paraphrasing examples in psychology

Reflecting and Paraphrasing

Part of the ‘art of listening’ is making sure that the client knows their story is being listened to.

This is achieved by the helper/counsellor repeating back to the client parts of their story. This known as paraphrasing .

Reflecting is showing the client that you have ‘heard’ not only what is being said, but also what feelings and emotions the client is experiencing when sharing their story with you .

This is sometimes known in counselling ‘speak ‘as the music behind the words .

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It is like holding up a mirror to the client; repeating what they have said shows the client they have your full attention. It also allows the client to make sure you fully understood them; if not, they can correct you.

Reflecting and paraphrasing should not only contain what is being said but what emotion or feeling the client is expressing.

Let’s look at an example:

Client (Mohammed): My ex-wife phoned me yesterday; she told me that our daughter Nafiza (who is only 9) is very ill after a car accident. I am feeling very scared for her. They live in France, so I am going to have to travel to see her, and now I have been made redundant, I don’t know how I can afford to go.

Counsellor: So, Mohammed, you have had some bad news about your little girl, who has been involved in an accident. You are frightened for her and also have worries over money now you have lost your job.

Client: Yes, yes ... that’s right.

Notice that the counsellor does not offer advice or start asking how long Mohammed and his wife have been separated, but reflects the emotion of what is said : ‘frightened' and 'worries'.

Reflecting and paraphrasing are the first skills we learn as helpers, and they remain the most useful.

To build a trusting relationship with a helper, the client needs not only to be ‘listened to' but also to be heard and valued as a person.

"Reflecting and paraphrasing should not only contain what is being said but what emotion or feeling the client is expressing."

Definition of Reflection in Counselling

Reflection in counselling is like holding up a mirror: repeating the client’s words back to them exactly as they said them.

You might reflect back the whole sentence, or you might select a few words – or even one single word – from what the client has brought.

I often refer to reflection as ‘the lost skill’ because when I watch counselling students doing simulated skill sessions, or listen to their recordings from placement (where clients have consented to this), I seldom see reflection being used as a skill. This is a pity, as reflection can be very powerful.

When we use the skill of reflection, we are looking to match the tone, the feeling of the words, and the client’s facial expression or body language as they spoke .

For example, they might have hunched their shoulders as they said, ‘I was so scared; I didn’t know what to do.’

We might reflect that back by hunching our own shoulders, mirroring their body language while also saying ‘I felt so scared; I didn’t know what to do.’

Using Reflection to Clarify Our Understanding

We can also use reflection to clarify our understanding, instead of using a question.

For example, suppose the client says:

‘My husband and my father are fighting. I’m really angry with him.’

For me to be in the client’s frame of reference, I need to know whether ‘him’ refers to the husband or the father. So I might reflect back the word ‘ him ’  with a quizzical look.

The client might then respond:

‘Yeah, my dad. He really gets to me when he is non-accepting.’

So you can get clarification in this way. You can adjust where you are to make sure that the empathic bond is strong and that you are truly within the client’s frame of reference.

"When we use the skill of reflection, we are looking to match the tone, the feeling of the words, and the client’s facial expression or body language as they spoke".

Definition of Paraphrasing in Counselling

Paraphrasing is repeating back your understanding of the material that has been brought by the client, using your own words.

A paraphrase reflects the essence of what has been said .

We all use paraphrasing in our everyday lives. If you look at your studies to become a counsellor or psychotherapist, you paraphrase in class.

Maybe your lecturer brings a body of work, and you listen and make notes: you’re paraphrasing as you distill this down to what you feel is important.

How Paraphrasing Builds Empathy

How does paraphrasing affect the client-counsellor relationship?

First of all, it helps the client to feel both heard and understood. The client brings their material, daring to share that with you.

And you show that you’re listening by giving them a little portion of that back – the part that feels the most important. You paraphrase it down.

And if you do that accurately and correctly, and it matches where the client is, the client is going to recognise that and to feel heard: ‘ Finally, somebody is there really listening, really understanding what it is that I am bringing.’

This keys right into empathy, because it’s about building that empathic relationship with the client. And empathy is not a one-way transaction .

..."Empathy [is] the ability to ‘perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the 'as if' conditions." Carl Rogers (1959, pp. 210–211)

In other words, we walk in somebody’s shoes as if their reality is our reality – but of course it’s not our reality, and that’s where the ‘as if’ comes in.

I’ve heard this rather aptly described as ‘walking in the client’s shoes, but keeping our socks on’!

Empathy is a two-way transaction – that is, it’s not enough for us to be 100% in the client’s frame of reference , understanding their true feelings; the client must also perceive that we understand .

When the client feels at some level that they have been understood, then the empathy circle is complete.

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Effects of Empathic Paraphrasing – Extrinsic Emotion Regulation in Social Conflict

Maria seehausen.

1 Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion,” Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany

2 Dahlem Institute for Neuroimaging of Emotion, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany

3 Department of Psychiatry, Charité University Medicine Berlin, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Berlin, Germany

Philipp Kazzer

Malek bajbouj, kristin prehn.

In the present study, we investigated the effects of empathic paraphrasing as an extrinsic emotion regulation technique in social conflict. We hypothesized that negative emotions elicited by social conflict can be regulated extrinsically in a conversation by a listener following the narrator’s perspective and verbally expressing cognitive empathy. Twenty participants were interviewed on an ongoing or recently self-experienced social conflict. The interviewer utilized 10 standardized open questions inviting participants to describe their perception of the conflict. After each of the 10 descriptions, the interviewer responded by either paraphrasing or taking notes (control condition). Valence ratings pertaining to the current emotional state were assessed during the interview along with psychophysiological and voice recordings. Participants reported feeling less negative after hearing the interviewer paraphrase what they had said. In addition, we found a lower sound intensity of participants’ voices when answering to questions following a paraphrase. At the physiological level, skin conductance response, as well as heart rate, were higher during paraphrasing than during taking notes, while blood volume pulse amplitude was lower during paraphrasing, indicating higher autonomic arousal. The results show that demonstrating cognitive empathy through paraphrasing can extrinsically regulate negative emotion on a short-term basis. Paraphrasing led to enhanced autonomic activation in recipients, while at the same time influencing emotional valence in the direction of feeling better. A possible explanation for these results is that being treated in an empathic manner may stimulate a more intense emotion processing helping to transform and resolve the conflict.

Introduction

Emotion regulation research to date has mainly focused on an individualistic point of view emphasizing control mechanisms in the individual, such as attention deployment, cognitive reappraisal, or the willful suppression of emotional expressions (Gross and Thompson, 2007 ; Butler and Gross, 2009 ; Rime, 2009 ). Compared to the abundance and sophistication of the research pertaining to classification schemes on such intrinsic regulation, systematic analysis of extrinsic emotion regulation and especially of controlled interpersonal affect regulation (i.e., the process of deliberately influencing the emotional state of another person, as opposed to non-conscious affect spreading) is still relatively sparse. Rime ( 2009 ), however, points out that an emotional experience is virtually indivisible of a social response, which in turn is bound to shape and modify the original emotion, so that emotion has to be regarded as a fundamentally interdependent process.

Niven et al. ( 2009 ) propose a classification system for controlled interpersonal affect regulation strategies, derived from Totterdell and Parkinson’s ( 1999 ) classification of strategies to deliberately improve one’s affect. Their final classification distinguishes between strategies used to improve versus strategies used to worsen others’ affect, and between strategies that engage the target in a situation or affective state versus relationship-oriented strategies. The technique of empathic paraphrasing, which is investigated in the present study, can be categorized as aiming at affect improvement and engagement within this classification framework. However, it also contains a relationship-oriented component, as empathic paraphrasing communicates interest and commitment in understanding the other’s perspective, thereby implying that their feelings are valid and worth listening to.

Empathy has been conceptualized in many different ways, usually involving a cognitive and an emotional component (Preston and de Waal, 2002 ; Lamm et al., 2007 ; Decety and Meyer, 2008 ). Cognitive empathy means the ability to take the perspective of another person and infer their mental state, while emotional empathy refers to the observer’s affective response to another person’s emotional state (Dziobek et al., 2008 ).

Paraphrasing or active listening (coined by Carl R. Rogers in Client-Centered-Therapy) is a form of responding empathically to the emotions of another person by repeating in other words what this person said while focusing on the essence of what they feel and what is important to them. In this way, the listener actively demonstrates that he or she can understand the speaker’s perspective (cognitive empathy). Rogers described empathy as the ability to sense the client’s private world as if it were one’s own, but without losing the “as if” quality (Rogers, 1951 ). Empathy is communicated through active listening, which in the Client-Centered approach aspires to evoke personal growth and transformation through providing a space of unconditional acceptance for the client. Rogers considered empathy, positive regard, and congruence both necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic change (Rogers, 1942 , 1951 ).

This early notion on the importance of empathy for facilitating therapeutic change has gained ample empirical support over the last decades of research. How empathic a therapist is perceived to be has been identified as a critical factor for positive therapy outcome for both psychodynamically oriented and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapies (Bohart et al., 2002 ; Duan and Kivlighan, 2002 ; Orlinsky et al., 2004 ; Marci et al., 2007 ; Elliott et al., 2011 ; Norcross and Wampold, 2011 ). Based on a review of several studies Marci et al. ( 2007 ) describe a significant influence of perceived empathy on mood and general clinical improvement, even when controlling for other factors. Along this line, a meta-analysis conducted by Bohart et al. ( 2002 ) confirms a modest but consistent importance of empathy during psychotherapy. Zuroff et al. ( 2010 ) specifically examined the relationship between patient-reported measures of the three Rogerian conditions (positive regard, empathy, and genuineness) and therapeutic outcome, and found that patients whose therapists provided high average levels of the Rogerian conditions across all patients in their caseloads experienced more rapid reductions in both overall maladjustment and depressive vulnerability (self-critical perfectionism). Farber and Doolin ( 2011 ) conducted a meta-analysis on 18 studies also focusing on the effects of positive regard as defined by Rogers on treatment outcome, and found an aggregate effect size of 0.26, confirming a moderate influence of this factor.

The effectiveness of showing empathy on treatment success has also been assured within the field of medical care. Medical researchers have coined the term clinical empathy , which Mercer and Reynolds ( 2002 ) define as (1) understanding the patient’s situation, perspective and feelings (and their attached meanings), (2) communicating that understanding and checking its accuracy, and (3) acting on that understanding with the patient in a helpful (therapeutic) way. Hence, within the clinical setting empathy entails not only cognitive and affective components but also a behavioral component to communicate understanding to the patient, i.e., through active listening (Davis, 2009 ). Accordingly, the active demonstration of empathy has already been recognized as a crucial component of promoting cooperation in challenging situations within the field of clinical care. Halpern ( 2007 ) stresses that physicians who learn to empathize with patients during emotionally charged interactions can thereby increase their therapeutic impact. By the same token, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that empathic communication effectively helps patients through challenging and fearful situations, ranging from painful dental treatments over psychological problems to pandemic crisis (Cape, 2000 ; Reynolds and Quinn Crouse, 2008 ; Bernson et al., 2011 ). Neumann et al. ( 2009 ) reviewed prior empirical studies on clinical empathy and conclude that clinical empathy is a fundamental determinant of successful medical care, because “ it enables the clinician to fulfill key medical tasks more accurately, thereby achieving enhanced health outcomes ” (Neumann et al., 2009 , p. 344).

In sum, the effectiveness of empathic communication as an extrinsic emotion regulation technique has already gained solid empirical support from psychotherapy and medical research. For the present study, social conflict was chosen as the context to examine the effects of empathic paraphrasing on emotion, for two reasons. Firstly, social conflict is often accompanied by intense emotions such as anger and hurt, and therefore lends itself easily to the investigation of extrinsic emotion regulation, without requiring artificial emotion induction in the laboratory. The setting of real-life social conflict renders it possible to work with “real” emotion, while at the same time concentrating on a non-clinical population. Secondly, empathic paraphrasing is used with vast prevalence within the field of conflict resolution. Paraphrasing is generally applied as one of the most important constitutional elements across all domains of conflict mediation (business mediation, family mediation, community mediation, victim-offender mediation, etc.). Hence, it seems expedient to take a closer look at the emotional effects of a technique so widely used within the context of its most common application.

Social psychology research offers evidence for a connection between dispositional affective empathy as well as dispositional perspective taking and adaptive social conflict behavior (Steins, 2000 ; Gehlbach, 2004 ; de Wied et al., 2007 ). However, there is hardly any research on the effects of being treated in an empathic manner (as opposed to feeling empathy oneself) on conflict behavior. Moran and Diamond ( 2008 ) report positive effects of therapist empathy on parent’s negative attitudes toward their depressed adolescent children. Being treated in an empathic way seems to help parents to also empathize with their children going through a rough time. This is an interesting finding, which contains parallels to social conflict situations and stimulates the question which emotional effects are triggered by being treated empathically, and how these emotional processes aid own empathic reactions toward others.

An interesting train of evidence regarding the socio-cognitive effects of being treated empathically is provided by research on interpersonal mimicry and language matching in social interaction. Numerous studies confirm that non-verbal interpersonal mimicry increases affiliation and positive social judgment as well as pro-social behavior not only toward the mimicker but also toward people not involved in the mimicry situation, indicating that being mimicked not only leads to an increased liking toward the interaction partner, but to an increased pro-social orientation in general (van Baaren et al., 2004 ; Ashton–James et al., 2007 ; Fischer-Lokou et al., 2011 .; Guéguen et al., 2011 ; Stel and Harinck, 2011 ). This is true for the mimickee as well as the mimicker (Stel et al., 2008 ). Maddux et al. ( 2008 ) also report that strategic mimicry in negotiation abets more favorable negotiation outcomes, facilitating both individual and joint gains. This effect was mediated by higher levels of trust toward the mimicker. Ashton–James et al. ( 2007 ) tested several hypotheses on why mimicry promotes pro-social behavior and found that being mimicked during social interaction shifts self-construal toward becoming more interdependent and “other-oriented.” Additionally, mimicry strengthens one’s perception of interpersonal closeness with other people in general.

Correspondingly, language style matching, i.e., similarity in use of function words, has been found to predict relationship initiation and stability (Ireland et al., 2011 ). On a similar vein, according to the interactive-alignment account of dialog, the success of any given conversation depends on the extent of the conversation partners arriving at a common understanding of the relevant aspects of what they are talking about, i.e., a common situation model (Pickering and Garrod, 2004 ). Interlocutors tend to automatically align at different levels of linguistic representation, e.g., through repeating each other’s words and grammar (Garrod and Pickering, 2004 ). This alignment at low-level structure positively affects alignment of interlocutors’ situation models – the hallmark of successful communication – as people who describe a situation in the same way tend to think about it in the same way as well (Markman and Makin, 1998 ; Menenti et al., 2012 ). These findings strongly support the hypothesis that paraphrasing, which involves a certain degree of language matching and bears parallels to mimicry on a verbal level, administrates emotional and socio-cognitive effects on the person being paraphrased.

