Empathic Accuracy

“Empathic accuracy” knowing another person’s internal state, including his or her thoughts and feelings.

Ickes (1997) and Wispe´ (1986)

  • "Empathic accuracy is defined as the congruence between a target-individual’s self-report and empathic understanding of that individual as expressed by the trainee. As such, empathic accuracy can be thought of as having components of both an empathic communication and empathic understanding.

  • This suggests that these significant constructs may be related despite statistically significant differences between subgroups, which may explain the heterogeneity that remains within the subgroups." (DEXTER 2012)*

  • understanding another person’s thoughts and feelings.

  • empathic accuracy (Ickes, 1993, 1997).

  • Ickes, W. (1993). Empathic accuracy. Journal of Personality, 61, 587–610.

  • Ickes, W. (Ed.). (1997). Empathic accuracy. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

  • Ickes, W. (in press). Empathic accuracy: Judging thoughts and feelings. In J. A. Hall, M. Schmid Mast, & T. West (Eds.), The social psychology of perceiving others accurately.Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

  • Ickes, W., Buysse, A., Pham, H., Rivers, K., Erickson, J. R., Hancock, M., . . . Gesn, P. R. (2000). On the difficulty of distinguishing“good” and “poor” perceivers: A social relations analysis of empathic accuracy data. Personal Relationships, 7, 219–234.

  • Ickes, W., Gesn, P. R., & Graham, T. (2000). Gender differencesin empathic accuracy: Differential ability or differentialmotivation? Personal Relationships, 7, 95–109.

  • Ickes, W., Robertson, E., Tooke, W., & Teng, G. (1986). Naturalistic social cognition: Methodology, assessment, and validation.

  • Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 66–82.Ickes, W., Stinson, L., Bissonnette, V., & Garcia, S. (1990).Naturalistic social cognition: Empathic accuracy in mixedsexdyads. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 730–742.