TPC Journal V8, Issue 4- FULL ISSUE

341 Empathy plays an integral role in the facilitation of therapeutic relationships and promotion of positive client outcomes. Researchers and scholars agree that some components of empathy might be dispositional in nature and that empathy can be developed through empathy training. However, although empathy is an essential part of the counseling process, literature reviewing the development of counseling students’ empathy is limited. Thus, we examined empathy and sympathy scores in counselors-in-training (CITs) in comparison to students from other academic disciplines ( N = 868) to determine if CITs possess greater levels of empathy than their non-counseling academic peers. We conducted a MANOVA and failed to identify differences in levels of empathy or sympathy across participants regardless of academic discipline, potentially indicating that counselor education programs might be missing opportunities to further develop empathy in their CITs. We call for counselor education training programs to promote empathy development in their CITs. Keywords : empathy, sympathy, counselor education, counselors-in-training, therapeutic relationships Empathy is considered an essential component of the human experience as it relates to how individuals socially and emotionally connect to one another (Goleman, 1995; Szalavitz & Perry, 2010). Although empathy can be difficult to define (Konrath, O’Brien, & Hsing, 2011; Spreng, McKinnon, Mar, & Levine, 2009), within the counseling profession there is agreement that empathy includes both cognitive and affective components (Clark, 2004; Davis, 1980, 1983). When discussing the difference between affective and cognitive empathy, Vossen, Piotrowski, and Valkenburg (2015) described that “whereas the affective component pertains to the experience of another person’s emotional state, the cognitive component refers to the comprehension of another person’s emotions” (p. 66). Regardless of specific nuances among researchers’ definitions of empathy, most appear to agree that “empathy- related responding is believed to influence whether or not, as well as whom, individuals help or hurt” (Eisenberg, Eggum, & Di Giunta, 2010, p. 144). Furthermore, empathy can be viewed as a motivating factor of altruistic behavior (Batson & Shaw, 1991) and is essential to clients’ experiences of care (Flasch et al., in press). As such, empathy is foundational to interpersonal relationships (Siegel, 2010; Szalavitz & Perry, 2010), including the relationships facilitated in a counseling setting (Norcross, 2011; Rogers, 1957). Rogers (1957) intuitively understood the necessity of empathy in a counseling relationship, which has been verified by the understanding of the physiology of the brain (Badenoch, 2008; Decety & Ickes, 2009; Siegel, 2010) and validated in the counseling literature (Elliott, Bohart, Watson, & Greenberg, 2011). In a clinical context, empathy can be described as both a personal characteristic and a clinical skill (Clark, 2010; Elliott et al., 2011; Rogers, 1957) that contributes to positive client outcomes (Norcross, 2011; Watson, Steckley, & McMullen, 2014). For example, empathy has been identified as a factor that leads to Zachary D. Bloom, Victoria A. McNeil, Paulina Flasch, Faith Sanders A Comparison of Empathy and Sympathy Between Counselors-in-Training and Their Non-Counseling Academic Peers Zachary D. Bloom is an assistant professor at Northeastern Illinois University. Victoria A. McNeil is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida. Paulina Flasch is an assistant professor at Texas State University. Faith Sanders is a mental health counselor at Neuropeace Wellness Counseling in Orlando, Florida. Correspondence can be addressed to Zachary Bloom, 5500 North St. Louis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625, z-bloom@neiu.edu. The Professional Counselor Volume 8, Issue 4, Pages 341–354 http://tpcjournal.nbcc.org © 2018 NBCC, Inc. and Affiliates doi:10.15241/zdb.8.4.341