Regardless the impressive amount of research reviewed above, the specific dynamics of emotional response to empathic paraphrasing are yet largely unclear. Rime ( 2009 ) suggests that socio-affective responses such as comfort and empathy temporarily alleviate a narrator’s negative emotions and generate a deep feeling of relief. However, if no cognitive reframing and re-adjustment of goals, motives, models, and schemas occur, the alleviating effects of socio-affective responses can be expected to be only temporary, because the cognitive sources of the emotional unsettledness have not been transformed. Following this reasoning, the emotional effects of empathic paraphrasing should be expected to be short-lived. On the other hand, Rogers argued that receiving empathy and positive regard are necessary conditions for being able to revise overly rigid structures of the self and assimilate dissonant information and experiences (Rogers, 1942 , 1951 ). Hence, empathic paraphrasing may initiate a cognitive-emotional process progressing in several stages, with emotional alleviation and an increased mental openness and disposition for cognitive restructuring possibly being the first one. In this respect, the present research makes a valuable contribution by moving beyond correlational designs to presenting the first experimental study assessing in detail the emotional effects of empathic paraphrasing in the context of social conflict, hopefully providing a useful basis for further analysis in future studies.

To investigate whether and how empathic paraphrasing in the context of a real-life social conflict extrinsically regulates emotion, we invited participants to an interview in which they were asked to talk about an ongoing or recently self-experienced social conflict with a partner, friend, roommate, neighbor, or family member. The interviewer responded to participants’ descriptions by either paraphrasing (experimental condition following half of the interview questions) or taking notes (control condition). We assessed valence ratings pertaining to participants’ current emotional state as well as skin conductance response (SCR), blood volume pulse (BVP), blood volume pulse amplitude (BVPamp), and heart rate (HR) as indicators of autonomous nervous system (ANS) activity during the interviews. We also recorded the interviews for documentation and analysis.

Psychophysiological and voice parameters have been proven to be reliable indicators for emotional responses (Scherer, 2003 ; Kushki et al., 2011 ). HR is regulated by sympathetic (increase) as well as parasympathetic (decrease) pathways of the ANS (Li and Chen, 2006 ; Kushki et al., 2011 ), and reflects autonomic arousal (Critchley, 2002 ) as well as emotional valence (Palomba et al., 1997 ). BVP is a measure of changes in the volume of blood in vessels and has been associated with affective and cognitive processing (Kushki et al., 2011 ). BVP amplitude has been found to be lower during episodes of increased sympathetic activity (Shelley, 2007 ) and has also been shown to decrease when feeling fear or sadness in several studies (Kreibig et al., 2007 ). SCR depicts changes in the skin’s ability to conduct electricity and is considered a sensitive psychophysiological index of changes in autonomic sympathetic arousal that are integrated with emotional and cognitive states. In addition, SCR reflects vicarious emotional responses to another’s affective state (pain), and is therefore also connected to empathy (Hein et al., 2011 ).

Based on the literature reviewed above, we hypothesized that empathic paraphrasing would lead to a reduction of negative emotion in the situation of talking about the conflict. Specifically, we expected valence ratings to be more positive after paraphrasing. Furthermore, we hypothesized that empathic paraphrasing would lead to lower autonomic arousal, reflected in psychophysiological measures and voice analysis.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

Twenty healthy subjects [10 female; age: mean (M) = 27, standard deviation (SD) = 7.9] participated in this study. All participants were native German speakers, and had recently experienced a potentially ongoing social conflict with a partner, friend, roommate, neighbor, or family member. No conflicts involving physical or psychological violence were included in the study. Due to technical problems, SCR and voice data of four participants as well as BVP data of three participants were lost. Therefore, 20 participants entered the analysis of self-report data, 16 entered voice data analysis and analysis of SCR, and 17 entered analysis of HR and BVP.

The study was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the ethical committee of the Charité University Medicine Berlin. All participants gave written informed consent prior to investigation and received payment for participation.

Interview design and procedure

Participants were told that the study investigates emotion in social conflict, especially how emotions develop while speaking about a social conflict. The interviewer further informed participants that she would try to understand their perspective, and sometimes summarize what she understood so far, while at other times take notes to help her memorize certain things and have them present over the course of the interview.

Interviews consisted of 10 standardized open questions (e.g., “What exactly bothers you about the other person’s behavior?”). After the participant answered each question, the interviewer either paraphrased what had been said, or silently took notes (control condition). Following these paraphrasing interventions or control conditions, respectively, participants were asked to rate their current emotional state. In order to avoid confounding effects resulting from the content of the questions, as well as distortions due to emotional processing over the course of the interview, interventions, and control condition were given alternately during the interview. Half of all participants received an intervention (empathic paraphrasing) after the first question, a control intervention after the second question, and so forth; the other half received a control intervention first. All interviews were conducted by the same female interviewer, who had previously received 190 h of training in conflict resolution and has worked on cases in community mediation, business mediation, and family mediation over several years, applying empathic paraphrasing as one of the core techniques of conflict resolution.

Paraphrasing in the present study was implemented in such a way that after each narration the interviewer briefly summarized the facts of the narration and described her understanding of how the narrator felt, and why, and what she understood was important to the narrator regarding the situation described. To confirm the accuracy of her paraphrasing, the interviewer asked if her understanding was correct at the end of each paraphrase. An example of a paraphrase is given in the Appendix.

All interviews were audiotaped. Interview length was 30.16 min on average (SD = 11.03), depending on how extensively participants answered to the questions. Figure ​ Figure1 1 depicts the interview questions as well as a schematic overview of the interview procedure and measurements.

Interview guideline and procedure .

Data acquisition and analyses

Participants were asked to indicate their current emotional state (valence rating) on an eight-point Likert scale ranging from −4 to 4 (“How positive or negative do you feel right now?”) 10 times during the interview, following the interventions and control condition, respectively. Ratings were analyzed with two-tailed t -tests for repeated measures in IBM SPSS Statistics 20.

Skin conductance response and BVP were recorded continuously with a sampling frequency of 40 Hz using a commercial sampling device ( Biofeedback 2000 X-pert , Schuhfried GmbH, Austria) during the entire interview. Both interviewer’s and participant’s voices were recorded using Audacity 1.2.6 with a highly directional microphone (Shure, WH20 Dynamic Headset Microphone, IL, USA).

Skin conductance data was analyzed in LedaLab V3.3.1. Time frame of analysis was 25 s after the onset of the intervention or control condition. Within this interval, SCR was decomposed by continuous decomposition analysis (CDA; Benedek and Kaernbach, 2010 ). For each participant and interval, the maximum phasic activity was computed (with a minimum amplitude of 0.001 μS) and averaged for each participant across all intervals of both conditions).

Blood volume pulse and BVPamp were analyzed for intervals of 23 s after the onset of intervention or control condition using Matlab 7.1 (The Math-Works, Inc., MA, USA). Data were smoothed using a six point Gaussian filter. BVP was further used for extracting HR data through computing the inverse of the distance between successive peaks of the BVP signal in intervals larger than 0.4 s (Kushki et al., 2011 ). Mean SCR between both conditions (paraphrasing interventions and control conditions), BVP, BVPamp (in%), and HR (in beats per minute) were also analyzed with two-tailed t -tests for repeated measures in IBM SPSS Statistics 20. In addition, we compared BVP, BVPamp, and HR during the paraphrasing intervention and the interview question directly following the paraphrase, with a standard time frame of 4 s for the question phase.

Analysis of voice recordings was done with seewave in R statistics (Sueur et al., 2008 ). Using Audacity 1.2.6., intervals of speech for voice analysis were selected manually by listening to the recorded interviews and cutting out participants’ responses to each question – following an intervention or control intervention, respectively.

Behavioral data

Valence ratings following paraphrasing revealed less negative feelings than ratings following the control condition [ t (19) = 3.395, p  = 0.003]. Effect size is d  = 0.76 (Cohen’s d for repeated measures, calculated with pooled means and standard deviations).

Differences in valence ratings over the conditions are shown in Figure ​ Figure2 2 .

Mean valence ratings (with standard error of the mean) after the empathic paraphrasing and control conditions .

Time series plots over the entire course of the interview show a U-shaped trend in valence ratings over time, which is mainly due to ratings following the control condition (see Figure ​ Figure3). 3 ). However, a repeated measures ANOVA including sequence of intervention over time as an additional factor demonstrates that the effect of the intervention remains untouched by sequence [main effect of sequence F (4, 72) = 1.768; p  = 0.145; main effect of intervention: F (1,18) = 11.400; p  = 0.003 interaction intervention × sequence F (4, 72) = 1.489; p  = 0.215].

Mean valence ratings over the course of the interview, averaged over both conditions (A) and split up into paraphrasing and control condition (B) . At each of the 10 trials, 10 subjects received an intervention and 10 received a control intervention.

Psychophysiological data

Two-tailed t -tests for repeated measures show that participants had a higher SCR during paraphrasing than during the control condition [ t (15) = 2.589; p  = 0.021]. Effect size is d  = 0.65 (Cohen’s d ). Complementary results were found in participants’ HR, which was also higher during paraphrasing than during the control condition [ t (16) = 6.491; p  = 0.000; effect size d  = 1.57]. No significant differences between the conditions for BVP were found [ t (16) = 0.22; p  = 0.812]. However, there was a strong trend for mean BVPamp [ t (16) = −2.119; p  = 0.050; effect size d  = 0.51], which was lower during paraphrasing than during taking notes. Comparing BVPamp during paraphrasing with the interview question directly following the paraphrase, we also found that BVPamp is lower during paraphrasing than during the following interview question [ t (13) = 2.381; p  = 0.033; effect size d  = 0.64]. For HR and BVP, no such difference between paraphrase and subsequent interview question was found. Figure ​ Figure4 4 illustrates differences in psychophysiological measures and voice intensity over the two conditions.

Measures of sympathetic activation (mean values with standard error of the mean) . (A) Skin conductance response (SCR; in μS), (B) Heart rate (in beats/minute), (C) Blood volume pulse amplitude (BVPamp in%), and (D) Voice volume (in dB) during empathic paraphrasing and control condition.

Voice analysis data

Mean intensity/volume of participants’ voices was lower when they replied to an interview question following a paraphrase [ t (15) = −2,466; p  = 0.026; effect size d  = 0.62]. There was no difference in mean fundamental voice frequency (F0) between the conditions [ t (15) = 0.583; p  = 0.568]. F0 range and F0 standard deviation did not differ between the conditions, either (see Table ​ Table1). 1 ). However, speech rate and articulation rate showed trends for slower speech following paraphrasing [speech rate t (15) = −1.86; p  = 0.082; articulation rate t (15) = −2.05; p  = 0.059]. Cohen’s d yielded effect sizes of d  = 0.47 for speech rate and d  = 0.51 for articulation rate.

Means (M), standard deviations (SD), t -, p -, and d -values of all parameters in intervention and control condition .

* and ** indicate significant findings .

Table ​ Table1 1 gives an overview of means and standard deviations of all psychophysiological, voice, and self-report parameters over the two conditions.

The aim of our study was to investigate the short-term emotional effects of empathic paraphrasing in social conflict. To achieve this, we conducted interviews on real-life social conflicts currently experienced by our participants. During the interview, paraphrasing was alternated with a control condition (taking notes). Emotional valence ratings were obtained after each intervention and control intervention and psychophysiological and voice recordings were executed continuously during the interviews. Our hypothesis was that paraphrasing would lead to more positive emotional valence and lower autonomic arousal. Viewing the results of our study as a whole suggests that empathic paraphrasing has a regulating effect on a narrator’s emotions, however, this effect seems to be more complex than originally expected. In sum, we found that participants felt better when the interviewer paraphrased their emotions and perceptions of the conflict. At the same time, and contrary to our expectations, SCR, HR, and BVP amplitude indicate higher autonomic activation during paraphrasing. Voice intensity as well as speech and articulation rate of participants on the other hand was lower when answering to a question following a paraphrase.

Effects of paraphrasing on valence

The self-report ratings demonstrate that participants felt better after the interviewer had paraphrased what they had said. Also, the relatively high effect size suggests that this effect is strong and practically relevant. The interview itself also induced valence effects over time, insofar that participants experienced a decline in emotional valence in the middle of the interview, which recuperated toward the end of the interview. However, due to the alternation of intervention and control intervention, which was again alternated in sequence over participants, this trend does not affect the intervention effect.

This self-reported valence effect is consistent with participants’ lower voice intensity after paraphrasing compared to the control condition. Banse and Scherer ( 1996 ) have linked high voice intensity with negative affects or aggressive speaker attitudes, thereby suggesting a conjunction between high voice intensity and negative emotional valence. Conversely, speech and articulation rate are also slightly lower following an intervention, even though these effects are not statistically significant. Speech rate is defined as the number of spoken units (e.g., words/syllables) per unit of time (minute/second). It is calculated across continuous speech segments, which may include pauses, disruptions, or dysfluency. Articulation rate is an analogical measure based only on fluent utterances, excluding pauses, and dysfluency (Howell et al., 1999 ). Speech rate has been demonstrated to increase when experiencing anger or fear compared to neutral emotional states (Scherer, 1995 ; Rochman et al., 2008 ). Hence, the lower speech and articulation rates following paraphrasing also suggest that participants experienced less negative emotion after paraphrasing.

By the same token, HR was higher during paraphrasing than during the control condition, which according to Palomba et al. ( 1997 ) can also be interpreted as a valence effect. HR deceleration has been associated with negative emotional valence during presentation of unpleasant visual stimuli. In social tasks, HR acceleration has been measured in accordance with intensity of emotion, and to a lesser degree, with emotional valence (Palomba et al., 1997 ). Palomba et al. ( 1997 ) found significant differences in HR deceleration between positive, negative, and neutral visual stimuli, with positive stimuli producing the highest and negative stimuli the lowest HR. Hence, self-report data, voice data, and HR analysis all support the conclusion that emotional valence was positively influenced by offering cognitive empathy through paraphrasing. This effect of paraphrasing on valence bolsters Rime’s ( 2009 ) supposition that being treated empathically while socially sharing negative emotion produces a short-term alleviation of these negative emotions.

Interestingly, the positive impact of mimicry on social judgment mentioned in the introduction (i.e., promoting liking toward the mimicker) suggests the generation of positive emotion as a result of mimicry. This was not the case for paraphrasing in our study: valence ratings in the intervention condition center around the neutral. Nevertheless, it is still possible that paraphrasing led to an increased liking toward the interviewer, while overall affect was neutral. Social judgment was not assessed in the present study, hence, no direct comparison with mimicry is possible. However, it would be interesting to compare the effects of mimicry and paraphrasing on emotion in future studies, as well as to study verbal mimicry or matching more extensively in the context of distressing conversations such as social conflict discussions.

Effects of paraphrasing on arousal

Skin conductance response, HR and BVP amplitude indicate a period of higher autonomic arousal while the interviewer paraphrased what participants had said, compared to taking notes on what they had said. Again, effects sizes of physiological measures suggest medium and in the case of HR, very strong, effects. This is surprising, as we presumed that the lower intensity of negative emotion induced by paraphrasing would be accompanied by lower arousal. Instead, paraphrasing apparently enhanced autonomic arousal. Quite conversely to psychophysiological data, the lower voice intensity following the intervention on the other hand suggests a calming effect of paraphrasing on autonomic arousal, as several studies on emotion and voice quality have associated high voice intensity with high sympathetic autonomic arousal emotions (Scherer, 2003 ). This apparent contradiction between voice data and psychophysiological data appears initially confusing, as vocal changes and changes in SCR both originate in mediated variation of HR, blood flow, and muscular tension caused by an arousing event (Duffy, 1932 ; Laver, 1968 ; Schirmer and Kotz, 2006 ).

