What can Speech and Language Tell us About the Working Alliance in Psychotherapy

  • We are interested in the problem of conversational analysis and its application to the health domain. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a structured approach in psychotherapy, allowing the therapist to help the patient to identify and modify the malicious thoughts, behavior, or actions. This cooperative effort can be evaluated using the Working Alliance Inventory Observer-rated Shortened – a 12 items inventory covering task, goal, and relationship – which has a relevant influence on therapeutic outcomes. In this work, we investigate the relation between this alliance inventory and the spoken conversations (sessions) between the patient and the psychotherapist. We have delivered eight weeks of e-therapy, collected their audio and video call sessions, and manually transcribed them. The spoken conversations have been annotated and evaluated with WAI ratings by professional therapists. We have investigated speech and language features and their association with WAI items. The feature types include turn dynamics, lexical entrainment,We are interested in the problem of conversational analysis and its application to the health domain. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a structured approach in psychotherapy, allowing the therapist to help the patient to identify and modify the malicious thoughts, behavior, or actions. This cooperative effort can be evaluated using the Working Alliance Inventory Observer-rated Shortened – a 12 items inventory covering task, goal, and relationship – which has a relevant influence on therapeutic outcomes. In this work, we investigate the relation between this alliance inventory and the spoken conversations (sessions) between the patient and the psychotherapist. We have delivered eight weeks of e-therapy, collected their audio and video call sessions, and manually transcribed them. The spoken conversations have been annotated and evaluated with WAI ratings by professional therapists. We have investigated speech and language features and their association with WAI items. The feature types include turn dynamics, lexical entrainment, and conversational descriptors extracted from the speech and language signals. Our findings provide strong evidence that a subset of these features are strong indicators of working alliance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and a novel study to exploit speech and language for characterising working alliance.show moreshow less

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Author:Sebastian Peter BayerlORCiD, Gabriel Roccabruna, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Tommaso Ciulli, Morena Danieli, Korbinian RiedhammerORCiD, Giuseppe Riccardi
DOI:https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2022-347
Parent Title (English):Interspeech 2022
Publisher:ISCA
Place of publication:ISCA
Document Type:conference proceeding (article)
Language:English
Reviewed:Begutachtet/Reviewed
Release Date:2024/08/02
Tag:conversational analysis; psychotherapy; working alliance
Pagenumber:5
First Page:2443
Last Page:2447
Konferenzangabe:Interspeech 2022, 18-22 September 2022, Incheon, Korea
institutes:Fakultät Informatik
Zentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (KIZ)
Research Themes:Digitalisierung & Künstliche Intelligenz
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