The development of meaning contexts for empathic accuracy: Channel and sequence effects.

Abstract

This study examined the effects of both immediate and cumulative contextual knowledge on empathic accuracy. Participants viewed excerpts from videotapes of 3 simulated psychotherapy sessions and attempted to infer each client's actual thoughts and feelings. Immediate contextual knowledge was varied by controlling the informational channels available. Cumulative contextual knowledge was varied by presenting the excerpts from each tape in either their original order or in a random order. The results revealed that empathic accuracy in this clinically relevant context was primarily dependent upon verbal, rather than nonverbal, cues. Knowledge of the cumulative meaning context was also important, however, in that it led perceivers to respond in a schema-driven fashion that sometimes facilitated, but at other times impaired, their empathic accuracy. Empathic accuracy is a measure of a perceiver's ability to accurately infer the specific content of another person's thoughts and feelings (Ickes, 1993). To date, none of the studies that used Ickes, Stinson, Bissonnette, and Garcia's (1990) procedure for assessing empathic accuracy has focused on the types of contextual cues that might influence empathic inference. Moreover, only two studies have examined the verbal and nonverbal cues that perceivers might use in making such inferences (Ickes et al., 1990; Stinson & Ickes, 1992). Accordingly, in the present study we examined the roles of both the immediate contextual cues (the verbal and nonverbal behaviors that precede each reported thought or feeling) and the cumulative contextual cues (the emergent meaning context that develops as a function of the temporal nature of an interaction) in the on-line inference of the specific content of a target person's successive thoughts and feelings. The essential questions we are posing in the present study are (a) What is the nature of the context that promotes the greatest accuracy in a perceiver's inferences about a target person's specific thoughts and feelings? and (b) Will the emergent cumulative meaning context facilitate such accuracy beyond the effect of the immediate meaning context provided by the words and actions that immediately precede each of the target person's reported thoughts and feelings'?