However, this discrepancy can be explained by the fact that BVP and SCR were recorded while participants listened to the interviewer paraphrasing, whereas voice analysis was done on recordings of participants’ answers to the interviewer’s next question, following the paraphrase. Thus, the autonomic arousal induced by paraphrasing may already have subsided and passed into a calmer state at the time participants answered the next question. This possibility is difficult to double-check for SCR as this parameter is reactive to speech and will thus be higher while participants are talking, even though autonomic sympathetic arousal induced by the intervention might have diminished already. However, we reassessed this hypothesis using BVP, BVPamp, and HR data, comparing the paraphrasing phase with the subsequent question phase and found a confirming result for BVPamp, although not for the other two measures. Participant had a lower BVP amplitude while listening to the paraphrase compared to listening to the interview question asked in direct succession. This indicates a specific effect of paraphrasing on autonomic arousal, which is not induced by speech in general. It should also be noted that voice intensity following paraphrasing is significantly lower than voice intensity following the control condition. Hence, given the assumption made above is correct, participants’ autonomic arousal is first heightened by listening to the paraphrasing, and after a short period of time lowered to a level below the control state. This is a very interesting finding, for which two possible explanations should be considered.

Firstly, it is possible that empathic paraphrasing not only leads to a reduction of negative emotion in participants, but even induces positive emotions, such as happiness and relief about being listened to and validated. This would explain the initial higher autonomic arousal, which would in this case be due to a short-term experience of positive emotions, in accordance with Rime ( 2009 ) dissipating quickly. However, the behavioral data does not support this notion, as the valence ratings remain in the negative range of the scale even after paraphrasing, only approximating the neutral zero-point. Also, it should be noted that empathic paraphrasing is distinctly different from everyday forms of volunteering empathy or forms of social sharing of emotion as referred to by Rime. Paraphrasing does not offer sympathy or emotional empathy, but instead takes a purely cognitive road by demonstrating that the listener can understand the narrator’s perspective. It does not seem likely that this technique should have the same emotional effects as common social sharing responses such as offering sympathy.

Therefore, as an alternative explanation of our results, it is more conceivable that demonstrating cognitive empathy through paraphrasing temporarily leads to a heightened focus on and increased processing of negative emotion, which might eventually have a resolving effect on these emotions. This explanation seems probable considering the nature of paraphrasing, which entails repeating emotional narrations in a pointed way, thereby sharpening and clarifying the emotional experience. In a study on the relationship between therapist pre-session mood, therapist empathy, and session evaluation, Duan and Kivlighan ( 2002 ) found that intellectual empathy (demonstrating an understanding of the client’s perspective, i.e., empathic paraphrasing) was positively correlated with client-perceived session depth (power and value of the session), but not correlated with perceived session smoothness (comfort and pleasantness of the session). In a way, paraphrasing confronts people with what they are feeling, and thus can stimulate a deeper processing of negative emotion (depth), which temporarily involves higher autonomic arousal and may even be perceived as trying and hard work (smoothness), but eventually abets resolution of the emotional conflict. It however seems unlikely that this process advances automatically without fueling cognitive work such as reappraisal and re-adjustment of goals and schemas. Yet, the clarifying focus on one’s own emotion, accompanied by the non-judgmental stance of empathic paraphrasing might strongly push this process forward. This notion is in line with Rogers’ original claim to evoke personal growth and transformation in the client through empathic paraphrasing, thereby achieving therapeutic change (Rogers, 1942 , 1951 ).

Also, considering the findings from mimicry and language matching research, which have demonstrated that being treated empathically on basal levels such as facial expression and language style promotes attitude and behavior change, it seems plausible that empathic paraphrasing may foster socio-cognitive processes in a similar direction. As paraphrasing contains a deliberate effort to verbally align with the narrator, it may generate a shared situation model and in this way promote successful communication. It would be interesting to consider if empathic paraphrasing, as it bears a certain resemblance to mimicry on a verbal level, can also stimulate pro-social behavior in the person being paraphrased; for instance a greater willingness to open up for the other party’s perspective on the conflict. This would strongly support the idea of paraphrasing stimulating a clearance of negative emotion.

There seems to be wide consensus between psychotherapists of different disciplines that psychotherapy benefits from an optimal level of arousal in the client, similar to the Yerkes–Dodson law, which posits an inverse U-shaped correlation between arousal and performance in complex tasks (Bridges, 2006 ). Markowitz and Milrod ( 2011 ) argue that emotional arousal is central for engaging the client in psychotherapy and making the therapeutic experience meaningful. They claim that the therapist’s ability to understand and respond empathically to negative emotional arousal should be considered the most important one of the common factors of psychotherapy. The therapist provides support and at the same time acts as a model, teaching the client to tolerate, verbalize, and integrate their feelings. Thus, negative feelings diminish and lose toxicity. In a similar vein, the traditional concept of the “corrective emotional experience” by Alexander and French ( 1946 ) describes the transformation of painful emotional conflicts as re-experiencing the old, unsettled conflict but with a new ending. This notion, which has gained ample empirical support, holds that processing emotional conflicts within a safe and empathic environment is necessary for therapeutic change (Bridges, 2006 ).

A resembling road is also pursued by acceptance and mindfulness-based interventions. Research on acceptance-based and mindfulness-based therapy has shown that accepting and mindfully observing negative emotions (instead of trying to suppress them) leads to the dissolution of these emotions (Eifert and Heffner, 2003 ; Arch and Craske, 2006 ; Hayes-Skelton et al., 2011 ). Czech et al. ( 2011 ) cite several experimental studies which have demonstrated that acceptance of negative emotion decreases distress and increases willingness to engage in challenging tasks. Empathic paraphrasing may have similar effects, as it essentially applies the principles of mindfulness and acceptance from the outside – through a listener who takes on an accepting role, thereby prompting the narrator in the same direction. Offering cognitive empathy through paraphrasing draws attention to emotions, non-judgmentally describes and accepts them, and is thus very similar to acceptance-based and mindfulness-based therapy. The central difference might be the locus of initiation of these processes, which in the case of empathic paraphrasing comes from somebody else. Comparing the effects of mindfulness and empathic paraphrasing and investigating the potential consequences of this difference on emotion processing and emotion regulation could be an interesting research focus for future studies.

Limitations of the present study

A potential short-coming of the present study pertains to the nature of the control condition, which consisted of taking notes silently. It could be argued that, as only the experimental condition involved speech, the differences found might be due to a general effect of being spoken to, rather than to an isolated effect of empathic paraphrasing. However, it should be noted that within a social conflict situation, the content of a reply to emotional descriptions can never be perceived as completely neutral, and any control condition involving speech will induce emotional effects of its own, e.g., irritation or even anger caused by inapplicable verbal comments of the interviewer following participants’ emotional disclosure. The present control condition was deliberately chosen for providing a neutral baseline against which the effects of empathic paraphrasing can be tested before moving on to other modes of comparison.

An aligned point of concern might be that it cannot be ascertained how the control condition was perceived by participants. For instance, even though they were informed that the note-taking simply served the purpose of bolstering the interviewer’s memory during the conversation, some participants may still have worried about the notes containing subjective judgment. This would most likely induce stress and add an emotional bias to the control condition. In this case, however, one would expect an increase in autonomic responses during the control condition, which did not occur. Still, considering these shortcomings of the control condition, the results need to be reproduced with varying kinds of control conditions involving speech before they can be viewed as definite.

It should also be mentioned that this study focused exclusively on short-term emotional reactions to paraphrasing, in order to obtain a constitutional data base illustrating the regulatory effect of this communicational technique. Our results suggest that in addition to influencing immediate emotional valence, paraphrasing sets in motion an initially arousing process of coping with negative emotions associated with the social conflict, which eventually may lead to resolving these emotions. However, as we did not assess longitudinal measures pertaining to the emotions associated with the social conflicts in question, this conclusion has to remain speculative until backed up by further research.

Finally, the relatively small sample size of the study makes it prone to distortions from individual variations and gender differences, e.g., in emotion expression. Again, replication of the results based on larger groups of study participants is called for.

Conclusion and directions for future research

The present study provides first experimental evidence that offering cognitive empathy through paraphrasing extrinsically regulates emotion in social conflict. Paraphrasing led to less negative feelings in study participants, while at the same time inducing higher autonomic arousal, which subsided after a short period of time. A possible explanation for these findings is that empathic paraphrasing stimulates an increased and focused processing of negative emotion in social conflict, and thus may contribute to resolving these emotions.

Future studies investigating the emotional effects of demonstrating cognitive empathy may further scrutinize the short- and long-term effects empathic paraphrasing has on arousal, and test the hypothesis that paraphrasing induces a cognitive-emotional process which facilitates the resolution of negative emotion in social conflict. Also, it would be interesting to investigate the dynamics of this process more closely and identify factors necessary for its successful development. Presently, we are working on a neuroimaging paradigm designed to overcome some of the above mentioned shortcomings and further explore the effects of empathic paraphrasing on the disposition to consider other people’s perspective in social conflict.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This study was financially supported by the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin which is funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation), and by the Open-Access publication fund of the DFG and the Freie Universität Berlin.

Example of a paraphrasing sequence

Interviewer: “What is worst for you about this situation?”

Narrator: “The worst thing is not knowing what happens now, well, this uncertainty. I mean, there is a problem, I have to make sure the rent is being paid, because in the end I am responsible, because I am in the rental agreement…and then – not being able to deal with that situation, not being able to act, because I just don’t know what is going to happen. The worst…now I am not so sure anymore, what was worst about it – well, also interpersonally it was very disappointing, because after all I took care of everything, voluntarily, and…I mean, when she is acting this way now, that is also a lack of recognition for what I do, what I accomplish. For my whole courtesy. What aggravates things is that is was clear from the beginning that she does not do so well financially, but urgently needed an apartment, and I let her move in with me to help her. And that is something that is…not being trampled under her feet…but you notice that there is a lack of recognition. Well, I think this second issue is worse than the first one.”

Interviewer: “So it is a combination, is it? For one, this thing, that in some way your existence is on stake here, that you are saying, this uncertainty is hard to bear – that you do not know how the rent is going to come around in the future. And then also the interpersonal issue, that you are saying you are disappointed of her, because you helped her, and in return you get this now, right? Especially the lack of recognition, the interpersonal treatment is what is worst – did I understand that correctly?”

Narrator: “Yes.”

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Clinical psychology

• Anxiety disorders
• Feeding and eating disorders
• Mood disorders
• Neuro-developmental disorders
• Personality disorders
• Affirmations
• Cover Letters
• Relationships
• Resignation & Leave letters

Psychotherapy

Personality.

Table of Contents

How Can Paraphrasing Be Used in Counseling? (3+ Main Indications)

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In this article, we will be discussing the topic: paraphrasing in counseling, which is one of the main counseling skills of a counselor. We will be looking at nature, importance, and the way of using this skill in the process of counseling. 

Paraphrasing in counseling

Paraphrasing refers to one of the counseling skills which holds paramount importance in the process of counseling. It is that skill which the counselor uses to repeat what the client has said at the present moment using fewer words and without any intention of changing the meaning of what the client conveyed through his words. 

The main intention behind paraphrasing is to feedback on the essence of what the person has just said. Paraphrasing is useful in the following situations:

• When you want to let the client know that you are actively listening and understanding the information provided by the client
• When you want to clear and clarify doubts concerning confusing content, given by the client.
• When you want to highlight issues that need more explanation and precision
• When you want to evaluate the accuracy of your perceptions as a counselor. 

Though paraphrasing looks quite simple and quick, it demands a sufficient amount of concentration and articulation skills from the side of the counselor. It is more difficult than it appears to be. While paraphrasing the words of the client, they should not end up feeling interrupted or misunderstood, in the process. The paraphrase should be kept, short, precise, and simple. There must be no unwanted complications or assumptions involved in it.

Although, if the paraphrase is kept too short, it would make the client feel confused and sometimes, dejected for being interrupted in between. Hence, paraphrasing must be initiated and put into action in a non-complex and understanding manner. It is very important to practice paraphrases that come in various lengths, variations of content, or emphasis of the wording. This will help you to understand what works best for your intentions and goals, as a counselor.

It is also important to understand that over-reliance on paraphrasing to the point of avoidance of reflection is indicative of discomfort on the part of the counselor, for encouraging the client to be emotionally open and expressive. 

Emphasis on essence

The intention of a counselor, when using paraphrases must be to reveal the essence of the client’s words. The client should get clarity, in terms of the paraphrases you use to communicate with them and must not feel confused or at loss for words once they’ve heard you out. They must be able to smoothly continue with their communication and not be intimidated or taken aback by your choice of words. 

Growth of empathy

Paraphrasing in counseling has a huge impact on the relationship between the therapist and the client. First ad foremost, it aids both the therapist and client to feel heard and understood. This forms the foundation for the client-therapist relationship. The client feels more free and brave to share their innermost and private experiences with the therapist. In turn, the therapist actively listens to the client and provide genuine feedback to the client on the most relevant parts of the client’s information using paraphrasing. 

If paraphrasing is carried out accurately and without the creation of confusion, it helps the client in recognizing the effort of the therapist and the amount of empathy the therapist holds for their state of mind. Hence, paraphrasing, in one way, helps in building the empathetic relationship between the client and the therapist which is important as empathy is not a one-way transaction. 

This is because it is important for the client to feel the empathy that is being conveyed by the counselor. Empathy is not just the counselor being able to put themselves in the client’s state of mind and understand their issues. It also involves the client receiving the empathetic energy that is being conveyed through the words and actions of the counselor.

A form of acknowledgment 

Paraphrasing is a form of acknowledgment that is provided by the counselor. This is done by mindfully restating the words of the client, conveying empathy, acceptance, and genuineness. A therapist’s role does not comprise of reading the minds of the clients or assuming their emotional states. Hence, it is very essential to learn the art of rephrasing the client’s words briefly and acknowledge them with honesty. 

By engaging in paraphrasing, you are letting the client know that you are understanding what they are trying to convey and you are ready to be corrected in case of any misunderstanding.

The important thing to be kept in mind is not to make judgemental statements or use biased terms in the form of paraphrases. This puts off the client and makes him/her trust the therapist less. You must allow the client to come to conclusions on their own and not put words in their mouth. 

Tone of voice

It is a good thing to keep a tab on the tone of voice used with the client while paraphrasing the client’s words. Be mindful of the following:

• A high or low voice
• A loud or soft voice
• Fast or slow voice
• Accommodating or demanding
• A lighthearted or gloomy voice

Be aware of the moderations used in voice, pitch, tone, and your body language as well. The client places an immense amount of trust in the therapist and they tend to remember how the therapist made them feel, at the end of the process. Therefore, it is imperative to be careful and gentle while dealing with clients and the information they provide. At the end of the day, the aim of the counselor must be to help the client feel validated and more confident through the usage of paraphrases. 

