In the mid-1950s, Carl Rogers adopted the term unconditional positive regard (UPR) for what he had previously called acceptance of the client as a person of unconditional self-worth. UPR is defined as the therapist’s warm acceptance of each aspect of the client’s experience. It occurs when the client perceives that he or she is making a positive difference in the experiential field of the therapist. Thus, UPR is regarded as a core condition for enhancing the therapeutic relationship, which is, from Rogers’s perspective, the critical factor in determining therapeutic success.

In this entry, UPR is discussed in relation to its practical psychotherapeutic significance in treating psychopathology, to the other core conditions of Rogers’s theory of therapeutic personality change, [Page 3681]and to meta-analytic research that indicates an ...