The empathy fillip: Can training in micro expressions of emotion enhance empathic accuracy?

The empathy fillip: Can training in micro expressions of emotion enhance empathic accuracy?

The things I’m going to say in a list:

• Background• Hypothesis• Participants• Method• Results• Results – A critical look • Questions

What is METT

Training Micro-expressions – does it work?

Hurley, C. (2012). Do you see what I see? Learning to detect micro expressions of emotion. Motivation &

Emotion, 36, 371-381.

• Looked at ability to identify micro expressions in 14-item pre and post test with 25mins training in between.

• 25 minutes of training.–METT + TRAINER was most effective, then

METT, then other manipulations.

Empathy and the face 2

Hassenstab et al. (2007). Knowing what others know, feeling what others feel: A controlled study of empathy in

psychotherapists. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 195, 277-281

• Compared psychotherapists and matched controls.• There were no significant differences the Ekman faces test. • There were differences on the Movie Assessing Social

Cognition • Psychotherapists show an “empathic advantage” not derived

from their ability to read facial expressions.• Rather this advantage comes from the ability to read between

the lines of speech.

My hypothesis

• Traditional empathy training comes in books and practice.• This training gives counsellors an empathic advantage, but

not from facial expression recognition (Hassenstab, et al, 2007).

• Use training in facial expressions of emotion to increase counsellor empathic accuracy.

• Hypothesis: Psychotherapeutic professionals given a reading task will be less empathically accurate than those trained with METT.

Participants

• 60 psychotherapists Reading eMETT p-value

Sex

Female: N (%) 24 (40) 25 (42) n.s.

Male: N (%) 6 (10) 5 (8) n.s.

Age 44.6 (12.6) 37.8 (11.5) 0.03

Age Range 26-74 24-69

Practice years 7.42 (9.37) 5.75 (6.27) n.s.

Empathic Accuracy

Ickes, W. (Ed.). (1997). Empathic Accuracy. New York: Guilford Press• Both partners where secretly filmed whilst waiting for the

experimenter.• Each partner views the footage separately and stops the video

where they can remember their thoughts or emotions – they note this down.

• Partners then swap, re-watch the footage which is stopped for them at the point their partner made a note – they must write down what they think their partner was thinking/feeling at that point.

• Raters compare notes and assign marks for each “match” – the total of these match points is the empathic accuracy score.

My Empathic Accuracy Video

• Start screen • Footage

• Stop Screen • Footage

Experimental procedure1 • Fill out consent form

2• Demographic, work, and Empathy

questionnaires.

3• 30 minutes reading• OR • 30 minutes eMETT

4 • Empathic accuracy video

5 • Debrief and questions

ResultsIntended sample = 60

Group Mean Score S.D.

METT task (n=30) 11.7 2.78

Reading task (n=30) 10.4 2.37

Independent samples t-test, t(58)=2.05, p = 0.02, d = 0.55

Excellent, so we should all rush out and buy eMETT?

• Before you do, perhaps consider the following sentence:

Outlier removal “depends on the situation and on the perspective defended by the researcher” Ley et al; (2013) Detecting outliers: Do not use standard deviation around the mean, use absolute deviation around the median.

3 Possible means of removing outliers

1. 3 standard deviations outside the mean:

2. Inter Quartile Range x 1.5

3. 2 standard deviations outside the mean?

t-test, t(58)=2.05, p = 0.02, d = 0.55

t-test, t(57)=2.00, p = 0.03, d = 0.53

t-test, t(56)=1.53, p = 0.07; d = 0.41 not significant.

Questions?