Alternatives that do not define paraphrasing

• Paraphrasing is not equivalent to repeating what the client just said. That is called repetition. Paraphrasing involves empathetic understanding and the right choice of words to help the client feel safe and heard.
• Parroting the words of the client reveals the idea that the therapist is not there with the client mentally and might cause irritation and frustration in the client. Eventually, they might even stop communicating, as a consequence. 

In this article, we discussed the topic: paraphrasing in counseling. We saw the importance of paraphrasing as a counselor’s skill, its emphasis on the essence, how it helps in the theme growth of empathy, and things to be kept in mind while using paraphrases. 

FAQs: paraphrasing in counseling

Why do counselors use paraphrasing.

Paraphrasing is one of the most important skills that is required, in the process of counseling. Paraphrasing in counseling is a way of responding, which informs the client that the counselor has precisely heard what the client has conveyed. These kinds of paraphrases, encouragers, and summaries are important and helpful for the client to feel understood in the process of counseling. They make the client feel more comfortable and less vulnerable in the relationship with their therapist. Paraphrasing and summarising are active and efficient ways of communicating to the client that they have been heard. 

What is the difference between paraphrasing and reflecting in counseling?

The difference between paraphrasing and reflecting in counseling is that in paraphrasing you are only summarizing what the client has conveyed. When the client conveys certain information to you, you use paraphrasing skills to reaffirm the meaning of what the client conveyed through his words. On the other hand, the skill of reflection is slightly different. In reflection, you go beyond the process of summarizing what the client said to try to identify the feelings and thought patterns the client may have not identified, but their words and attitudes indicate the presence of such feelings and thought patterns. 

How do you reflect in counseling?

Reflection is an extremely useful and comprehensive skill use by counselors in the process of counseling. It can be compared to holding up a mirror to see the reflection of yourself in it. While reflecting on what the client said, you repeat the client’s words back to them in the exact way they conveyed it to the therapist. In the process, the therapist might choose to reflect on a selected set of words, the whole sentence, or sometimes, just a single word is used for the purpose. This helps the client in gaining insight into his thought process and how it works. It also helps him to connect many events in his life to his way of thinking and feeling and how it affected those events. Clients find the process of reflection a potential tool for growth and meaningful understanding of their obstacles in the process of counseling and how to overcome them. 

How is paraphrasing helpful?

Paraphrasing is important for the mutual understanding of both the client’s and the therapist’s understanding of the client’s situation. It helps the client in revealing the source of his thoughts and emotions in many instances and it acts as a breakthrough for the client in the process of counseling. The therapist also makes good use of the paraphrasing skill to confirm and reaffirm the meaning and tone of emotion used to convey anything that is said by the client, to clear the air of doubts or confusions and make the process of counseling smooth and hassle-free. It provides a good deal of understanding between the client and the therapist.

What are some counseling skills?

The most essential and primary ten skills required in counseling are as follows:

Listening: the counselor must be able to provide their undivided and complete attention to the client, while they are sharing their thoughts, emotions, and their queries. Empathy: the counselor must be empathetic, genuine, non-biased, and able to sincerely understand the emotional state of their clients.  Genuineness.  Unconditional positive regard: the counselor must be non-judgemental and completely accepting of the client as a person, without any expectation of personal gain or rewards.  being concrete Open-ended questioning: open-ended questioning is a form of questioning process which is used to assist the client in clarifying or exploring thoughts. Self-disclosure of the counselor Meaningful interpretation and explanation skill Appropriate and helpful delivery of suggestions, when needed Consistent removal of obstacles in the way of change.

What is the primary goal of counseling?

The primary goal of counseling is to enable the client to make their own decisions, concerning various aspects of their life, such as career, education, personal growth, relationships, and health. The client should be able to think and act for themselves, without the aid of external influential sources. Counseling will help the clients gain information and also to clarify emotional concerns that may interfere with or be related to the decisions involved. It enhances their problem-solving skills and let them depend less on people’s opinions and judgments.

http://www.csun.edu/~hcpsy002/Psy460_GrpTask05_Paraphra.pdf

https://counsellingtutor.com/basic-counselling-skills/reflecting-and-paraphrasing/

https://www.basic-counseling-skills.com/paraphrasingtone.html

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Paraphrasing in Counselling

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In essence, paraphrasing is a micro skill that allows counselors to create an authentic bond with their clients  Together with encouraging and summarizing, paraphrasing plays a crucial role in therapeutic communication, making the client feel understood and listened to.  In other words, paraphrasing in counseling is what makes the client say, “ Finally, someone who understands what I’m going through.” Without this essential ingredient, counseling sessions would be nothing more than dull and impersonal exchanges of ideas.

What is the difference between reflecting and paraphrasing in Counseling?

Paraphrasing and reflecting are close synonyms for most people, both playing a crucial role in any form of communication.

Although paraphrasing and reflecting are fundamental counseling communication skills [1], these two processes can have slightly different connotations in a therapeutic context.

In essence, reflecting is like putting a mirror in front of your clients, helping them gain a better sense of the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors they experienced in a situation that has meaning for them.

Of course, this does not mean you have to parrot their message; simply highlight the link between different ideas and emotions and how one influences the other.

When reflecting, it is vital to match the client’s tone and even body language so that he/she knows that you’ve received the message and the feelings that accompany his/her story.

On the other hand, paraphrasing is about capturing the essence of their story with a brief statement that emphasizes the underlying emotional vibe.

This technique is particularly useful when clients know how ideas and emotions can merge to create a subjective experience, but you want them to feel understood and listened to.

In a way, we could argue that paraphrasing is a brief version of reflecting.

Let’s look at a brief example of paraphrasing in counseling:

Client: I had a huge fight with Andrew last night. At some point, he stormed out and didn’t come back ‘til morning. I tried calling him all night, but his phone was switched off. I was worried sick and thought he did something stupid. This whole thing was like a nightmare that I could not wake up from.

Therapist : It seems this unpleasant event has put you through a lot of fear and anxiety.

Now let’s take a look at reflecting:

Therapist : I can only imagine how terrifying it must have felt to see your partner storm out after a huge fight without telling you where he is going or when he’ll be back.

As you can see, both processes require active listening. But while paraphrasing is a short statement that highlights the emotional tone of the situation, a reflective response captures “the vibe” of the story, along with other essential details.

How do you paraphrase?

Start by listening.

Whether the purpose is to paraphrase or reflect, listening is always the first step.

Through active listening, counselors gain a better sense of what their clients have experienced in a particular situation. Active listening means looking beyond the surface and trying to connect with the client on an emotional level.

To achieve this level of emotional depth, counselors listen with both their ears and their hearts. That means putting themselves in their clients’ shoes and zeroing in on the emotional aspect of the experience.

Focus on feelings and thoughts rather than circumstances

When we listen to another person’s story, the most visible aspects are related to the actual events that he or she has gone through.

But details like names, dates, locations, or other circumstantial issues are less relevant than how the person interpreted and consequently felt in a particular situation.

When it comes to paraphrasing, counselors are trained to look beyond circumstances and identify why a client has chosen to talk about a particular event.

In almost every case, the reason is a set of emotional experiences.

Capture the essence of the message

Although people can experience a wide range of emotions in a given situation or context, there’s always an underlying feeling that defines how they react.

That underlying emotional vibe is the “golden nugget” that counselors are looking to capture and express through paraphrasing.

If done right, paraphrasing in counseling creates an emotional bridge that sets the foundation for authentic and meaningful interactions. This will encourage clients to open up and share their struggles.

Offer a brief version of what has been said

The last step is providing a concise version that highlights the emotional tone of the story.

Once this message reaches the client, it creates a sense of understanding that builds trust and authentic connection.

Long story short, paraphrasing is a valuable tool for cultivating empathy and facilitating therapeutic change.

How does paraphrasing help in communication?

Cultivating clarity (on both sides).

Any form of communication, whether it’s a therapeutic process, a negotiation, or a casual chat between friends, involves exchanging ideas.

And when people exchange ideas and opinions, there’s always the risk of confusion and misunderstanding.

By paraphrasing what the other person has shared, not only that you cultivate empathy, but you also let him/her know that the message has been received and understood correctly.

Research indicates that paraphrasing in counseling helps clients clarify their issues. [2] The more clients understand the inner-workings of their problems, the better they can adjust their coping strategies.

In a nutshell, paraphrasing eliminates ambiguity and paves the way for clarity.

Facilitating emotional regulation

One of the main functions of paraphrasing is to build empathy between two or more people engaged in conversation.

But the effects of paraphrasing on emotions extend way beyond empathy and understanding.

One study revealed that empathic paraphrasing facilitates extrinsic emotional regulation. [3] People who receive empathy through paraphrasing feel understood, and that prompts them to engage in a more intense emotional regulation process.

What starts as extrinsic emotional regulation slowly becomes intrinsic emotional regulation. This is the reason why someone who’s going through a rough patch can feel better by merely talking to a person who listens in an empathic manner and doesn’t necessarily hand out solutions or practical advice.

Paraphrasing can be a vital skill in heated arguments where two people have opposing views that result in emotional turmoil.

If one of them manages to exercise restraint over their intense emotional reactions and tries to paraphrase what the other shares, it could change the whole dynamic of the conversation.

What is the role of paraphrasing in listening?

As we discussed throughout this article, paraphrasing is one of the critical aspects of active listening.

It’s what turns a passive individual who listens only to have something to say when it’s his/her turn to speak into an active listener who understands and resonates on an emotional level.

Furthermore, paraphrasing is a means by which we provide valuable feedback on the topic of discussion, keeping the conversation alive.

It is also the tool that allows therapists to build safe spaces where clients feel comfortable enough to unburden their souls by sharing painful experiences and gaining clarity.

To sum up, paraphrasing in counseling is a vital micro skill that creates an authentic connection, providing clients with the opportunity to experience a sense of understanding.

Knowing there is someone who resonates with your emotional struggles makes your problems seem less burdensome.

Reflection (Therapeutic Behavior)

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• Kathryn N. Schrantz 3 &
• Alicia Lyon-Limke McLean 4  

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Active listening techniques ; Affirmation statements ; Directive techniques ; Feelings interpretation ; Feelings validation ; Nondirective techniques ; Psychotherapy ; Reflective statements

Therapeutic reflections are statements used by psychotherapists to restate, paraphrase, or uncover therapy clients’ emotional reactions to situations, thoughts, behaviors, or interpersonal interactions.

Introduction

Verbal and nonverbal reflections are a major component of psychotherapy. Considered as an active listening technique, reflections serve as an important therapeutic tool. Often, reflections paraphrase or restate clients’ feelings and emotions. Therapists also use reflections to help clients examine previously undiscovered or misunderstood emotional reactions. There are various types of reflections that are used to elicit different reactions from clients. Reflections impact the therapeutic relationship and play a significant role in many therapeutic approaches.

Types of...

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Schrantz, K.N., McLean, A.LL. (2020). Reflection (Therapeutic Behavior). In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_841

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Mastering Paraphrasing and Summarising in Research Writing

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Have you ever found yourself grappling with a dense research article, struggling to sift through the jargon to grasp the core message? Or perhaps you’re a budding researcher yourself, looking to communicate your findings effectively. This is where the art of paraphrasing and summarising becomes your powerful ally in research writing. Let’s embark on a journey to master these essential academic skills, ensuring you can condense and clarify complex ideas without losing their original meaning.

Understanding the essence of paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is not just about finding synonyms for the words used in the original text. It is a nuanced process that involves reading a segment of text and expressing its meaning in new words. A successful paraphrase retains the essence of the idea while transforming its presentation. The goal is to make the information more accessible and digestible for your readers while ensuring academic integrity by properly attributing the original source.

The step-by-step process of paraphrasing

• Comprehension: Start by reading the original text carefully to fully understand the concepts presented.
• Note-taking: Jot down the key points without looking at the original wording to avoid unintentional plagiarism .
• Rephrasing: Use your notes to rewrite the ideas in your own words, employing different sentence structures and vocabulary.
• Reviewing: Compare your paraphrase with the original text to ensure you’ve captured the intended meaning without copying the form.
• Citing: Always attribute the original author to avoid plagiarism and maintain the credibility of your work.

The strategic art of summarizing

Summarizing is akin to creating a map of a vast territory. It’s about distilling the expanse of information into its most essential landmarks. A good summary captures the overarching ideas and conclusions of a work while omitting the finer details. It provides a clear, brief overview of the original text, allowing readers to understand the gist without delving into the full content.

Techniques for effective summarizing

• Identification: Highlight the main points and core arguments of the text. Look for topic sentences and conclusions.
• Condensation: Focus on condensing the key elements into a concise form, stripping away examples, repetitions, and elaborations.
• Synthesis: Integrate the main ideas into a coherent whole that flows logically and reflects the original text’s intent.
• Attribution: Like paraphrasing, summarizing requires proper citation of the source material to respect intellectual property .

Paraphrasing and summarizing in context

Imagine you’re working on a literature review for a psychological study. You’re surrounded by mountains of research papers, each brimming with valuable insights. Your task is to weave these separate strands of knowledge into a cohesive narrative. Paraphrasing and summarizing become your tools to highlight the significance of the research, draw connections between studies, and position your work within the broader academic landscape.

Applying the skills to research writing

• Integration: Use paraphrasing to smoothly integrate research findings into your discussion without disrupting the flow of your own argument.
• Distillation: Employ summarizing to distill lengthy research articles into brief synopses that inform your study’s background or rationale.
• Comparison: Paraphrase and summarize to compare and contrast different studies, highlighting similarities and differences in findings.
• Referencing: Ensure each paraphrase and summary is accompanied by the appropriate citations , using the referencing style dictated by your field.

Challenges and common pitfalls

Even the most seasoned researchers can stumble when trying to paraphrase or summarize. Common pitfalls include sticking too closely to the original text’s structure, using too many of the same words, or inadvertently changing the meaning. Overcoming these challenges requires practice, a rich vocabulary, and a firm grasp of the subject matter. Let’s address these challenges and outline strategies to avoid them.

Strategies to avoid common pitfalls

• Vocabulary expansion: Broaden your lexicon to have a variety of words at your disposal for effective rephrasing.
• Critical reading: Engage with the text critically to ensure a deep understanding of the nuances and implications.
• Feedback loops: Seek feedback on your paraphrases and summaries from peers or mentors to refine your technique.
• Practice rigorously: Regular practice with different types of texts will hone your ability to capture the essence of complex ideas.

Mastering paraphrasing and summarizing is a journey of continuous learning and refinement. These skills are indispensable in the realm of research writing, allowing you to communicate complex ideas with clarity and precision. By following the outlined strategies and committing to practice, you can elevate your academic writing to new heights, contributing to the collective understanding and advancement of your field.

What do you think? Have you encountered any specific challenges while paraphrasing or summarizing? How do you ensure the original meaning is preserved in your own writing?

