Electron microscopic investigations of aspects of red algal reproductive differentiation and developmental morphology

Empathy Revisited: The Effect of Representational System Matching on Certain Counseling Process and Outcome Variables William Philip Brockman, Ed.D. The College of William and Mary in Virginia, May 1980 Chairman: Charles 0. Matthews, Ph.D. Therapist-offered empathy has been shown to be an important ingredient in the counseling relationship. Many operational definitions of empathy and tools for measurement of this elusive quality exist. Most empathy measures have been criticized on methodological grounds and their construct validity is suspect. Yet there is little argument with the trend which emerges from the data; the overall relationship between empathy, or those dimensions tapped by empathy measures and effective therapy appears positive. The nature of empathy however remains enigmatic and it is evident that all of the variables which account for the empathic process have not been explicated. This study defined and investigated the validty and effect on counseling of a new dimension of empathy. From their linguistic analysis of effective therapy Bandler and Grinder have formulated the construct of representational systems or internal maps used by individuals to organize reality. Such maps are visual, auditory or kinesthetic and are reflected in natural language. Do you see what I mean? Empathy, then, is operationally defined as the counselor's matching language with the representational system used by the client. It was hypothesized that counselors who use representa­ tional system matching would: 1 ) be perceived by subjects as more empathic than counselors who do not (accepted, £ = • OOI4S ) ; 2 ) be perceived by judges as more empathic than counselors who do not (accepted, £ = .0165); elicit a greater willingness to self-disclose than counselors who do not (rejected) and i|) be preferred by clients over counselors who do not use representational matching (accepted £ < . 05). Reproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohib ited w ithout permission. Subjects (N=20) were undergraduates at The College of William and Mary who met with each of two counselors, in counterbalanced order, for an analogue of a beginning counseling interview. One counselor used representational system matching; the other counselor took a more generic, human relations, approach to empathy. After each interview subjects completed Barrett-Lennard’s Relationship Inventory (RI) and Jourard1s Willingness-to-Disclose Questionnaire (WDQ). Following their second interview subjects indicated their preferred counselor. Covariates were: 1) Carkhuff's Empathic Understanding Scale (EU) which also served as a dependent measure; 2) The Counseling Readiness Scale (Crs) of Gough and Heilbrun’s Adjective Check List and 3) Rotter’s I-E scale. The Latin-square design produced data analyzed by: repeated measures analysis of covariance (Hypotheses 1-3); stepwise regression (Hypotheses 1 & 2) and Chi square (Hypothesis ). Results indicate that both subjects and judges per­ ceived the representational system matching counselor as more empathic than the generic empathy counselor. While EU accounted for 11.76% of the variance on Rl-empathy scale scores, representational system matching accounted for 11.9i+% of the variance beyond that accounted for by EU. Clients preferred the representational system matching counselor by a ratio of 3 to 1. It was concluded that representational system matching is an important dimension of empathy and the recommendation was made that beginning courses in counseling techniques and human relations training include a section on identify ing and responding to client’s representational systems. Recommendations were made for further study. Reproduced with perm ission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohib ited w ithout permission.