ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author designs the experiment in order to test the hypothesis that empathic attunement was connected with interaction and could only be judged by paying attention to the responsiveness of both parties to each other, but particularly the responsiveness of the therapist to the client. The experiment supported the hypothesis that students who were given instructions to pay attention to the interaction between the therapist and client would be significantly better at identifying empathic attunement and non-attunement than those who were judging the interaction using only loose definitions of the concept. This was a good result, confirming that her concept of empathic attunement was goal-corrected and could only be judged correctly by focusing on the interaction between therapist and client. The concept of goal-corrected empathic attunement is located within an understanding of the dynamics of attachment, which suggests that when caregiving is effective exploration will be activated, and that when caregiving is ineffective exploration will be inhibited.