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Research Methods in Psychology

1 Introduction to Psychological Research – Objectives and Goals, Problems, Hypothesis and Variables

• Nature of Psychological Research
• The Context of Discovery
• Context of Justification
• Characteristics of Psychological Research
• Goals and Objectives of Psychological Research

2 Introduction to Psychological Experiments and Tests

• Independent and Dependent Variables
• Extraneous Variables
• Experimental and Control Groups
• Introduction of Test
• Types of Psychological Test
• Uses of Psychological Tests

3 Steps in Research

• Research Process
• Identification of the Problem
• Review of Literature
• Formulating a Hypothesis
• Identifying Manipulating and Controlling Variables
• Formulating a Research Design
• Constructing Devices for Observation and Measurement
• Sample Selection and Data Collection
• Data Analysis and Interpretation
• Hypothesis Testing
• Drawing Conclusion

4 Types of Research and Methods of Research

• Historical Research
• Descriptive Research
• Correlational Research
• Qualitative Research
• Ex-Post Facto Research
• True Experimental Research
• Quasi-Experimental Research

5 Definition and Description Research Design, Quality of Research Design

• Research Design
• Purpose of Research Design
• Design Selection
• Criteria of Research Design
• Qualities of Research Design

6 Experimental Design (Control Group Design and Two Factor Design)

• Experimental Design
• Control Group Design
• Two Factor Design

7 Survey Design

• Survey Research Designs
• Steps in Survey Design
• Structuring and Designing the Questionnaire
• Interviewing Methodology
• Data Analysis
• Final Report

8 Single Subject Design

• Single Subject Design: Definition and Meaning
• Phases Within Single Subject Design
• Requirements of Single Subject Design
• Characteristics of Single Subject Design
• Types of Single Subject Design
• Advantages of Single Subject Design
• Disadvantages of Single Subject Design

9 Observation Method

• Definition and Meaning of Observation
• Characteristics of Observation
• Types of Observation
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Observation
• Guides for Observation Method

10 Interview and Interviewing

• Definition of Interview
• Types of Interview
• Aspects of Qualitative Research Interviews
• Interview Questions
• Convergent Interviewing as Action Research
• Research Team

11 Questionnaire Method

• Definition and Description of Questionnaires
• Types of Questionnaires
• Purpose of Questionnaire Studies
• Designing Research Questionnaires
• The Methods to Make a Questionnaire Efficient
• The Types of Questionnaire to be Included in the Questionnaire
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Questionnaire
• When to Use a Questionnaire?

12 Case Study

• Definition and Description of Case Study Method
• Historical Account of Case Study Method
• Designing Case Study
• Requirements for Case Studies
• Guideline to Follow in Case Study Method
• Other Important Measures in Case Study Method
• Case Reports

13 Report Writing

• Purpose of a Report
• Writing Style of the Report
• Report Writing – the Do’s and the Don’ts
• Format for Report in Psychology Area
• Major Sections in a Report

14 Review of Literature

• Purposes of Review of Literature
• Sources of Review of Literature
• Types of Literature
• Writing Process of the Review of Literature
• Preparation of Index Card for Reviewing and Abstracting

15 Methodology

• Definition and Purpose of Methodology
• Participants (Sample)
• Apparatus and Materials

16 Result, Analysis and Discussion of the Data

• Definition and Description of Results
• Statistical Presentation
• Tables and Figures

17 Summary and Conclusion

• Summary Definition and Description
• Guidelines for Writing a Summary
• Writing the Summary and Choosing Words
• A Process for Paraphrasing and Summarising
• Summary of a Report
• Writing Conclusions

18 References in Research Report

• Reference List (the Format)
• References (Process of Writing)
• Reference List and Print Sources
• Electronic Sources
• Book on CD Tape and Movie
• Reference Specifications
• General Guidelines to Write References

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How to Practice Active Listening: 16 Examples & Techniques

Do you wonder if you could be better?

Good listeners can stay present and engaged with what is being said. This article will describe a listening technique called active listening. It’s useful in building therapeutic relationships and creating empathy.

You will learn the benefits of active listening and how it makes you a better communicator. And we will provide a list of the skills needed and techniques to learn exactly how to practice this. Finally, we’ll go over common pitfalls that keep us from being good listeners.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Communication Exercises (PDF) for free . These science-based tools will help you and those you work with build better social skills and better connect with others.

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What is active listening 3 principles, is it important in communication 4 benefits, active listening skills you can foster, 7 techniques to train your active listening skills, 3 counseling exercises & activities, 3 worksheets to practice active listening, questions to ask others: 3 examples, possible barriers & psychology tips to overcome them, 3 courses for training on effective communication, resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

Often, while we are listening, we are thinking of how we will respond. We might get distracted and miss some of what was said. We may not be paying much attention to the nonverbal communication cues of the speaker.

Active listening requires the listener to pay close attention to what is being communicated verbally and nonverbally. The listener is encouraged to interpret not only the content of what is being said, but also the emotions present and the body language.

In order to achieve this, the listener must be willing to devote energy to the task. They will need to have an excellent attention span and honed empathic abilities . Active listening has even been referred to as the “measurable dimension of empathy” (Olson & Iwasiw, 1987, p. 104).

There are three main components of successful active listening (Rogers & Farson, 1987):

• Listen for total meaning When someone is conveying a message, there are two meanings to gather: the content and the feeling or attitude underlying the message. An active listener is not only tuned in to the information conveyed, but also how it is conveyed and any nonverbal cues present.
• Respond to feelings After listening, when a response is appropriate, the listener should respond to the feeling of what was said. In this way, the speaker feels understood and empathy is established.
• Note all cues Nonverbal cues include tone of voice, facial or body expressions, and speed of speech. All of these taken together can convey a much deeper meaning than merely the content of what was said.

Carl Rogers’s take on active listening

Psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson (1987) are responsible for defining the concept of active listening. They describe the skill as vitally important for effective communication. For Rogers, the ultimate goal of active listening was to foster positive change (Rogers & Farson, 1987). This change can occur in the context of a client/helper relationship or in the context of a group.

Rogers described three important principles in effective counseling: empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard . Active listening is a tool that fosters and supports these principles.

Empathy is demonstrated in active listening by the listener reflecting the thoughts and feelings of the speaker. These thoughts and feelings are believed, supported, and respected. They are not dismissed or challenged.

Rogers stresses that in order to be successful in active listening, the listener must be authentic in their care. This reflects the principle of genuineness. Active listening can’t be faked.

Active listening requires true feelings of respect toward the individual speaking. The listener accepts and supports the speaker regardless of the content of their words. This illustrates the principle of unconditional positive regard.

It is also a skill that will benefit the listener in their life outside of work.

Whether at work or in casual conversation, active listening can provide a safe and empathetic space for a speaker, fostering feelings of trust.

Active listening in counseling

Active listening has been shown to be a vital skill in counseling. Empathy and empathic listening foster the therapeutic relationship , and the relationship between therapist and client has been shown to be the one of the most crucial and stable predictors of client success (Martin, Garske, & Davis, 2000).

Another benefit of learning active listening as a counselor is that it may increase self-efficacy . Levitt (2002) examined the impact of teaching active listening to counseling students and found that this skill created greater levels of confidence in the students and helped to reduce their anxiety as new counselors.

Active listening in the workplace

Kubota, Mishima, and Nagata (2004) examined the effects of an active listening training program on middle managers, finding positive results. In workplaces, a large portion of stress experienced by employees comes from interpersonal relationships.

The study showed that teaching managers who learned active listening skills were better able to support employees with mental health issues, providing a safe environment for them to share their difficulties without judgment. This led to calmer behaviors and more success (Kubota et al., 2004).

Can active listening skills even work through text conversations? Perhaps so. A unique and interesting study looked at the application of active listening to written communication online (Bauer & Figl, 2008). This case study was examining soft skills among computer science students and to see if active listening could come across in instant message conversations.

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These detailed, science-based exercises will equip you or your clients with tools to improve communication skills and enjoy more positive social interactions with others.

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Active listening requires a skill set that differs from typical everyday listening. Not only are you using the principles of empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard, but you must also develop certain skillful ways of interacting.

It’s useful to begin with the body language of the listener (Robertson, 2005). How do you know when someone is listening to you? Maintaining eye contact and appropriate facial expressions is important to convey empathy and attention. As with all aspects of active listening, these indicators shouldn’t be forced or faked. They are simply a reflection of your genuine attentiveness.

It also helps to remove distractions from the environment. Depending on the context, you may desire to set up an environment that conveys peace and quiet. If you are in a public place, putting away distractions or moving to a quieter location can also be helpful.

Another skill is following (Robertson, 2005). To actively follow what the speaker is conveying, you allow space for them to speak, reducing or eliminating questions and giving space for silence .

In a non-active listening situation, there may be quick back and forth, many rapid questions, or people may talk over one another. With active listening, the speaker is given the time and space to speak as much as they want. And they are encouraged to continue.

A third skill is reflecting (Robertson, 2005). This is the skill of repeating what you heard the speaker say, but avoiding parroting it back verbatim. You are trying to capture the essence of what they said and reflect it back to them. You may also try to capture the feelings that are conveyed.

This is always done without expressing judgment and with the goal of understanding. It may even be useful to ask if you have it right before asking them to continue.

Each technique is listed with an example and an explanation of the use.

Use the below suggestions to help your clients improve their listening.

Practicing with a partner

For counselors in training, it is important to practice active listening with a partner. One partner shares a story of something emotional that happened, and the listener will practice the following techniques:

• Demonstrating listening through body language and nonverbal responses
• Reflecting back the content of what the partner shared
• Reflecting back the emotions that the partner shared

It’s important to check in with your partner after you’ve reflected to be sure that it’s accurate.

Mindful listening group practice

In many ways, active listening is a mindfulness practice. The listener is trying to stay focused on the present, with what is being shared. And they are working to accomplish this without judgment.

Here is an excellent activity to practice mindful listening in a group.

• Have the group sit in a circle.
• Offer an ice breaker question or prompt, such as something they are grateful for today.
• Rather than go around the circle, ask participants to share spontaneously when they feel ready.
• Invite them to notice if they are thinking about their answer, rather than listening.
• Ask them to be present with the person who is sharing.
• Challenge them to notice if they are uncomfortable with the silences.

Mindful listening alone

At any moment, you can drop in and practice mindful listening. Simply stop what you are doing, close your eyes, and try to see how many sounds you can hear around you and within you. Notice if there are judgments arising and try not to attach to them. Stay with the flow of sounds for as long as you can.

Listening Accurately

This worksheet offers a five-step process to improve your communication skills with another person. It would be a useful tool for working with couples or anyone who would like to hone their listening skills.

The five steps are:

• Step in their shoes.
• Fact-check your interpretation.
• Give your full attention.
• Clarify what they’ve said.
• Clarify what you’ve said.

500 Years Ago

This creative exercise helps both the listener and the speaker develop their empathy by imagining themselves in someone else’s place.

The listener is instructed to pretend that they have come from the past, 500 years ago. The speaker is trying to explain something to them and must use language that they can understand.

Using Small Rewards

In working to create a therapeutic alliance, nonverbal communication is key. This worksheet lists some “small rewards,” subtle but powerful nonverbal gestures that the therapist can use to let their client know that they hear them and are following along.

The worksheet invites the practitioner to listen to a five-minute segment of their session and see how often they were using these nonverbal cues. There is space to reflect on how better to incorporate them and consider why there may have been trouble.

How to actively listen to others – Scott Pierce

Active listening starts with refraining from questions. It’s important that the stage be set by allowing the speaker enough time and space to speak.

Start with reflection

Begin with reflections and try to capture the feeling of what was said. A reflection mirrors back what the person just said and tries to capture the meaning or the tone.

For example, let’s say a friend comes to you about a fight she had with her husband. She describes how the argument got heated, and they ended up sleeping separately. She is feeling worried about the state of their marriage.

A reflection restates what she said: “Things got really heated last night – so bad you didn’t even want to be in the same room.” Or “You’re feeling really worried because this fight felt so intense.”

The first example is a reflection of the content of what was shared. The second reflects the emotions. These types of reflections validate the speaker and help them feel heard and understood.

Asking questions

Only after reflection has been done will it be time to ask questions. The types of questions are important. The purpose of questions during active listening is to continue to move the individual toward self-discovery.

Open questions are vital for this step. Open questions can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. They invite introspection. Powerful questions stimulate curiosity in the listener and encourage conversation. They reveal underlying assumptions and invite creativity. They don’t change the subject or close down the conversation.

The point of an open-ended question as part of active listening is to learn more and continue to connect with the speaker. It is not to drive the conversation in a particular direction.

Here are three examples of closed questions vs open questions to ask, given the above situation. Remember, your friend just told you about a terrible fight that she had with her husband, and she is upset.

Closed question: “Did you make up?” Open question: “How are you feeling about the fight today?”

Closed question: “Did your kids hear you?” Open question: “How does it feel to share this with me? Have you thought about talking to anyone else?”

Closed question: “Are you going to leave him?” Open question: “What sorts of responses or solutions are you considering?”

You can see that the open questions invite conversation and show compassion , whereas the closed questions seem more like information gathering.

When practicing active listening, practitioners should also self-monitor for judgments that might come up while the person is speaking.

If these judgments aren’t monitored, they may cause criticizing, labeling, diagnosing, or even praising in a way that leads the speaker (Robertson, 2005).

The goal of active listening is to create a safe environment for the individual to speak freely. Any of these responses may lead to defensiveness, distrust, or shutting down.

Another barrier is suggesting solutions (Robertson, 2005). Although it may seem well meaning, the urge to suggest solutions often comes from a discomfort with what the speaker is saying. While it may seem supportive, it creates an imbalance of power in the dynamic. The speaker is left feeling unheard, and they are disempowered to create their own solutions.

A third barrier is avoiding what the person is sharing. This may manifest as diverting the conversation away, logically arguing, or even reassuring. Again, while reassurance seems comforting, it often shuts down or ends the conversation for the other person.

A wonderful example of the comparison of empathetic and other responses can be found in Brené Brown’s video below about sympathy versus empathy.

Active listening is a straightforward skill, and taking a short course is the perfect way to learn how to do it effectively. While it is possible to learn it simply by reading, it’s always helpful to see it in action and practice with other people.

If you are hoping to learn active listening to improve your workplace as a manager or a leader, these courses would be great for you.

Udemy offers thousands of short courses on everything from programming to cooking, and this course on active listening has over 10,000 downloads.

LinkedIn Learning offers courses for businesses, including one on effective listening . Your team can take a listening assessment, address challenges that they have, and learn effective listening behaviors.

A wonderful course for in-depth active listening training is offered by Voice of Health (VOH). VOH is an online peer-support community that offers free training for anyone interested.

17 Exercises To Develop Positive Communication

17 Positive Communication Exercises [PDFs] to help others develop communication skills for successful social interactions and positive, fulfilling relationships.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

Our Positive Psychology Toolkit© has excellent resources for learning how to listen more effectively and empathetically. One such tool is the exercise Listening Without Trying to Solve .

This exercise is done with a group. Individuals are paired off with one person as the listener and one as the storyteller. Each listener is given a card with instructions, half are told to listen without trying to solve and half are told to try to solve the problem as best as they can. Each pair is given five minutes for the storyteller to share a problem.

After sharing, the group returns together and discusses how it felt to be on the receiving end of a person who is working hard to solve the problem vs someone who is fully listening and empathizing. This is a powerful activity to show the effectiveness of active listening.

