Are You Really Empathic? Evidence from Trait, State and Speaker-Perceived Empathy, and Physiological Signals

Abstract: When someone claims to be empathic, it does not necessarily mean they are perceived as empathic by the person receiving it. Empathy promotes supportive communication, yet the relationship between listeners' trait and state empathy and speakers' perceptions remains unclear. We conducted an experiment in which speakers described a personal incident and one or more listeners responded naturally, as in everyday conversation. Afterwards, speakers reported perceived empathy, and listeners reported their trait and state empathy. Reliability of the scales was high (Cronbach's $\alpha = 0.805$--$0.888$). Nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis tests showed that speakers paired with higher trait-empathy listeners reported greater perceived empathy, with large effect sizes. In contrast, state empathy did not reliably differentiate speaker outcomes. To complement self-reports, we collected electrodermal activity and heart rate from listeners during the conversations, which shows that high trait empathy listeners exhibited higher physiological variability.