I know just how you feel

When people talk with psychotherapists, the best results occur if both feel similar emotions, when both “like” each other. But do most therapists really connect with patients this way? No one has ever tried to directly measure the biology of empathy between the two.

To fill this gap, a group of researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital measured involuntary biological reactions by both patients and therapists during a regular psychotherapy session. Attention and inattention, expressions of pleasure and satisfaction, and words of care and understanding also were caught on videotape.

“To our knowledge, this is the first study of the physiology of shared emotions during live psychotherapy sessions,” notes Carl Marci, the Harvard psychiatrist who led the study. “We were pleased to find evidence for a biological basis of empathic connections. Our results suggest that therapists perceived as being more empathic have more positive emotional experiences in common with patients.”

That’s good news, given that other research has shown that lack of empathy is the best predictor of a poor outcome for patients.