Robert Elliott, University of Strathclyde
Arthur C. Bohart, California State University Dominguez Hills and Saybrook Graduate School
Jeanne C. Watson, University of Toronto
Leslie S. Greenberg, York University
Psychotherapist empathy has had a long and sometimes stormy history in psychotherapy. Proposed and codified by Rogers and his followers in the 1940's and 1950's, it was put forward as the foundation of helping skills training popularized in the 1960's and early 1970's. Claims concerning its universal effectiveness were treated with skepticism and came under intense scrutiny by psychotherapy researchers in the late 1970's and early 1980's. After that, research on empathy went into relative eclipse, resulting in a dearth of research between 1975 and 1995 (Watson, 2001; Duan & Hill, 1996).
Since the mid-1990’s, however, empathy has once again become a topic of scientific interest in developmental and social psychology (e.g., Bohart & Greenberg, 1997; Ickes 1997), particularly because empathy came to be seen as a major part of “emotional intelligence” (Goleman, 1985). We believe the time is ripe for the reexamination and rehabilitation of therapist empathy as a key change process in psychotherapy (Bohart & Greenberg, 1997).
Indeed, the meta-analytic results we will present clearly support such a conclusion. The most important development in the past 10 years, however, is the emergence of active scientific research on the biological basis of empathy, as part of the new field of social neuroscience (Decety & Ickes, 2009), which we will address briefly in the next section.
Defining Empathy
The first problem with researching empathy in psychotherapy is that there is no consensual definition (Bohart & Greenberg, 1997; Duan & Hill, 1996; Batson, 2009). Recent neuroscience research on empathy begins to clarify some of the conceptual confusion, as a result of the concerted efforts of researchers using a variety of methods ranging from performance tasks, self-report, and neuropsychological assessment to fMRI and transcranial stimulation. Research examining the brain correlates of different component subprocesses of empathy (Decety & Ickes, 2009) has extended the initial discovery of “mirror neurons” in the motor