Caregiver Thoughts and Feelings in Response to Different Perspective-Taking Prompts

Both conceptual and empirical evidence in the caregiving literature suggest that “how” informal caregivers are prompted to think about patient experiences can impact their ability to achieve perceptual agreement with patients on symptom events. Researchers have begun to test the effects of different clinical questions with caregivers or a proxy on their perceptual agreement with patient self-reports. However, there are gaps in understanding caregivers' underlying thoughts and feelings when they are prompted to take different vantage points on the patient's symptom experiences. To assess these thoughts and feelings, content analysis was performed on verbal responses to an open-ended interview schedule, in which caregivers were questioned about their thoughts and feelings in one of three randomly assigned instructional conditions—neutral, imagine-patient, and imagine-self perspective-taking. Responses were classified into one of five cue categories: patient-oriented, caregiver-oriented, generalized other, feeling distanced, and other. Caregivers tended to respond to patient symptom experiences in ways that suggest it is innate for caregivers in intimate relationships to make an effort to imagine the patient's viewpoint on symptom events. When caregivers were prompted to imagine the patient's perspective, “labeling” processes were also triggered that denote a categorization process in which caregivers interpreted the meaning of simple patient information arising in the care situation. A large portion of caregivers in the neutral and imagine-patient conditions reported feeling distanced from patients in light of perceived communication difficulties.