Abstract

The present study is to examine the hypothesis that client-perceived empathy mediate the causal relationship of counselor intentions and counseling outcome. For this purpose three kinds of counselor intentions which seemed to be mainly used in the begin­ning of counseling were selected. The intentions were "support", "insight", and "self-control". The experimental conditions were manipulated by the frequency of counselor intentions in each script : "support", "insight", and "self-control" intentions were significantly frequent and more of them were significantly frequent. The subjects of this experiment were 120 female college students and they were randomly assigned to four conditions "support", "insight", "self-control" and "neutral" which controlled the counselor intentions. The subjects listened to one of the audiotaped counseling sessions and then evaluated the session. The measures to evaluate the counseling session were : the Session Evaluation Questionnair, Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory and Counselor Rating Form. The Results of this study are summarized as follows : First, "Support" is related with positive outcome on depth factor, on the other hand, "self-control" is related with negative outcome on smoothness factor. Second, "support" and "self-control" have an important effect on evaluation counselor's Empathy. Third, "support" and "insight" have positive effect on evaluating counselor's trustworthiness and attrativeness, on the other hand, "self-control" has negative effect on evaluating counselor's trustworthiness and attractiveness. Forth, the outcome of high-empathy session is evaluated positive. And two dimensions of empathy-empathy recognition and referential empathy have an important effect on evaluating counseling outcome. The most significant finding of this study was that empathy has an important effect on counseling session outcome, especialy on perceiving counselor's attitudes. It is concluded that empathy is one of variables to mediate between counselor intentions and counseling outcome.