Empathic accuracy

In psychology, empathic accuracy refers to how accurately one person can infer the thoughts and feelings of another person. It was first introduced in conjunction with the term empathic inference, which was presented by psychologists William Ickes and William Tooke in 1988. Since then research on empathic accuracy has explored its relationship with the concepts of affect sharing and mentalizing. In order to accurately infer another's psychological state, one must be able to both share that state (affect sharing), and understand cognitively how to label that state (mentalizing). Neuroscience research has shown that brain activation associated with empathic accuracy overlaps with both the areas responsible for affect sharing and mentalizing.

Empathic accuracy is an important aspect of what William Ickes has called "everyday mind reading." Understanding the states of others is extremely important to successful social interaction, and the costs of failing in this task can be high, as seen in the social difficulties people with autism spectrum disorders face. Empathic accuracy has been linked to positive peer relationship outcomes and overall healthy adjustment for adolescents. In adult relationships, empathic accuracy correlates with stable romantic relationships.

In 1951, Carl Rogers published Client-Centered Therapy, the work he is most known for, and created three guidelines that psychologists should follow when in a therapeutic session with a client. These general rules are to have unconditional positive regard, empathy, and genuineness. Roger's core goal for implementing these rules was to have the client actualize his or her own inherent potentialities, which is termed self-actualization. But, according to Rogers, self-actualization could not be accomplished until the need for positive regard, positive self-regard, and having a self-concept were gained, so having empathy as one of the main guidelines in therapy helps to move the client towards self-actualization. Empathy in Rogers's client-centered therapy is to better understand the client and his or her issues. This relates to empathic accuracy because Rogers's intent was not to simply make the client feel as if being pitied upon, but for the psychologist to be in tune with the client's needs and perspectives. To do so, the psychologist must be an accurate "reader".

The Rogerian view is based on Carl Roger's Client-Centered Therapy, and uses three criteria to measure empathic accuracy. These criteria include having repeated assessments of the perceiver's empathic accuracy, such as testing how accurate the perceiver can "read" other's thoughts and feelings. After the initial testing, the psychologist then allows the perceiver to generate their own inferences of the specific content provided by the psychologist. Lastly, the psychologist needs to operationally define empathic accuracy to fully understand and identify exactly what he or she is looking for within the perceiver.

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