Listener education

Abstract

Listener education has usually been conducted as primary prevention in occupational medicine. We report on the present state of listener education in which the training focuses on active listening (AL). AL means the way of listening to a person in the person-centered attitude (PCA) that is based on Rogers' three conditions, i.e. empathy, unconditional positive regard, and congruence. Although the need of this kind of training has been widely described, there is a paucity of academic literature on this subject. This review deals with listener education by dividing it into two types; one is listener education in a narrow sense that consistently depends on the three conditions, and the other is listener education in a broad sense that combines other methods that have different orientations from Rogers' theory. As an example of the former, Ikemi et al. reported the importance of the PCA, and studies conducted by Kubota et al., Mishima et al., and Miyagi dealt with the actual training. As an example of the later, Morisaki and Hamaguchi et al. illustrated their training including other methods such as transactional analysis in their studies. Finally, we point out not only that future research needs to focus on the assessment of listener education, but also that AL needs to be understood from the standpoint of developing workers' competency.