ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the factors that have been shown to influence perceivers' empathic accuracy, such as age-related maturational changes and various motivational influences. It explains how the target person's "readability" can influence the perceiver's empathic accuracy, and how perceivers can improve their empathic accuracy. Psychologists call the process by which they achieve this insight empathic inference, whereas the level of insight they actually achieve is called empathic accuracy. Empathic accuracy, as operationally defined, is a global measure of how accurately a perceiver is able to infer the specific content of all of the target person's thoughts and feelings. The standard stimulus paradigm was originally developed to assess empathic accuracy in a clinically relevant research setting. People with severe autism often have severe language deficits and other behavioral disturbances that make testing their empathic accuracy essentially impossible. The chapter discusses the conditions in which empathic accuracy hurts versus helps the partners in close relationships.
