| As one of the six "necessary and sufficient conditions" for positive personality change and successful therapeutic outcomes (Rogers, 1957), empathy has figured prominently in the person-centered research tradition. The notion that empathic accuracy plays an indispensible role in psychotherapy has not been limited to the Rogerian approach, however, but has pervaded the field of counseling psychology. As such, the development of measurement scales for the assessment of empathy as well as programs for the training of empathy have abounded.; Despite the plethora of theoretical, research, and training attention devoted to this construct, a suitable operationalization for the assessment of empathic accuracy has remained elusive. The research literature is replete with calls for the development of new methods capable of (a) "dismantling" the multifaceted empathy process into its component subskills, (b) developing methods for training these individual component skills, and (c) assessing empathic accuracy in a valid and reliable fashion (Barrett-Lennard, 1981; Goldstein & Michaels, 1985; Marks & Tolsma, 1986).; In the spirit of the "component processes approach" to empathy research, the current investigation was designed to address issues relevant to the accuracy of empathic inferences. In the present context, three female volunteers who agreed to serve as empathy stimulus-targets were videotaped while participating in simulated individual psychotherapy sessions. Each of the target individuals viewed her videotape immediately following the therapy session, pausing the tape every time she remembered experiencing a thought or feeling during the preceeding session. During each of these paused intervals, the empathy-targets recorded the specific content of her thought-feeling recollection and the time the entry occurred. The data obtained in this manner constituted (1) the accuracy criterion for the empathic inferences generated by observer-subjects, and (2) the data set that was used in creating the stimulus materials for subjects in the feedback experimental condition.; This study was designed to address the following questions. First, is the accuracy of subjects' empathic inferences enhanced following the receipt of relevant target-generated feedback? Second, if feedback training does effectively increase empathic accuracy, will it be equally effective across three different target individuals? Finally, is the Empathic Accuracy Scale (Ickes, 1987) a predictively valid instrument for the selection of individuals high versus low in dispositional empathic accuracy?... |
