The Role of Trait Empathy and State‐Level Emotion in Predicting Helpers' Facilitative Interpersonal Skill

Helpers may associate the ability to modulate anxiety with their self-judgments of being skillful in challenging therapeutic situations. However, trained observations of these skills were associated with helper experiences of positive affect (and not anxiety or negative affect). One implication of this finding is that negative and positive affect may play different roles for how skill is perceived within students learning therapeutic skills versus observers (e.g., supervisors).