Love and Mindreading: The Role of Empathic AccuracyPerceptions on Relationship Satisfaction

[摘要] Purpose: The current study investigated the correlations between objective, subjective,and dispositional empathy and relationship satisfaction. Highly satisfied relationships arelinked with better health (Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001), yet empathic accuracy—anobjective measure of correctly understanding a partner’s thoughts and feelings frommoment-to-moment—has inconsistent associations with relationship satisfaction. As the importance of perceptions in social support has been identified and social cognitiontheory emphasizes perceptions, I investigated perceived partner empathic accuracy(PPEA) and perceived (self) empathic accuracy (PEA) along with dispositional empathicconcern and perspective taking. We also investigated sources of information partners payattention to when determining if their partner understood them (PPEA) or if theyunderstood their partner (PEA). To my knowledge, this study is the first to explore PPEAand sources of empathic accuracy perceptions as they relate to relationship satisfaction.Methods: Fifty-one couples were videotaped having a conflict discussion and partnersseparately watched the recording twice. During the first viewing, participants recordedspecific thoughts and feelings from the original discussion. Participants also rated howwell they believed their partner understood their thought/feeling and the influencedifferent sources had on that assessment. During the second viewing, participants inferred what their partner had been thinking/feeling at those identified moments. Participants rated their confidence about their inference and rated the influence of different sources.Results: PPEA was associated with relationship satisfaction while EA was not. Positivecorrelations were found between PPEA, PEA, and empathic concern for women alongwith perspective taking for men. Both PPEA and perspective taking accounted forsignificant variance in relationship satisfaction. For PPEA, tone of voice was influentialfor both men and women, as were facial expressions for men and body language forwomen. For PEA, facial expressions were influential for men while knowledge of pastinteractions was influential for women. Sources did not directly correlate withrelationship satisfaction.Conclusion: Support was found for all hypotheses, suggesting that feeling understood byone’s partner is more important than actually being understood in terms of relationshipsatisfaction. As men and women paid attention to different sources when perceivingempathy, clinical applications are indicated.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] empathic accuracy perception

[关键词] empathy;empathic accuracy perception;couples empathy;empathy sources;relationship satisfaction;Psychology;Social Sciences