The acquisition of culture-specific knowledge through reading and/or experience is an important component of cross-cultural counseling education. This study explores the relationship between counselor trainees' culture specific knowledge and their ability to empathize in general. It would seem reasonable to assume that those who belong to a…

Multicultural empathy has been recognized as an important factor in successfully treating ethnic minority clients. A study detailing the relationship between White counselor trainees' general ability to empathize and their ability to interact comfortably outside their culture of origin is described in this paper. Thirty-three counselor trainees…

This paper describes a study on how, and to what degree, students' demographic information, ethnic identity, and attitudes about women contribute to their ability to be empathic. The report defines an empathic person as one who is interpersonally sensitive and aware of one's self and impact in relationship to others and is responsible for the…

Recent research has produced ambiguous results as to whether traditional training in multicultural development, awareness, knowledge, and skills is necessary to produce counseling competence. To explore this question, a study of multicultural counseling competence prior to multicultural counseling training is reported here. For the study, a…

Empathy has been defined as the single most important dimension in establishing a counseling relationship. This paper describes a study that compares counselor trainees' and a general population of African American males' empathy ratings of racially mixed videotaped counseling sessions. The report addresses the following questions: "Do…