Abstract
Providing remote psychotherapy using technology is a growing practice, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if in numerous studies video conferencing psychotherapy (VCP) was found to be clinically effective, some doubts continue to exist about how the psychotherapeutic alliance works in the online setting, and the characteristics of the empathic process are still poorly understood. This is an exploratory study aimed at analyzing the degree of empathy between the psychotherapist and client pair, and the degree of support perceived by the client who shall be referred to as the patient interchangeably in this study, comparing the sessions in person with those online, during the current pandemic, in order to discriminate the impact of empathy in the digital setting. The sample analyzed was composed of 23 patients with different severity of pathology engaged in online and in-person therapeutic sessions with five psychotherapists of different theoretical leanings. The scores of the support and empathy scale, obtained by both members of the psychotherapeutic couple in the two settings, were analyzed and compared. The test used belongs to an Italian adaptation of the Empathic Understanding (EU) of the Relationship Inventory. What emerged from comparing the scores was interesting: Unlike the psychotherapists, the patients perceived their therapists as significantly more empathic and supportive in the remote setting. These are rather important data, because the literature documents that client empathic perception measures represent a more accurate measure of the empathic relationship and, in general, can predict a good treatment outcome. Although these results need further investigation, they represent an important contribution in filling the scientific gap in the understanding of digital empathy. Also, this study provides new insights for future research on the characteristics and impact empathy has on the practice of remote psychotherapy.
Highlights
Since the day the World Health Organization declared the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus as a pandemic because of its global outbreak, unprecedented changes have happened in the personal and professional activities of the whole Italian population (Di Corrado et al, 2020)
This is an exploratory study aimed at analyzing the level of affective attunement and more precisely the degree of empathy among the members of the psychotherapist-client dyad, as well as the degree of support perceived by the patient, comparing the sessions in-person with those online, during the period of lockdown necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to discriminate the specific characteristics of digital empathy
The attention to the relational aspects, according to the theoretical and methodological background of the psychotherapist, was found to be an element capable of fostering the therapist’s perceived satisfaction using video conferencing psychotherapy (VCP). In this second phase, we hypothesized that the level of affective attunement and more widely the degree of empathy between the members of the psychotherapist-client dyad has specific characteristics and represents an efficacy factor for the success of the treatment
Summary
Since the day the World Health Organization declared the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus as a pandemic because of its global outbreak, unprecedented changes have happened in the personal and professional activities of the whole Italian population (Di Corrado et al, 2020). In this challenging period, the coronavirus has not been the only health risk, since everyone has to continue to manage stress (Maldonato et al, 2020) and take care of their personal, physical, and psychological wellbeing. VPC has been used in a multiplicity of therapeutic plans and with different kinds of patients, it is generally associated with good user satisfaction, and it is found to have clinical outcomes comparable to traditional frontal psychotherapy (Backhaus et al, 2012; Berryhill et al, 2019a,b; Dolce et al, 2020)
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