Empathy and Feedback in Conversations About Felt Experience

When we talk about felt experiences, such as physical pains and pleasures, we normally expect our conversational partners to provide empathetic feedback of some kind. Some models of human interaction predict that this feedback should be similar in form to our original production; the gestures, expressions and other non-verbal signals we use to explain our experience should be mirrored in the empathic displays of our conversational partners. Here, we test this idea using data from a corpus of interactions in which people describe experiences that vary in their degree of unpleasantness. Speakers in this situation produce more gestures when describing more unpleasant experiences. In contrast to this, their listeners provide less non-verbal feedback and use more verbal feedback as the expressed experience becomes more negative. These findings suggest a socially strategic use of emphatic feedback that is not explained by the operation of an automatic perception-behaviour link.