Electris, C. Alexandra (1/13) Vicarious trauma: a relationship between emotional empathy and emotional overidentification in mid-career trauma clinicians (Lisa Wallner Samstag, Ph.D.; Kevin B. Meehan, Ph.D.; Linda S. Pen, Ph.D.)
The purpose of this online study was to examine the role of emotional overidentification in vicarious trauma (VT) using a sample of N=201 mid-career clinicians (134 females, 67 males; 3 to 7 years of experience) whose caseload consisted of at least 45% survivors of interpersonal trauma. It was hypothesized that greater emotional empathy would predict less ability to maintain emotional boundaries, and that greater emotional overidentification would predict more VT symptoms. Mediating variables of emotional overidentification included: low ability to separate emotionally, high ability to become absorbed, and low ability to maintain self-other differentiation. A bootstrapping method confirmed that greater emotional overidentification mediated the relationship between greater emotional empathy and both increased PTSD symptoms (34.57% of total effect) and more disrupted cognitive beliefs (17.82%) associated with VT. Results suggest that emotional overidentification is distinct from emotional empathy, and that the relationship between these two variables determines whether clinicians will be vulnerable or resilient to VT. Emotional empathy in the context of maintaining emotional separation may be a protective quality for trauma clinicians. Exploratory hypotheses indicated that supervision and clinical support mediated the relationship between the degree of absorption and VT symptoms. In addition, no differences were found in VT scores of clinicians with a personal history of trauma, suggesting that these clinicians are not more distressed by doing trauma work than clinicians without such a history. Implications of the findings are discussed.
