Emotional Responses to Disfigured Faces: The Influences of Perceived Anonymity, Empathy, and Disgust Sensitivity

Two experiments investigated self-reported emotional reactions to photographs of people with attractive, unattractive or structurally disfigured faces. In Experiment 1 participants viewing disfigured faces reported raised levels of sorrow and curiosity but not raised levels of negative emotions. In Experiment 2 there was more negative emotion and less positive emotion reported under conditions of relatively high anonymity, compared to low anonymity, specific to disfigured faces, suggesting that self-reports are influenced by social desirability. Trait empathy was associated with sorrow and negative emotions when viewing disfigured faces. Disgust sensitivity was associated with negative emotions and inversely associated with positive emotions.

The Multi-Faceted Experience of Empathy in Intellectual Disability Settings: An IPA Study

This research thesis explored the concept of empathy. The specific purpose was to further understand the idea of empathy in relation to the experience of male support workers who provide residential care to adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) and challenging behaviour. The thesis aimed to provide some insights into how support workers develop and extract meaning from their experiences of relationships with clients and the impact of this on their own self-care, namely, self-compassion. Since personal accounts of experience were required, a qualitative methodology was employed, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Smith, 2004). This methodology was selected as it allows for the exploration and interpretation of idiographic lived experience and meaning making. 8 experienced support workers were interviewed using a semi structured interview. Four superordinate themes emerged from the data. These included: 1. Making sense of the others inner world; 2. Processes that enhance empathic practice; 3. Tensions and conflicts, and 4. Management of distressing feelings. Differing accounts of interpreting the needs of clients were identified which helped participants understand, make sense of their interpersonal experience and participate in their role. These included utilising academic knowledge and senses, particularly sight and hearing, which were seemingly complemented by a level of reflective practice. Additionally, to make sense of the experience of a client, they appeared to put themselves in their position, suggesting a form of empathy. Participants appeared to engage in a process of reflection on their relationships with clients, which helped them think about what they had learned about the person’s needs, moreover, this process enabled them to identify some of their own responses and feelings. However, participants seemed to struggle to recognise the occurrence or impact of distressing emotional experience and to express their feelings, possibly in response to a deep sense of responsibility and fear of transferring emotional distress to others. This dilemma of holding two potentially conflicting views of experience seemed to inhibit self-compassion. Although not specifically testing theories of empathy, from the overall findings, it could be suggested that empathy may be a dynamic, transient process that is influenced by reflexivity, values and context. The context in which participants discussed their practice, and situated within their accounts, suggested a sense of confusion and uncertainty. Consequently, it is suggested this impacted on how participants understood and related to clients, and to themselves. There were some specific implications for Counselling Psychology practice, mostly concerning training and supervision. These included recommendations for staff training and supervision, systemic organisational intervention, policy development, recommendations for revisions to models of specialist care frameworks and clinical training.

Coping with emotional labour in tennis coaching

A tennis coach works in a social environment, employed in a service based economy with the outcome of client-customer interactions significantly impacting on the consumer experience. Research conducted outside of sport has shown that positive affective displays during interactions, which in a tennis situation may include providing support through displays of warmth, empathy, positivity and compassion as the client attempts to master a new technique, have shown positive associations with customer satisfaction. Hochschild (1983) coined the term ‘emotional labour’ to describe the process of, and demands resulting from adjusting one’s demeanour, language and tone during social encounters in a planned and strategic manner in order to facilitate a positive outcome. Hochschild proposed that individuals in jobs which require a high degree of face-to-face interaction with the public are particularly at risk of experiencing potentially deleterious effects that result from dealing with emotional labour demands on a daily basis. It would appear that tennis coaches work in environments that make them susceptible to experiencing emotional labour and as such the intention of this article is to first introduce the concept and then to provide suggestions for how a coach may cope with these demands.

