A Conversational Analysis Of Novice Therapist’s Empathy In Psychological Counseling

Empathy is not only an essential factor for psychotherapy,but also one of the necessary skills for psychological counselors.Regardless of different genres of counseling,empathy plays an important role in establishing counseling relationship and promoting the progress of counseling.As a critical stage in the development of counselors,novice counselors are getting more and more concerns by researchers.Meanwhile,some studies have found that novice counselors are difficult to empathize with their clients in counseling.Psychological counseling is a highly practical practice,so understanding the behavior of a novice counselor in the process of counseling will be more conducive to the learning and growth of novice counselors.Conversation analysis,as a qualitative research method based on real corpus in natural situations,which analyses characteristics and patterns of natural conversations,provides a very valid way to study empathy in the process of counseling for novice counselors through turn-taking,sequence structure and conversation strategies.This study adopts conversation analysis,basing on the novice counselors who both receive psychological counseling training and have counseling experience from six months to two years.After two and a half months of continuous collection,eventually 21 audio recordings have been chosen to be transferred and processed.Through analysis we get the following conclusions:(1)In the process of psychological counseling,novice counselors share empathy with certain patterns in turn-taking.The turn-taking is spontaneous,and usually the length of the turn is not fixed.But in the case of empathy,the turn of the client is generally longer than that of the counselor,and most of the conversation is completed by the client.There are still existing some situations including the discourse overlaps or the turn competition in the distribution of the turn.In the analysis of the empathetic corpus,it is found that there is a turn gap after a counselor’s empathy,and the counselor usually break the silence and start a new turn.(2)In the interaction with the clients,there is a pattern in the conversation sequence.Thesequence structure of empathy consists of four parts: "Initiation-Response-Empathy-Feedback".These include counselors who perceive clients’ feelings of emotions,counselors’ understanding and expression of empathy,and clients’ acceptance of empathy and feedback.The process of empathy concludes continuous empathy and correction sequence.Continuous empathy is a model of“initiate-respond-empathy-feedback-empathy-feedback...”.The correction sequence occurs when the empathy is inaccurate or empathy fails.The self-directed correction by others is a more general revision mode in the field of empathy.(3)Novice counselors will adopt some conversational strategies for empathy.The basic discourse model of empathy can be summarized as “emotional affixes + emotional vocabulary for expression evaluation,exclamation,understanding,etc.”.Strategies such as first-person statements,restatements,and revisions are used in methods.Restatement of strategies is most commonly used.(4)The novice counselors have low power on empathy clues,and grasp the empathy clues mainly on emotional statements and negative events statements.Basically,it is an emotional reaction in terms of cognition,emotion,or both.(5)The failures and successes of empathy have certain signs in the interaction.Agreeing with affirmative answers,eliciting more information on the topic and causing clients’ emotions are the signs of success.After the empathy expressed,a negative or uncertain responding from clients,directly changing the topic or silence are the signs of failure that needs counselors’ attention.