TPC Journal V8, Issue 4- FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 4 343 accounting for about 30% of the variance (Lambert & Barley, 2001). That is, clients who perceive the counseling relationship to be meaningful will have more positive treatment outcomes (Bell, Hagedorn, & Robinson, 2016; Norcross & Lambert, 2011). One of the key factors in the establishment of a strong therapeutic relationship is a counselor’s ability to experience and communicate empathy. Researchers estimate that empathy alone may account for as much as 7–10% of overall treatment outcomes (Bohart, Elliott, Greenberg, & Watson, 2002; Sachse & Elliott, 2002), making it an important construct to foster in counselors. Despite the importance of empathy in the counseling process, much of the literature on empathy training in counseling is outdated. Thus, little is known about the training aspect of empathy; that is, how is empathy taught to and learned by counselors? Nevertheless, early scholars (Barrett-Lennard, 1986; Ivey, 1971; Ivey, Normington, Miller, Morrill, & Haase, 1968; Truax & Carkhuff, 1967) posited that counselor empathy is a clinical skill that may be practiced and learned, and there is supporting evidence that empathy training may be efficacious. In one seminal study, Truax and Lister (1971) conducted a 40-hour empathy training program with 12 counselor participants and identified statistically significant increases in participants’ levels of empathy. In their investigation, the researchers employed methods in which (a) the facilitator modeled empathy, warmth, and genuineness throughout the training program; (b) therapeutic groups were used to integrate empathy skills with personal values; and (c) researchers coded three of participants’ 4-minute counseling clips using scales of accurate empathy and non-possessive warmth (Truax & Carkhuff, 1967). Despite identifying statistically significant changes in participants’ scores of empathy, it is necessary to note that participants who initially demonstrated low levels of empathy remained lower than participants who initially scored high on the empathy measures. In a later study modeled after the Truax and Lister study, Silva (2001) utilized a combination of didactic, experiential, and practice components in her empathy training program, and found that counselor trainee participants ( N = 45) improved their overall empathy scores on Truax’s Accurate Empathy Scale (Truax & Carkhuff, 1967). These findings contribute to the idea that empathy increases as a result of empathy training. More recent researchers (Lam, Kolomitro, &Alamparambil, 2011; Ridley, Kelly, & Mollen, 2011) have identified the most common methods in empathy training programs as experiential training, didactic (lecture), skills training, and other mixed methods such as role play and reflection. In their meta- analysis, Teding van Berkhout and Malouff (2016) examined the effect of empathy training programs across various populations (e.g., university students, health professionals, patients, other adults, teens, and children) using the training methods identified above. The researchers investigated the effect of cognitive, affective, and behavioral empathy training and found a statistically significant medium effect size overall ( g ranged from 0.51 to 0.73). The effect size was larger in health professionals and university students compared to other groups such as teenagers and adult community members. Though empathy increased as a result of empathy training studies, the specific mechanisms that facilitated positive outcomes remain largely unknown. Although research indicates that empathy training can be effective, specific empathy-fostering skills are still not fully understood. Programmatically, empathy is taught to counselors within basic counseling skills (Bayne & Jangha, 2016), specifically because empathy is believed to lie in the accurate reflection of feeling and meaning (Truax & Carkhuff, 1967). But scholars argue that there is more to empathy than the verbal communication of understanding (Davis, 1980; Vossen et al., 2015). For example, in a more recent study, DePue and Lambie (2014) reported that counselor trainees’ scores on the Empathic Concern subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1980) increased as a result of engaging in