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The relationship of empathy in movement to synchrony, echoing, and empathy in verbal interactions

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Abstract

This pilot study analyzed the relationships among synchrony, echoing, and empathy in dyadic counseling sessions and friendly conversations to explore the validity of relating synchrony to movement empathy. It also compared the counseling and friendship dyads’ movement profiles. The study worked only with female participants. One from each pair viewed three ten minute sections from her videotaped interaction and used Kagan’s Interpersonal Process Recall System to analyze them into empathic, nonempathic, and neutral segments of varying lengths. She also judged the empathic experience as affective or cognitive. Three female raters viewed the segments in random order, without audio. They recorded the manifest synchrony and echoing, and for each echo they noted the degree of delay. Results showed echoing, and not synchrony, related to empathy directly. Short and long delays characterized echoes in the affective and cognitive modes respectively. Counselors/clients and friends had disparate movement profiles. The discussion addresses these findings, considers functional and relational differences between synchrony and echoing, and suggests inspecting further the connection between movement empathy and synchrony which dance therapy has so far accepted without extensive questioning.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Rochester, Center for Counseling, Family Life, and Work Studies, Graduate Studies Office Lattimore Hall, 14627, Rochester, New York

    Danielle L. Fraenkel M.S., DTR

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  1. Danielle L. Fraenkel M.S., DTR
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Additional information

The author wishes to express her appreciation to Beth Franks, M.S. for her help in developing and designing the Fraenkel-Franks Index of Shared Behaviors (FFISB), to Gerald Gladstein, Ph.D. for his comments on earlier drafts, to Barbara Butler, M.S. and Beth Franks, for their help with the data collection, to Peter Franks, M.D. for his help with the analysis, and to Terry Conheady, Jeffrey Mehr, and A. Jeffrey Scheutz for their technical assistance.

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Fraenkel, D.L. The relationship of empathy in movement to synchrony, echoing, and empathy in verbal interactions. Am J Dance Ther 6, 31–48 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02579518

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