Abstract
We study the phenomenon of linguistic synchrony between clients and therapists in a psychotherapy process. Linguistic Synchrony (LS) can be viewed as any observed interdependence or association between more than one person’s linguistic behavior. Accordingly, we establish LS as a methodological task. We suggest a LS function that applies a linguistic similarity measure based on the Jensen-Shannon distance across the observed part-of-speech tag distributions (JSDuPos) of the speakers in different time frames. We perform a study over a unique corpus of 872 transcribed sessions, covering 68 clients and 59 therapists. After establishing the presence of client-therapist LS, we verify its association with therapeutic alliance and treatment outcome (measured using WAI and ORS), and additionally analyse the behavior of JSDuPos throughout treatment. Results indicate that (1) higher linguistic similarity at the session level associates with higher therapeutic alliance as reported by the client and therapist at the end of the session, (2) higher linguistic similarity at the session level associates with higher level of treatment outcome as reported by the client at the beginnings of the next sessions, (3) there is a significant linear increase in linguistic similarity throughout treatment, (4) surprisingly, higher LS associates with lower treatment outcome. Finally, we demonstrate how the LS function can be used to interpret and explore the mechanism for synchrony.1
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | CLPsych 2022 - 8th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, Proceedings |
Editors | Ayah Zirikly, Dana Atzil-Slonim, Maria Liakata, Steven Bedrick, Bart Desmet, Molly Ireland, Andrew Lee, Sean MacAvaney, Matthew Purver, Rebecca Resnik, Andrew Yates |
Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
Pages | 158-176 |
Number of pages | 19 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781955917872 |
State | Published - 2022 |
Event | 8th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, CLPsych 2022 - Seattle, United States Duration: 15 Jul 2022 → … |
Publication series
Name | CLPsych 2022 - 8th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, Proceedings |
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Conference
Conference | 8th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, CLPsych 2022 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Seattle |
Period | 15/07/22 → … |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022 Association for Computational Linguistics.
Funding
We would like to thank Yoav Goldberg, Daniel Juravski, Tslil Ofir, Ayelet Meiri, Adar Paz, Dana Stolowicz-Melman, Yarden Menashri Sinai, Almog Simchon, Rotem Dror, Victoria Basmov, Shoval Sadde, Reut Tsarfaty, Nir Milstein, Oded Mayo, Alon Tomashin, Maya Sabag, Shahar Siegman, the synchrony PhD forum members in the Psychology department, and BIU-NLP lab members for helpful discussions and contributions, each in their own way. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. This project was partially funded by the Israel Science Foundation (grants 1348/15 and 1278/16); the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, grant agreement No. 802774 (iEXTRACT); and the Computer Science department of Bar-Ilan University.
Funders | Funder number |
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Computer Science department of Bar-Ilan University | |
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme | 802774 |
European Commission | |
Israel Science Foundation | 1348/15, 1278/16 |