Emily Weiss

Conceptualizing empathy in marital discussions

Current research suggests that how couples communicate emotions to each other is related to the quality and stability of the marriage. Empathy, one aspect of communication, has been conceptualized and measured in multiple ways in the psychological literature. In this study, three unique models of empathy were conceptualized -- the Beholder, the Objective Observer, and the Mind Reader. The Beholder model examines how much partners perceive their spouses as trying to understand them. The Objective Observer provides an index of how empathic the spouses appear to strangers. The Mind Reader model explores how accurate spouses are in knowing what their partners are feeling. This model was measured in multiple ways to determine if different aspects of empathic accuracy are more important than others. The major goal of this paper is to examine how these three conceptions of empathy relate to each other, and how individually, and in combination relate to marital satisfaction.