s Universal Grammar Theory) and a lack of empirical support, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis lost favor and was largely discarded by the 1990s. A less deterministic version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was revisited by the Neo-Whorfians, who contended that language does, in fact, significantly influence the way in which people perceive the world around them. Recent studies have supported this contention, revealing that language affects people’s representations of time (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010), perceptions of cause and responsibility (Fausey & Boroditsky, 2010), perceptual processing of images (Dils & Boroditsky, 2010), and conceptions of agency (Fausey, Long, Inamori, & Boroditsky, 2010). Fausey et al. (2010), for example, examined the effect of language on causality and agency. The authors gave English and Japanese speakers a memory test following a video that participants