A Discursive-pragmatic Study Of Empathy In Psychotherapy:Rapport Management Perspective

Psychotherapy is a kind of social activity concerning "language treating illness",and its diagnostic and treatment processes are achieved through the verbal(nonverbal)interaction between therapists and clients who advance the orderly development of psychotherapy collaboratively.During the course of verbal or nonverbal interaction,the establishment of warm,pleasant and loving relationship is a prerequisite to achieving good therapeutic effect.With respect to building up such a relationship,empathy plays a vital role.Empathy in psychotherapy is characterized as therapists "feeling into" the thought and experience of clients.It concerns the ability to feel the inner world of another accurately and involves the process of intelligence and emotion.Being an empath not only needs to understand another person's emotions and circumstances,but also needs to communicate this understanding and cognition accurately to him or her.The practice of empathy has attracted the attention from a number of researchers who mainly approach empathy from psychological point of view and focus on the more macroscopic and technical aspects.However,there are few studies on verbal or nonverbal expressions of empathy in the course of the talk.Thus,this study attempts to conduct a linguistic analysis of how therapists express empathy to their clients based on the naturally occurring interactional sessions.The data used in this study demonstrate a specific type of institutional encounter,that is,psychotherapy.All the data are selected from 17 videotapes of therapist-client interaction.Guided by Rapport Management Theory(RMT)and using the method of Conversation Analysis(CA),this study aims to make a discursive-pragmatic study of empathy in psychotherapy by scrutinizing into five aspects,i.e.,rapport orientation,illocutionary domain,discourse domain,participation domain and nonverbal domain.In terms of rapport orientation,it is found that empathy in psychotherapy could be classified into rapport-enhancing acts of empathy,rapport-threatening acts of empathy and rapport-neglecting acts of empathy.In these processes,empathy is usually employed by therapists to claim association rights,preserve equity rights,maintain or enhance quality and identity face,and achieve transactional and relational goals.Despite a few potentially face-threatening ones,all the instances of empathy work to maintain or enhance,rather than damage,the rapport between therapist and client.With regard to the illocutionary domain,research findings suggest that therapists could employ a range of interactional practices to express empathy.Specifically,this study has identified ten types of interactional practices through which therapists demonstrate their empathic understanding of clients' troubles telling or problematic experiences.Therapists display strong rapport-enhancing orientation through using these interactional practices that show respect to the equity and association principles.Note that therapists sometimes go against the equity principle(autonomy-control)by offering candidate method for trouble-solving.However,this kind of violation is seen as permitted behavior within the helping context.With respect to therapists' respect for their own and clients5 face sensitivities,therapists' interactional practices can significantly enhance the client's identity face.In addition to enhancing the clients' identity face,they also enhance therapists' own identity face in that they can claim positive social values associating with therapists' various self-aspects such as caring,considerateness and helpfulness.Meanwhile,therapists' own respectability could be enhanced because their helping role in psychotherapy is highlighted.Moreover,therapists' interactional goals are mainly relational,aiming to establish,maintain or enhance the good therapeutic relationship with clients.In what follows,this study explores the sequential organization of empathic sequence in the discourse domain of rapport management.A detailed analysis of sequential organization of therapists' empathic responses to clients' troubles telling is conducted.It shows that the empathic sequence consists of a four-part structures,namely(1)the therapist soliciting troubles-telling(problematic experience)from the client;(2)the client's report on the troubles telling(problematic experience);(3)the therapist's empathy,and(4)the client's response.This study also explores the structural features of the four-part empathy delivery sequence,which could reveal the interactional details of empathy in psychotherapy and thus contribute to the understanding of the nature and process of psychotherapy and counselling.In terms of the participation domain of rapport managenent,this study addresses procedures aspects of empathic sequence,including the turn-taking,lexical substitution,pronoun use,intersubjectivity and empathic continuers.It is found that the turn constructional units of empatlhy consists of word(s),phrase(s),and sentence(s).Two types of turn allocation are then found in our data,that is,current-selects-next and self-selection.With respect to pronoun use,other orientedness "you" and inclusive "we"are two important linguistic devices for showing empathy in psychotherapy.Also,empathic continuers are used by the therapist when the client is revealing feelings,describing difficult emotional experiences,or personal vulnerabilities,talking about sufferings,or working through upsetting emotional insights.The volume of empathic continuers is low and soft,resonating with client's feelings.In regard to the nonverbal domain of rapport management,it is found that therapists tend to use nonverbal resources to convey affiliation with clients' troubles telling(problematic experiences)including nodding,eye contact,leaning slightly forward,a sorrowful facial display and smile.Essentially,psychotherapy is a kind of verbal(nonverbal)interaction.Empathy could advance the smooth development of counseling activities.Therefore,the analysis of the micro-processes of empathy is an effective way to understand counseling activities.This study could help the therapist and client perceive and understand the micro-processes of empathy in psychotherapy and will also serve as a useful reference for qualitative method of psychotherapy research.