The Effects of Professional Counselor Training on Empathy: Continued Cause for Concern

The evidence reviewed, especially that from the most methodologically sound studies, indicates that professional training in counseling generally fails to increase trainees' empathy. Further, professional status may establish social distance between counselor and client, and posttraining experience in counseling cannot be counted on to have uniformly positive, empathy-enhancing effects. The review points to the needs for: (a) the incorporation into professional programs of brief, effective empathy-skills training, (b) supplementing intellectual program selection methods with more counseling-relevant measures, (c) defining and upgrading of acceptable posttraining empathy levels and retention of training effects, and (d) research into differences between professional programs that do and do not enhance empathy.     

TEST RELIABILITY AS A FUNCTION OF ANSWER SHEET MODE

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of using separate, machine scorable answer sheets on the number of marking errors made by third-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students. Half of the Ss at each grade level answered in the test booklet (AIB), and half answered on separate answer sheets (SAS). The number of marking errors for the SAS group was approximately three times as great as for the AIB group at each grade level. This indicates that test standardization information must specify the answer sheet mode used to collect normative data.