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This study investigates the characteristics of backchannels showing the entrainment to the interlocutor’s speech. The prosodic features of the dialogues of attentive listening are analyzed to describe how the prosody of Japanese backchannels is affected by the preceding interlocutor’s utterance. We adopt a support vector regression (SVR) to model the relationships between the prosodic features of backchannels and those of the preceding utterances. As a result, we found an interrelationship between the different types of features; in particular, the F0 of backchannels is highly correlated with the power of the preceding utterance. The regression analyses show that the combination of prosodic features of the preceding utterances achieves good prediction of both the F0 and power of backchannels. The findings of this study can be applied to the automatic generation of backchannels for spoken dialogue systems to show empathy and facilitate user’s speech.