This checklist is a helpful tool for practicing active listening techniques. The checklist lists the techniques and then asks the listener to check back to see if they successfully used each one. There is space to write what worked well, what was difficult, and how to better incorporate unused techniques.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others communicate better, this collection contains 17 validated positive communication tools for practitioners. Use them to help others improve their communication skills and form deeper and more positive relationships.

Active listening is a skill that anyone can learn. It’s a vital tool for therapists and counselors to connect empathically with their clients. But it’s also useful for better communication with family, friends, and coworkers.

Practicing active listening can deepen connections in your relationships and help to create stronger and more lasting bonds. Try some of these exercises to improve your communication skills today.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Communication Exercises (PDF) for free .

• Bauer, C., & Figl, K. (2008). ‘Active listening’ in written online communication-a case study in a course on ‘soft skills’ for computer scientists. In 2008 38th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference (pp. F2C–1). IEEE.
• Kubota, S., Mishima, N., & Nagata, S. (2004). A study of the effects of active listening on listening attitudes of middle managers. Journal of Occupational Health , 46 (1), 60–67.
• Levitt, D. H. (2002). Active listening and counselor self-efficacy: Emphasis on one microskill in beginning counselor training. The Clinical Supervisor , 20 (2), 101–115.
• Martin, D. J., Garske, J. P., & Davis, M. K. (2000). Relation of the therapeutic alliance with outcome and other variables: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology , 68 (3), 438–450.
• Olson, J. K., & Iwasiw, C. L. (1987). Effects of a training model on active listening skills of post-RN students. Journal of Nursing Education , 26 (3), 104–107.
• Robertson, K. (2005). Active listening: More than just paying attention. Australian Family Physician , 34 (12), 1053–1055.
• Rogers, C. R., & Farson, R. E. (1987). Active listening. In R. G. Newman, M. A. Danziger, & M. Cohen (Eds.), Communicating in business today . DC Heath & Company.

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A Guide to Plagiarism and Paraphrasing

According to the joint research efforts of Dr. Donald McCabe and the International Center for Academic Integrity , nearly 30% of university students admit to having cheated in some way on an exam.

Understanding how and when to cite sources is a critical skill for students to learn. Whether you borrow someone’s ideas from a textbook, blog post, or academic journal, you must give proper credit while representing the source’s ideas fairly and coherently.

This guide covers:

• Paraphrasing
• Plagiarism checkers, citation managers, and writing tools

The Purdue Global Writing Center defines plagiarism as “using another's words, ideas, results, or images without giving appropriate credit to that person, therefore, giving the impression that it is your own work.”

Types of Plagiarism

University of Oxford notes eight common forms of plagiarism:

• Verbatim plagiarism: Copying someone else’s work word for word.
• Cutting and pasting from web pages without clear acknowledgement: Pulling information off the internet without referencing it and without including it in the bibliography.
• Paraphrasing: Paraphrasing so closely so that the copy is almost an exact match to the original.
• Collusion: In group projects, or projects in which you received help, failing to properly attribute the assistance or failure to follow the project’s rules.
• Inaccurate citation: Failing to cite correctly, according to the conventions of your discipline.
• Failure to acknowledge assistance: Failing to clearly acknowledge all assistance that has contributed to your work (ordinary proofreading and help from a tutor or supervisor is excepted).
• Use of material written by professional agencies or other people: Using material that was written by a professional agency or another person, even if you have the consent of the person who wrote it.
• Auto-plagiarism (also known as self-plagiarism): Reusing work that you’ve previously submitted or published; presenting that information as new when you’ve already gotten credit for the work.

A new concern revolves around AI and copying directly from chat, composition, and visual tools. Using prompts to generate content for assignments and passing it off as your own contribution is considered plagiarism. Various organizations use AI software to check for submissions generated by a chatbot.

Also, keep in mind that AI tools may produce inaccurate and unreliable information. While there may be valid use cases for informal AI-generated brainstorming, this is a complex and evolving topic. Be sure to verify the policy expressed by your school, professors, or professional organizations for recent developments.

It’s important to note that plagiarism can be intentional or unintentional. Unintentional plagiarism occurs when a student unknowingly cites a source inaccurately or improperly. Intentional plagiarism, on the other hand, is when a student chooses not to cite a source or tries to pass off someone else’s ideas as their own.

Consequences of Plagiarism

The consequences of plagiarism vary by institution, but it could get you expelled or dropped from a course. In less severe instances, plagiarism — both intentional and unintentional — may result in a grade penalty, course failure, or suspension. Beyond the academic consequences, plagiarism also tarnishes your reputation and minimizes your integrity. Whether you’re in school or the working world, plagiarism is not a good look.

How to Avoid Plagiarism

The key to avoiding plagiarism is learning how to incorporate research into your writing. According to the Purdue Global Writing Center , you can do this in the following ways:

• Quoting: If you don’t want to alter a source, use quotation marks to enclose all verbatim phrases.
• Summarizing: If you find multiple relevant points in a lengthy text, simplify them into your own condensed synopsis.
• Paraphrasing: If you want to use a source’s information, restate it in your own words.

Whether you’re quoting, summarizing, or paraphrasing, don’t forget to cite all sources.

What Is Paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing is using your own words to convey the meaning of an excerpt. It shows your reader that you did your research and understand the content. While students may understand that they need to cite sources, many struggle with paraphrasing the ideas of others into their own words. However, like many aspects of writing, effective paraphrasing is a skill developed over time.

How to Approach Paraphrasing

The goal of paraphrasing is to translate the original work into your own wording and sentence structure. The best way to approach this is to focus on the meaning of the text, forcing you to interact with its purpose and context.

Paraphrasing Tips

A good way to judge your understanding of material is to see if you can explain it to someone else. Once you have this level of understanding, it’s easier to create effective paraphrases — changing the language and structure of a passage becomes more manageable.

Here are some tips to help you paraphrase:

• Reread the passage until you fully understand its meaning.
• Write your own summary of the passage without referencing the original.
• Check that your summary accurately captures the context of the original passage.
• Document the source information following your summary, whether it’s an endnote or footnote.

Remember that you still need to cite your paraphrases, but your follow-up analysis and discussion points belong to you.

What Requires Citation?

Any time you use information that isn’t common knowledge or you didn’t come up with yourself, you must cite it. The following requires citation, usually through in-text citation or a reference list entry:

• Quotes: If you are quoting the actual words someone said, put the words in quotation marks and cite the source.
• Information and ideas: If you obtain ideas or information from somewhere else, cite it — even if you paraphrase the original content.
• Illustrations: If you use someone else’s graphic, table, figure, or artwork, you must credit the source. These may also require permission and a copyright notice.
• Photographs: If you use your own photography or an image that allows use without attribution, no citation is required. In other cases, add a note below the image and a corresponding reference citation.

Common Knowledge Exception

You don’t need to cite information that’s considered common knowledge in the public domain — as long as you reword the well-known fact. According to the Purdue Global Writing Center , information must have the following traits to be considered common knowledge:

• The reader would already be aware of it.
• It’s a widely accepted fact; for example, there are 24 hours in a day.
• It’s accessible via common information sources.
• It originates from folklore or a well-known story.
• It’s commonly acknowledged in your field and known by your audience.

Why Citation Is Important

The importance of citation goes beyond the avoidance of plagiarism. According to the Purdue Global Writing Center’s Plagiarism Information page, citation:

• Distinguishes new ideas from existing information
• Reinforces arguments regarding a particular topic
• Allows readers to find your sources and conduct additional research
• Maintains ethical research and writing
• Ensures attribution of ideas, avoiding plagiarism

Additionally, proper citation enhances your credibility with readers, displays your critical thinking skills, and demonstrates your strong writing ability.

Plagiarism Prevention and Writing Resources

It takes time to develop strong writing and paraphrasing skills. Thinking of writing as more of a discussion than a report may help you develop your skills. Remember that it’s not about reporting and repeating information; it’s about expanding on ideas and making them your own.

Below are some tools to help you avoid plagiarism, accurately cite sources, and improve your writing as you develop your own unique voice.

Plagiarism Checkers

• DupliChecker
• Grammarly's Plagiarism Checker
• Plagiarism Detector

Citation Managers

• Academic Writer
• Grammarly’s Free Citation Generator

>> Read: Apps and Extensions to Help You With APA Citations

Writing Tools

Check out purdue global’s writing center resources.

The Purdue Global Writing Center can help guide students through the paper writing process — from avoiding plagiarism to proper paraphrasing to getting the right citations.

Students may access this resource from the Purdue Global campus homepage . Click “My Studies,” followed by “Academic Success Center.”

From there, students have several options:

• Ask a writing tutor
• Connect with a tutor for a one-on-one session
• Browse the Study Studio
• Watch webinars

Students can check out the Using Sources & APA Style page , which includes several resources to guide students through the process of formatting a document and citing sources in the American Psychological Association (APA) style. The Plagiarism Information page offers a tutorial designed to help students identify instances of plagiarism and understand how to avoid them.

See Notes and Conditions below for important information.

About the Author

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Effects of empathic paraphrasing – extrinsic emotion regulation in social conflict.

• 1 Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion,” Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany
• 2 Dahlem Institute for Neuroimaging of Emotion, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany
• 3 Department of Psychiatry, Charité University Medicine Berlin, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Berlin, Germany

In the present study, we investigated the effects of empathic paraphrasing as an extrinsic emotion regulation technique in social conflict. We hypothesized that negative emotions elicited by social conflict can be regulated extrinsically in a conversation by a listener following the narrator’s perspective and verbally expressing cognitive empathy. Twenty participants were interviewed on an ongoing or recently self-experienced social conflict. The interviewer utilized 10 standardized open questions inviting participants to describe their perception of the conflict. After each of the 10 descriptions, the interviewer responded by either paraphrasing or taking notes (control condition). Valence ratings pertaining to the current emotional state were assessed during the interview along with psychophysiological and voice recordings. Participants reported feeling less negative after hearing the interviewer paraphrase what they had said. In addition, we found a lower sound intensity of participants’ voices when answering to questions following a paraphrase. At the physiological level, skin conductance response, as well as heart rate, were higher during paraphrasing than during taking notes, while blood volume pulse amplitude was lower during paraphrasing, indicating higher autonomic arousal. The results show that demonstrating cognitive empathy through paraphrasing can extrinsically regulate negative emotion on a short-term basis. Paraphrasing led to enhanced autonomic activation in recipients, while at the same time influencing emotional valence in the direction of feeling better. A possible explanation for these results is that being treated in an empathic manner may stimulate a more intense emotion processing helping to transform and resolve the conflict.

Introduction

Emotion regulation research to date has mainly focused on an individualistic point of view emphasizing control mechanisms in the individual, such as attention deployment, cognitive reappraisal, or the willful suppression of emotional expressions ( Gross and Thompson, 2007 ; Butler and Gross, 2009 ; Rime, 2009 ). Compared to the abundance and sophistication of the research pertaining to classification schemes on such intrinsic regulation, systematic analysis of extrinsic emotion regulation and especially of controlled interpersonal affect regulation (i.e., the process of deliberately influencing the emotional state of another person, as opposed to non-conscious affect spreading) is still relatively sparse. Rime (2009) , however, points out that an emotional experience is virtually indivisible of a social response, which in turn is bound to shape and modify the original emotion, so that emotion has to be regarded as a fundamentally interdependent process.

Niven et al. (2009) propose a classification system for controlled interpersonal affect regulation strategies, derived from Totterdell and Parkinson’s (1999 ) classification of strategies to deliberately improve one’s affect. Their final classification distinguishes between strategies used to improve versus strategies used to worsen others’ affect, and between strategies that engage the target in a situation or affective state versus relationship-oriented strategies. The technique of empathic paraphrasing, which is investigated in the present study, can be categorized as aiming at affect improvement and engagement within this classification framework. However, it also contains a relationship-oriented component, as empathic paraphrasing communicates interest and commitment in understanding the other’s perspective, thereby implying that their feelings are valid and worth listening to.

Empathy has been conceptualized in many different ways, usually involving a cognitive and an emotional component ( Preston and de Waal, 2002 ; Lamm et al., 2007 ; Decety and Meyer, 2008 ). Cognitive empathy means the ability to take the perspective of another person and infer their mental state, while emotional empathy refers to the observer’s affective response to another person’s emotional state ( Dziobek et al., 2008 ).

Paraphrasing or active listening (coined by Carl R. Rogers in Client-Centered-Therapy) is a form of responding empathically to the emotions of another person by repeating in other words what this person said while focusing on the essence of what they feel and what is important to them. In this way, the listener actively demonstrates that he or she can understand the speaker’s perspective (cognitive empathy). Rogers described empathy as the ability to sense the client’s private world as if it were one’s own, but without losing the “as if” quality ( Rogers, 1951 ). Empathy is communicated through active listening, which in the Client-Centered approach aspires to evoke personal growth and transformation through providing a space of unconditional acceptance for the client. Rogers considered empathy, positive regard, and congruence both necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic change ( Rogers, 1942 , 1951 ).

This early notion on the importance of empathy for facilitating therapeutic change has gained ample empirical support over the last decades of research. How empathic a therapist is perceived to be has been identified as a critical factor for positive therapy outcome for both psychodynamically oriented and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapies ( Bohart et al., 2002 ; Duan and Kivlighan, 2002 ; Orlinsky et al., 2004 ; Marci et al., 2007 ; Elliott et al., 2011 ; Norcross and Wampold, 2011 ). Based on a review of several studies Marci et al. (2007) describe a significant influence of perceived empathy on mood and general clinical improvement, even when controlling for other factors. Along this line, a meta-analysis conducted by Bohart et al. (2002) confirms a modest but consistent importance of empathy during psychotherapy. Zuroff et al. (2010) specifically examined the relationship between patient-reported measures of the three Rogerian conditions (positive regard, empathy, and genuineness) and therapeutic outcome, and found that patients whose therapists provided high average levels of the Rogerian conditions across all patients in their caseloads experienced more rapid reductions in both overall maladjustment and depressive vulnerability (self-critical perfectionism). Farber and Doolin (2011) conducted a meta-analysis on 18 studies also focusing on the effects of positive regard as defined by Rogers on treatment outcome, and found an aggregate effect size of 0.26, confirming a moderate influence of this factor.

The effectiveness of showing empathy on treatment success has also been assured within the field of medical care. Medical researchers have coined the term clinical empathy , which Mercer and Reynolds (2002) define as (1) understanding the patient’s situation, perspective and feelings (and their attached meanings), (2) communicating that understanding and checking its accuracy, and (3) acting on that understanding with the patient in a helpful (therapeutic) way. Hence, within the clinical setting empathy entails not only cognitive and affective components but also a behavioral component to communicate understanding to the patient, i.e., through active listening ( Davis, 2009 ). Accordingly, the active demonstration of empathy has already been recognized as a crucial component of promoting cooperation in challenging situations within the field of clinical care. Halpern (2007) stresses that physicians who learn to empathize with patients during emotionally charged interactions can thereby increase their therapeutic impact. By the same token, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that empathic communication effectively helps patients through challenging and fearful situations, ranging from painful dental treatments over psychological problems to pandemic crisis ( Cape, 2000 ; Reynolds and Quinn Crouse, 2008 ; Bernson et al., 2011 ). Neumann et al. (2009) reviewed prior empirical studies on clinical empathy and conclude that clinical empathy is a fundamental determinant of successful medical care, because “ it enables the clinician to fulfill key medical tasks more accurately, thereby achieving enhanced health outcomes ” ( Neumann et al., 2009 , p. 344).

