The Relationship Between Counselors’ Empathic Accuracy Toward Clients’ Emotions and Counseling Outcomes

Key Points

• To investigate how counselors' empathic accuracy towards clients' changing emotions affects counseling outcomes.
• Analyzed emotional responses from 60 pairs of counselors and clients during 8 counseling sessions.
• Clients evaluated counseling outcomes using the Outcome Rating Scale (ORS) before each session.
• Counselors assessed their own and clients' emotions using the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE) after each session.
• Data from 474 counseling sessions were collected and analyzed.
• Counselors accurately tracked clients' emotions throughout sessions.
• Counselors underestimated clients' positive emotions and overestimated their negative emotions.
• Both cognitive and emotional accuracy routes showed significant relationships.
• A larger discrepancy between counselors' and clients' negative emotions correlated with decreased counseling outcomes.