Emotion recognition in psychotherapy: impact of therapist level of experience and emotional awareness

Accurately identifying another person’s emotional state is an ability that may be necessary for a psychotherapist to empathize with a patient and that may be required for obtaining valid and reliable psychotherapy process ratings in research. Accuracy of identifying emotions and of rating emotional intensity expressed by a patient was studied in a comparison of 36 experienced therapists and 36 undergraduate psychology students who intended to become psychotherapists. Representative segments of a psychotherapy session were presented in one of three ways to tease apart the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal cues in making accurate ratings. Accuracy was judged against ratings supplied by two experienced and prestigious clinicians based on the same therapy sample. Results indicated that although therapists were more accurate than nontherapists in identifying emotions, they did not differ in the accuracy of rating emotional intensity. Moreover, accuracy of ratings was found to be less reliant on verbal cues among psychotherapists than among nontherapists. Finally, levels of participants’ personal awareness of their own emotions had a positive impact on the accuracy of identifying specific emotions but not on the accuracy of rating their intensity.
This study was partially supported by grant of the Junta Nacional de Investigação Científica e Tecnológica/National Council for Scientific and Technological Research, Portugal (JNICT-BD/1112/90/ID), and an American Psychological Association Dissertation Research Award to the first author.