In sum, the effectiveness of empathic communication as an extrinsic emotion regulation technique has already gained solid empirical support from psychotherapy and medical research. For the present study, social conflict was chosen as the context to examine the effects of empathic paraphrasing on emotion, for two reasons. Firstly, social conflict is often accompanied by intense emotions such as anger and hurt, and therefore lends itself easily to the investigation of extrinsic emotion regulation, without requiring artificial emotion induction in the laboratory. The setting of real-life social conflict renders it possible to work with “real” emotion, while at the same time concentrating on a non-clinical population. Secondly, empathic paraphrasing is used with vast prevalence within the field of conflict resolution. Paraphrasing is generally applied as one of the most important constitutional elements across all domains of conflict mediation (business mediation, family mediation, community mediation, victim-offender mediation, etc.). Hence, it seems expedient to take a closer look at the emotional effects of a technique so widely used within the context of its most common application.

Social psychology research offers evidence for a connection between dispositional affective empathy as well as dispositional perspective taking and adaptive social conflict behavior ( Steins, 2000 ; Gehlbach, 2004 ; de Wied et al., 2007 ). However, there is hardly any research on the effects of being treated in an empathic manner (as opposed to feeling empathy oneself) on conflict behavior. Moran and Diamond (2008) report positive effects of therapist empathy on parent’s negative attitudes toward their depressed adolescent children. Being treated in an empathic way seems to help parents to also empathize with their children going through a rough time. This is an interesting finding, which contains parallels to social conflict situations and stimulates the question which emotional effects are triggered by being treated empathically, and how these emotional processes aid own empathic reactions toward others.

An interesting train of evidence regarding the socio-cognitive effects of being treated empathically is provided by research on interpersonal mimicry and language matching in social interaction. Numerous studies confirm that non-verbal interpersonal mimicry increases affiliation and positive social judgment as well as pro-social behavior not only toward the mimicker but also toward people not involved in the mimicry situation, indicating that being mimicked not only leads to an increased liking toward the interaction partner, but to an increased pro-social orientation in general ( van Baaren et al., 2004 ; Ashton–James et al., 2007 ; Fischer-Lokou et al., 2011 .; Guéguen et al., 2011 ; Stel and Harinck, 2011 ). This is true for the mimickee as well as the mimicker ( Stel et al., 2008 ). Maddux et al. (2008) also report that strategic mimicry in negotiation abets more favorable negotiation outcomes, facilitating both individual and joint gains. This effect was mediated by higher levels of trust toward the mimicker. Ashton–James et al. (2007) tested several hypotheses on why mimicry promotes pro-social behavior and found that being mimicked during social interaction shifts self-construal toward becoming more interdependent and “other-oriented.” Additionally, mimicry strengthens one’s perception of interpersonal closeness with other people in general.

Correspondingly, language style matching, i.e., similarity in use of function words, has been found to predict relationship initiation and stability ( Ireland et al., 2011 ). On a similar vein, according to the interactive-alignment account of dialog, the success of any given conversation depends on the extent of the conversation partners arriving at a common understanding of the relevant aspects of what they are talking about, i.e., a common situation model ( Pickering and Garrod, 2004 ). Interlocutors tend to automatically align at different levels of linguistic representation, e.g., through repeating each other’s words and grammar ( Garrod and Pickering, 2004 ). This alignment at low-level structure positively affects alignment of interlocutors’ situation models – the hallmark of successful communication – as people who describe a situation in the same way tend to think about it in the same way as well ( Markman and Makin, 1998 ; Menenti et al., 2012 ). These findings strongly support the hypothesis that paraphrasing, which involves a certain degree of language matching and bears parallels to mimicry on a verbal level, administrates emotional and socio-cognitive effects on the person being paraphrased.

Regardless the impressive amount of research reviewed above, the specific dynamics of emotional response to empathic paraphrasing are yet largely unclear. Rime (2009) suggests that socio-affective responses such as comfort and empathy temporarily alleviate a narrator’s negative emotions and generate a deep feeling of relief. However, if no cognitive reframing and re-adjustment of goals, motives, models, and schemas occur, the alleviating effects of socio-affective responses can be expected to be only temporary, because the cognitive sources of the emotional unsettledness have not been transformed. Following this reasoning, the emotional effects of empathic paraphrasing should be expected to be short-lived. On the other hand, Rogers argued that receiving empathy and positive regard are necessary conditions for being able to revise overly rigid structures of the self and assimilate dissonant information and experiences ( Rogers, 1942 , 1951 ). Hence, empathic paraphrasing may initiate a cognitive-emotional process progressing in several stages, with emotional alleviation and an increased mental openness and disposition for cognitive restructuring possibly being the first one. In this respect, the present research makes a valuable contribution by moving beyond correlational designs to presenting the first experimental study assessing in detail the emotional effects of empathic paraphrasing in the context of social conflict, hopefully providing a useful basis for further analysis in future studies.

To investigate whether and how empathic paraphrasing in the context of a real-life social conflict extrinsically regulates emotion, we invited participants to an interview in which they were asked to talk about an ongoing or recently self-experienced social conflict with a partner, friend, roommate, neighbor, or family member. The interviewer responded to participants’ descriptions by either paraphrasing (experimental condition following half of the interview questions) or taking notes (control condition). We assessed valence ratings pertaining to participants’ current emotional state as well as skin conductance response (SCR), blood volume pulse (BVP), blood volume pulse amplitude (BVPamp), and heart rate (HR) as indicators of autonomous nervous system (ANS) activity during the interviews. We also recorded the interviews for documentation and analysis.

Psychophysiological and voice parameters have been proven to be reliable indicators for emotional responses ( Scherer, 2003 ; Kushki et al., 2011 ). HR is regulated by sympathetic (increase) as well as parasympathetic (decrease) pathways of the ANS ( Li and Chen, 2006 ; Kushki et al., 2011 ), and reflects autonomic arousal ( Critchley, 2002 ) as well as emotional valence ( Palomba et al., 1997 ). BVP is a measure of changes in the volume of blood in vessels and has been associated with affective and cognitive processing ( Kushki et al., 2011 ). BVP amplitude has been found to be lower during episodes of increased sympathetic activity ( Shelley, 2007 ) and has also been shown to decrease when feeling fear or sadness in several studies ( Kreibig et al., 2007 ). SCR depicts changes in the skin’s ability to conduct electricity and is considered a sensitive psychophysiological index of changes in autonomic sympathetic arousal that are integrated with emotional and cognitive states. In addition, SCR reflects vicarious emotional responses to another’s affective state (pain), and is therefore also connected to empathy ( Hein et al., 2011 ).

Based on the literature reviewed above, we hypothesized that empathic paraphrasing would lead to a reduction of negative emotion in the situation of talking about the conflict. Specifically, we expected valence ratings to be more positive after paraphrasing. Furthermore, we hypothesized that empathic paraphrasing would lead to lower autonomic arousal, reflected in psychophysiological measures and voice analysis.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

Twenty healthy subjects [10 female; age: mean (M) = 27, standard deviation (SD) = 7.9] participated in this study. All participants were native German speakers, and had recently experienced a potentially ongoing social conflict with a partner, friend, roommate, neighbor, or family member. No conflicts involving physical or psychological violence were included in the study. Due to technical problems, SCR and voice data of four participants as well as BVP data of three participants were lost. Therefore, 20 participants entered the analysis of self-report data, 16 entered voice data analysis and analysis of SCR, and 17 entered analysis of HR and BVP.

The study was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the ethical committee of the Charité University Medicine Berlin. All participants gave written informed consent prior to investigation and received payment for participation.

Interview Design and Procedure

Participants were told that the study investigates emotion in social conflict, especially how emotions develop while speaking about a social conflict. The interviewer further informed participants that she would try to understand their perspective, and sometimes summarize what she understood so far, while at other times take notes to help her memorize certain things and have them present over the course of the interview.

Interviews consisted of 10 standardized open questions (e.g., “What exactly bothers you about the other person’s behavior?”). After the participant answered each question, the interviewer either paraphrased what had been said, or silently took notes (control condition). Following these paraphrasing interventions or control conditions, respectively, participants were asked to rate their current emotional state. In order to avoid confounding effects resulting from the content of the questions, as well as distortions due to emotional processing over the course of the interview, interventions, and control condition were given alternately during the interview. Half of all participants received an intervention (empathic paraphrasing) after the first question, a control intervention after the second question, and so forth; the other half received a control intervention first. All interviews were conducted by the same female interviewer, who had previously received 190 h of training in conflict resolution and has worked on cases in community mediation, business mediation, and family mediation over several years, applying empathic paraphrasing as one of the core techniques of conflict resolution.

Paraphrasing in the present study was implemented in such a way that after each narration the interviewer briefly summarized the facts of the narration and described her understanding of how the narrator felt, and why, and what she understood was important to the narrator regarding the situation described. To confirm the accuracy of her paraphrasing, the interviewer asked if her understanding was correct at the end of each paraphrase. An example of a paraphrase is given in the Appendix.

All interviews were audiotaped. Interview length was 30.16 min on average (SD = 11.03), depending on how extensively participants answered to the questions. Figure 1 depicts the interview questions as well as a schematic overview of the interview procedure and measurements.

Figure 1. Interview guideline and procedure .

Data Acquisition and Analyses

Participants were asked to indicate their current emotional state (valence rating) on an eight-point Likert scale ranging from −4 to 4 (“How positive or negative do you feel right now?”) 10 times during the interview, following the interventions and control condition, respectively. Ratings were analyzed with two-tailed t -tests for repeated measures in IBM SPSS Statistics 20.

Skin conductance response and BVP were recorded continuously with a sampling frequency of 40 Hz using a commercial sampling device ( Biofeedback 2000 X-pert , Schuhfried GmbH, Austria) during the entire interview. Both interviewer’s and participant’s voices were recorded using Audacity 1.2.6 with a highly directional microphone (Shure, WH20 Dynamic Headset Microphone, IL, USA).

Skin conductance data was analyzed in LedaLab V3.3.1. Time frame of analysis was 25 s after the onset of the intervention or control condition. Within this interval, SCR was decomposed by continuous decomposition analysis (CDA; Benedek and Kaernbach, 2010 ). For each participant and interval, the maximum phasic activity was computed (with a minimum amplitude of 0.001 μS) and averaged for each participant across all intervals of both conditions).

Blood volume pulse and BVPamp were analyzed for intervals of 23 s after the onset of intervention or control condition using Matlab 7.1 (The Math-Works, Inc., MA, USA). Data were smoothed using a six point Gaussian filter. BVP was further used for extracting HR data through computing the inverse of the distance between successive peaks of the BVP signal in intervals larger than 0.4 s ( Kushki et al., 2011 ). Mean SCR between both conditions (paraphrasing interventions and control conditions), BVP, BVPamp (in%), and HR (in beats per minute) were also analyzed with two-tailed t -tests for repeated measures in IBM SPSS Statistics 20. In addition, we compared BVP, BVPamp, and HR during the paraphrasing intervention and the interview question directly following the paraphrase, with a standard time frame of 4 s for the question phase.

Analysis of voice recordings was done with seewave in R statistics ( Sueur et al., 2008 ). Using Audacity 1.2.6., intervals of speech for voice analysis were selected manually by listening to the recorded interviews and cutting out participants’ responses to each question – following an intervention or control intervention, respectively.

Behavioral Data

Valence ratings following paraphrasing revealed less negative feelings than ratings following the control condition [ t (19) = 3.395, p = 0.003]. Effect size is d = 0.76 (Cohen’s d for repeated measures, calculated with pooled means and standard deviations).

Differences in valence ratings over the conditions are shown in Figure 2 .

Figure 2. Mean valence ratings (with standard error of the mean) after the empathic paraphrasing and control conditions .

Time series plots over the entire course of the interview show a U-shaped trend in valence ratings over time, which is mainly due to ratings following the control condition (see Figure 3 ). However, a repeated measures ANOVA including sequence of intervention over time as an additional factor demonstrates that the effect of the intervention remains untouched by sequence [main effect of sequence F (4, 72) = 1.768; p = 0.145; main effect of intervention: F (1,18) = 11.400; p = 0.003 interaction intervention × sequence F (4, 72) = 1.489; p = 0.215].

Figure 3. Mean valence ratings over the course of the interview, averaged over both conditions (A) and split up into paraphrasing and control condition (B) . At each of the 10 trials, 10 subjects received an intervention and 10 received a control intervention.

Psychophysiological Data

Two-tailed t -tests for repeated measures show that participants had a higher SCR during paraphrasing than during the control condition [ t (15) = 2.589; p = 0.021]. Effect size is d = 0.65 (Cohen’s d ). Complementary results were found in participants’ HR, which was also higher during paraphrasing than during the control condition [ t (16) = 6.491; p = 0.000; effect size d = 1.57]. No significant differences between the conditions for BVP were found [ t (16) = 0.22; p = 0.812]. However, there was a strong trend for mean BVPamp [ t (16) = −2.119; p = 0.050; effect size d = 0.51], which was lower during paraphrasing than during taking notes. Comparing BVPamp during paraphrasing with the interview question directly following the paraphrase, we also found that BVPamp is lower during paraphrasing than during the following interview question [ t (13) = 2.381; p = 0.033; effect size d = 0.64]. For HR and BVP, no such difference between paraphrase and subsequent interview question was found. Figure 4 illustrates differences in psychophysiological measures and voice intensity over the two conditions.

Figure 4. Measures of sympathetic activation (mean values with standard error of the mean) . (A) Skin conductance response (SCR; in μS), (B) Heart rate (in beats/minute), (C) Blood volume pulse amplitude (BVPamp in%), and (D) Voice volume (in dB) during empathic paraphrasing and control condition.

Voice Analysis Data

Mean intensity/volume of participants’ voices was lower when they replied to an interview question following a paraphrase [ t (15) = −2,466; p = 0.026; effect size d = 0.62]. There was no difference in mean fundamental voice frequency (F0) between the conditions [ t (15) = 0.583; p = 0.568]. F0 range and F0 standard deviation did not differ between the conditions, either (see Table 1 ). However, speech rate and articulation rate showed trends for slower speech following paraphrasing [speech rate t (15) = −1.86; p = 0.082; articulation rate t (15) = −2.05; p = 0.059]. Cohen’s d yielded effect sizes of d = 0.47 for speech rate and d = 0.51 for articulation rate.

Table 1 . Means (M), standard deviations (SD), t -, p -, and d -values of all parameters in intervention and control condition .

Table 1 gives an overview of means and standard deviations of all psychophysiological, voice, and self-report parameters over the two conditions.