Challenges Facing Long Term Foster Carers: Exploration of the Nature of Psychoanalytic Parent/Carer Support

This research study investigates the role and impact of psychoanalytically-informed short-term parent work with long-term foster carers of looked-after children, in support of the foster placement. The study reflects on the data gathered from four child assessments and five foster families seen by a psychoanalytic child psychotherapist for four sessions each. It draws on psychoanalytic ideas from a range of theoretical traditions, exploring such concepts as trauma, defences, compulsion to repeat, psychological-mindedness, ‘container/contained’ (Bion) and ‘holding environment’ (Winnicott). One distinctive contribution of this research is what it adds to our already existing understanding of the defences (or responses) aroused in the carer when faced with the intense and distressing affect associated with the child’s early trauma; and the impact of this legacy of trauma on the child, on the carer and on the wider Social Services system. Applying Grounded Theory and psychoanalytically-informed clinical case study methodology to the research material, the study breaks down the data analysis into seven stages of coding, from the initial reading of the data to the eventual development of two key hypotheses. One of the predominant themes that emerged from the analysis was the carer’s capacity to remain focused on the child’s emotional needs and how this in turn was linked to the direction of the therapist’s focus. The successive analyses of the data culminated in the hypothesis that the more the therapist focused on the carer and the carer’s emotional states in the course of the parent work, the more the carer was enabled to focus on the child’s emotional needs. As the system of categories emerged according to the themes exemplified in the sessions, a particular focus of analysis became the concept of psychologicalmindedness, considered under several sub-categories: displaying insightful comments; awareness of the child’s bodily states; awareness of the child’s affect; the carer’s ability to recognize the child’s defences; and the carer’s ability to make links between the child’s current difficulties and the child’s past experiences. Through this analysis it became apparent that degree of psychological-mindedness was closely linked to the individual carer’s capacity to metabolize the child’s distressed and distressing communication. This in turn led to a deeper exploration of the situations that were particularly challenging for the carers: i.e., instances when the child was compelled to repeat past traumatic emotional states and as a result was communicating intense distress. This exploration eventually generated the second hypothesis: that in reaction to the child’s distress, the response of each carer could be plotted somewhere along a spectrum, from either distancing themselves from the child’s emotional state to seeking excessive closeness with the child (merging). The next stage of the analysis developed four new categories of carer responses to the distressed child: identification and distancing from the child; identification and merging with the child; the category that describes the carer’s psychologicalmindedness as being ‘impaired’; and ‘good enough’ caring. This then led to an exploration of the carer’s own defences at these most challenging times. This research demonstrates clearly that even within the short space of four sessions of weekly psychoanalytic parent work, it is possible to achieve significant improvement in a carer’s capacity to bear the child’s compulsion to repeat early traumas, and to help the carers become more emotionally available to provide the child with effective psychological parenting at such difficult and challenging times. Key words: looked-after children; long-term foster carers; psychoanalytic short-term parent work; trauma; compulsion to repeat; psychological-mindedness; empathy; defences; psychoanalytically-informed clinical case study research methodology; Grounded Theory research methodology.

Compassion and its role in the clinical encounter – An argument for compassion training

Empathic communication, (i.e. emotionally engaging with a patient), is an important part of the therapeutic relationship. It has been shown to improve the health and therapeutic outcomes for patients by improving diagnosis and compliance. In the West, front-line medical professionals, including herbal medicine practitioners, put themselves at risk of burnout and compassion fatigue by giving emotionally intensive care. While treatments for compassion fatigue and burnout are available, another way forward is needed to ensure healthcare professionals do not become ill; one that will enable both patients and healthcare professionals to receive the care needed. In this paper it is argued that compassion, which is defined in this paper, involves different neural circuitry to empathy and can protect healthcare professionals from the effects of stress that can, if not addressed, lead to burnout. Traditional Buddhist meditation techniques such as loving-kindness meditation have been shown to increase compassion in non-meditative states. Short daily sessions of such mediation practices have been shown to improve compassion in a way that protects healthcare professionals from burnout.