Therapist empathy and client outcome: An updated meta-analysis.

Put simply, empathy refers to understanding what another person is experiencing or trying to express. Therapist empathy has a long history as a hypothesized key change process in psychotherapy. We begin by discussing definitional issues and presenting an integrative definition.

From There and Back Again.

This article describes my journey from being a radical, person-centered therapist in the 1960s to the present. In the 1960s, my colleagues and I saw therapy as a person-to-person encounter. Over the years I lost that notion and became corrupted by the idea that therapy is a process of intervening to make things happen in clients.

Empathy.

After defining empathy, discussing its measurement, and offering an example of empathy in practice, we present the results of an updated meta-analysis of the relation between empathy and psychotherapy outcome. Results indicated that empathy is a moderately strong predictor of therapy outcome: mean weighted r = .31 (p < .

Focusing on the positive, focusing on the negative: implications for psychotherapy.

Each of the contributions in this special section challenges some of our preciously held notions. We are challenged to be aware that an overfocus on positivity and optimism can be tyrannical, see the positivity in the negativity, realize that some pessimism can be adaptive, see that complaining has positive value, and be aware that false hope is not necessarily bad. Through an examination of these, I have suggested that (a) we have to be careful to deeply respect the individuality of our clients and to take seriously the possibility that there is some "ecological wisdom" in their apparently dysfunctional behavior, and (b) what is more important than optimism-pessimism, complaining versus not complaining, or false versus realistic hope is the degree to which the client adopts a task-focused orientation towards problems.

Introduction: The (overlooked) virtues of "unvirtuous" attitudes and behavior: reconsidering negativity, complaining, pessimism, and "false" hope.

The attitudes and behaviors examined in this special section-namely, negativity, complaining, pessimism, and "false" hope-have not typically been viewed as virtuous either in popular culture or in professional psychology. In reconsidering these attitudes and behaviors, each of the authors demonstrates how there may actually be virtue, or at least something positive, in what has typically been cast in a negative light.