The aim of our study was to investigate the short-term emotional effects of empathic paraphrasing in social conflict. To achieve this, we conducted interviews on real-life social conflicts currently experienced by our participants. During the interview, paraphrasing was alternated with a control condition (taking notes). Emotional valence ratings were obtained after each intervention and control intervention and psychophysiological and voice recordings were executed continuously during the interviews. Our hypothesis was that paraphrasing would lead to more positive emotional valence and lower autonomic arousal. Viewing the results of our study as a whole suggests that empathic paraphrasing has a regulating effect on a narrator’s emotions, however, this effect seems to be more complex than originally expected. In sum, we found that participants felt better when the interviewer paraphrased their emotions and perceptions of the conflict. At the same time, and contrary to our expectations, SCR, HR, and BVP amplitude indicate higher autonomic activation during paraphrasing. Voice intensity as well as speech and articulation rate of participants on the other hand was lower when answering to a question following a paraphrase.

Effects of Paraphrasing on Valence

The self-report ratings demonstrate that participants felt better after the interviewer had paraphrased what they had said. Also, the relatively high effect size suggests that this effect is strong and practically relevant. The interview itself also induced valence effects over time, insofar that participants experienced a decline in emotional valence in the middle of the interview, which recuperated toward the end of the interview. However, due to the alternation of intervention and control intervention, which was again alternated in sequence over participants, this trend does not affect the intervention effect.

This self-reported valence effect is consistent with participants’ lower voice intensity after paraphrasing compared to the control condition. Banse and Scherer (1996) have linked high voice intensity with negative affects or aggressive speaker attitudes, thereby suggesting a conjunction between high voice intensity and negative emotional valence. Conversely, speech and articulation rate are also slightly lower following an intervention, even though these effects are not statistically significant. Speech rate is defined as the number of spoken units (e.g., words/syllables) per unit of time (minute/second). It is calculated across continuous speech segments, which may include pauses, disruptions, or dysfluency. Articulation rate is an analogical measure based only on fluent utterances, excluding pauses, and dysfluency ( Howell et al., 1999 ). Speech rate has been demonstrated to increase when experiencing anger or fear compared to neutral emotional states ( Scherer, 1995 ; Rochman et al., 2008 ). Hence, the lower speech and articulation rates following paraphrasing also suggest that participants experienced less negative emotion after paraphrasing.

By the same token, HR was higher during paraphrasing than during the control condition, which according to Palomba et al. (1997) can also be interpreted as a valence effect. HR deceleration has been associated with negative emotional valence during presentation of unpleasant visual stimuli. In social tasks, HR acceleration has been measured in accordance with intensity of emotion, and to a lesser degree, with emotional valence ( Palomba et al., 1997 ). Palomba et al. (1997) found significant differences in HR deceleration between positive, negative, and neutral visual stimuli, with positive stimuli producing the highest and negative stimuli the lowest HR. Hence, self-report data, voice data, and HR analysis all support the conclusion that emotional valence was positively influenced by offering cognitive empathy through paraphrasing. This effect of paraphrasing on valence bolsters Rime’s (2009) supposition that being treated empathically while socially sharing negative emotion produces a short-term alleviation of these negative emotions.

Interestingly, the positive impact of mimicry on social judgment mentioned in the introduction (i.e., promoting liking toward the mimicker) suggests the generation of positive emotion as a result of mimicry. This was not the case for paraphrasing in our study: valence ratings in the intervention condition center around the neutral. Nevertheless, it is still possible that paraphrasing led to an increased liking toward the interviewer, while overall affect was neutral. Social judgment was not assessed in the present study, hence, no direct comparison with mimicry is possible. However, it would be interesting to compare the effects of mimicry and paraphrasing on emotion in future studies, as well as to study verbal mimicry or matching more extensively in the context of distressing conversations such as social conflict discussions.

Effects of Paraphrasing on Arousal

Skin conductance response, HR and BVP amplitude indicate a period of higher autonomic arousal while the interviewer paraphrased what participants had said, compared to taking notes on what they had said. Again, effects sizes of physiological measures suggest medium and in the case of HR, very strong, effects. This is surprising, as we presumed that the lower intensity of negative emotion induced by paraphrasing would be accompanied by lower arousal. Instead, paraphrasing apparently enhanced autonomic arousal. Quite conversely to psychophysiological data, the lower voice intensity following the intervention on the other hand suggests a calming effect of paraphrasing on autonomic arousal, as several studies on emotion and voice quality have associated high voice intensity with high sympathetic autonomic arousal emotions ( Scherer, 2003 ). This apparent contradiction between voice data and psychophysiological data appears initially confusing, as vocal changes and changes in SCR both originate in mediated variation of HR, blood flow, and muscular tension caused by an arousing event ( Duffy, 1932 ; Laver, 1968 ; Schirmer and Kotz, 2006 ).

However, this discrepancy can be explained by the fact that BVP and SCR were recorded while participants listened to the interviewer paraphrasing, whereas voice analysis was done on recordings of participants’ answers to the interviewer’s next question, following the paraphrase. Thus, the autonomic arousal induced by paraphrasing may already have subsided and passed into a calmer state at the time participants answered the next question. This possibility is difficult to double-check for SCR as this parameter is reactive to speech and will thus be higher while participants are talking, even though autonomic sympathetic arousal induced by the intervention might have diminished already. However, we reassessed this hypothesis using BVP, BVPamp, and HR data, comparing the paraphrasing phase with the subsequent question phase and found a confirming result for BVPamp, although not for the other two measures. Participant had a lower BVP amplitude while listening to the paraphrase compared to listening to the interview question asked in direct succession. This indicates a specific effect of paraphrasing on autonomic arousal, which is not induced by speech in general. It should also be noted that voice intensity following paraphrasing is significantly lower than voice intensity following the control condition. Hence, given the assumption made above is correct, participants’ autonomic arousal is first heightened by listening to the paraphrasing, and after a short period of time lowered to a level below the control state. This is a very interesting finding, for which two possible explanations should be considered.

Firstly, it is possible that empathic paraphrasing not only leads to a reduction of negative emotion in participants, but even induces positive emotions, such as happiness and relief about being listened to and validated. This would explain the initial higher autonomic arousal, which would in this case be due to a short-term experience of positive emotions, in accordance with Rime (2009) dissipating quickly. However, the behavioral data does not support this notion, as the valence ratings remain in the negative range of the scale even after paraphrasing, only approximating the neutral zero-point. Also, it should be noted that empathic paraphrasing is distinctly different from everyday forms of volunteering empathy or forms of social sharing of emotion as referred to by Rime. Paraphrasing does not offer sympathy or emotional empathy, but instead takes a purely cognitive road by demonstrating that the listener can understand the narrator’s perspective. It does not seem likely that this technique should have the same emotional effects as common social sharing responses such as offering sympathy.

Therefore, as an alternative explanation of our results, it is more conceivable that demonstrating cognitive empathy through paraphrasing temporarily leads to a heightened focus on and increased processing of negative emotion, which might eventually have a resolving effect on these emotions. This explanation seems probable considering the nature of paraphrasing, which entails repeating emotional narrations in a pointed way, thereby sharpening and clarifying the emotional experience. In a study on the relationship between therapist pre-session mood, therapist empathy, and session evaluation, Duan and Kivlighan (2002) found that intellectual empathy (demonstrating an understanding of the client’s perspective, i.e., empathic paraphrasing) was positively correlated with client-perceived session depth (power and value of the session), but not correlated with perceived session smoothness (comfort and pleasantness of the session). In a way, paraphrasing confronts people with what they are feeling, and thus can stimulate a deeper processing of negative emotion (depth), which temporarily involves higher autonomic arousal and may even be perceived as trying and hard work (smoothness), but eventually abets resolution of the emotional conflict. It however seems unlikely that this process advances automatically without fueling cognitive work such as reappraisal and re-adjustment of goals and schemas. Yet, the clarifying focus on one’s own emotion, accompanied by the non-judgmental stance of empathic paraphrasing might strongly push this process forward. This notion is in line with Rogers’ original claim to evoke personal growth and transformation in the client through empathic paraphrasing, thereby achieving therapeutic change ( Rogers, 1942 , 1951 ).

Also, considering the findings from mimicry and language matching research, which have demonstrated that being treated empathically on basal levels such as facial expression and language style promotes attitude and behavior change, it seems plausible that empathic paraphrasing may foster socio-cognitive processes in a similar direction. As paraphrasing contains a deliberate effort to verbally align with the narrator, it may generate a shared situation model and in this way promote successful communication. It would be interesting to consider if empathic paraphrasing, as it bears a certain resemblance to mimicry on a verbal level, can also stimulate pro-social behavior in the person being paraphrased; for instance a greater willingness to open up for the other party’s perspective on the conflict. This would strongly support the idea of paraphrasing stimulating a clearance of negative emotion.

There seems to be wide consensus between psychotherapists of different disciplines that psychotherapy benefits from an optimal level of arousal in the client, similar to the Yerkes–Dodson law, which posits an inverse U-shaped correlation between arousal and performance in complex tasks ( Bridges, 2006 ). Markowitz and Milrod (2011) argue that emotional arousal is central for engaging the client in psychotherapy and making the therapeutic experience meaningful. They claim that the therapist’s ability to understand and respond empathically to negative emotional arousal should be considered the most important one of the common factors of psychotherapy. The therapist provides support and at the same time acts as a model, teaching the client to tolerate, verbalize, and integrate their feelings. Thus, negative feelings diminish and lose toxicity. In a similar vein, the traditional concept of the “corrective emotional experience” by Alexander and French (1946) describes the transformation of painful emotional conflicts as re-experiencing the old, unsettled conflict but with a new ending. This notion, which has gained ample empirical support, holds that processing emotional conflicts within a safe and empathic environment is necessary for therapeutic change ( Bridges, 2006 ).

A resembling road is also pursued by acceptance and mindfulness-based interventions. Research on acceptance-based and mindfulness-based therapy has shown that accepting and mindfully observing negative emotions (instead of trying to suppress them) leads to the dissolution of these emotions ( Eifert and Heffner, 2003 ; Arch and Craske, 2006 ; Hayes-Skelton et al., 2011 ). Czech et al. (2011) cite several experimental studies which have demonstrated that acceptance of negative emotion decreases distress and increases willingness to engage in challenging tasks. Empathic paraphrasing may have similar effects, as it essentially applies the principles of mindfulness and acceptance from the outside – through a listener who takes on an accepting role, thereby prompting the narrator in the same direction. Offering cognitive empathy through paraphrasing draws attention to emotions, non-judgmentally describes and accepts them, and is thus very similar to acceptance-based and mindfulness-based therapy. The central difference might be the locus of initiation of these processes, which in the case of empathic paraphrasing comes from somebody else. Comparing the effects of mindfulness and empathic paraphrasing and investigating the potential consequences of this difference on emotion processing and emotion regulation could be an interesting research focus for future studies.

Limitations of the Present Study

A potential short-coming of the present study pertains to the nature of the control condition, which consisted of taking notes silently. It could be argued that, as only the experimental condition involved speech, the differences found might be due to a general effect of being spoken to, rather than to an isolated effect of empathic paraphrasing. However, it should be noted that within a social conflict situation, the content of a reply to emotional descriptions can never be perceived as completely neutral, and any control condition involving speech will induce emotional effects of its own, e.g., irritation or even anger caused by inapplicable verbal comments of the interviewer following participants’ emotional disclosure. The present control condition was deliberately chosen for providing a neutral baseline against which the effects of empathic paraphrasing can be tested before moving on to other modes of comparison.

An aligned point of concern might be that it cannot be ascertained how the control condition was perceived by participants. For instance, even though they were informed that the note-taking simply served the purpose of bolstering the interviewer’s memory during the conversation, some participants may still have worried about the notes containing subjective judgment. This would most likely induce stress and add an emotional bias to the control condition. In this case, however, one would expect an increase in autonomic responses during the control condition, which did not occur. Still, considering these shortcomings of the control condition, the results need to be reproduced with varying kinds of control conditions involving speech before they can be viewed as definite.

It should also be mentioned that this study focused exclusively on short-term emotional reactions to paraphrasing, in order to obtain a constitutional data base illustrating the regulatory effect of this communicational technique. Our results suggest that in addition to influencing immediate emotional valence, paraphrasing sets in motion an initially arousing process of coping with negative emotions associated with the social conflict, which eventually may lead to resolving these emotions. However, as we did not assess longitudinal measures pertaining to the emotions associated with the social conflicts in question, this conclusion has to remain speculative until backed up by further research.

Finally, the relatively small sample size of the study makes it prone to distortions from individual variations and gender differences, e.g., in emotion expression. Again, replication of the results based on larger groups of study participants is called for.

Conclusion and Directions for Future Research

The present study provides first experimental evidence that offering cognitive empathy through paraphrasing extrinsically regulates emotion in social conflict. Paraphrasing led to less negative feelings in study participants, while at the same time inducing higher autonomic arousal, which subsided after a short period of time. A possible explanation for these findings is that empathic paraphrasing stimulates an increased and focused processing of negative emotion in social conflict, and thus may contribute to resolving these emotions.

Future studies investigating the emotional effects of demonstrating cognitive empathy may further scrutinize the short- and long-term effects empathic paraphrasing has on arousal, and test the hypothesis that paraphrasing induces a cognitive-emotional process which facilitates the resolution of negative emotion in social conflict. Also, it would be interesting to investigate the dynamics of this process more closely and identify factors necessary for its successful development. Presently, we are working on a neuroimaging paradigm designed to overcome some of the above mentioned shortcomings and further explore the effects of empathic paraphrasing on the disposition to consider other people’s perspective in social conflict.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This study was financially supported by the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin which is funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation), and by the Open-Access publication fund of the DFG and the Freie Universität Berlin.

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Example of a Paraphrasing Sequence

Interviewer: “What is worst for you about this situation?”

Narrator: “The worst thing is not knowing what happens now, well, this uncertainty. I mean, there is a problem, I have to make sure the rent is being paid, because in the end I am responsible, because I am in the rental agreement…and then – not being able to deal with that situation, not being able to act, because I just don’t know what is going to happen. The worst…now I am not so sure anymore, what was worst about it – well, also interpersonally it was very disappointing, because after all I took care of everything, voluntarily, and…I mean, when she is acting this way now, that is also a lack of recognition for what I do, what I accomplish. For my whole courtesy. What aggravates things is that is was clear from the beginning that she does not do so well financially, but urgently needed an apartment, and I let her move in with me to help her. And that is something that is…not being trampled under her feet…but you notice that there is a lack of recognition. Well, I think this second issue is worse than the first one.”

Interviewer: “So it is a combination, is it? For one, this thing, that in some way your existence is on stake here, that you are saying, this uncertainty is hard to bear – that you do not know how the rent is going to come around in the future. And then also the interpersonal issue, that you are saying you are disappointed of her, because you helped her, and in return you get this now, right? Especially the lack of recognition, the interpersonal treatment is what is worst – did I understand that correctly?”

Narrator: “Yes.”

Keywords: emotion regulation, empathy, social conflict resolution, paraphrasing, client-centered-therapy

Citation: Seehausen M, Kazzer P, Bajbouj M and Prehn K (2012) Effects of empathic paraphrasing – extrinsic emotion regulation in social conflict. Front. Psychology 3 :482. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00482

Received: 24 June 2012; Accepted: 19 October 2012; Published online: 12 November 2012.

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Copyright: © 2012 Seehausen, Kazzer, Bajbouj and Prehn. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.

*Correspondence: Maria Seehausen, Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion,” Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany. e-mail: maria.seehausen@fu-berlin.de

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