A natural language processing approach reveals first-person pronoun usage and non-fluency as markers of therapeutic alliance in psychotherapy.

ABSTRACT: It remains elusive what language markers derived from psychotherapy sessions are indicative of therapeutic alliance, limiting our capacity to assess and provide feedback on the trusting quality of the patient-clinician relationship. To address this critical knowledge gap, we leveraged feature extraction methods from natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence, to quantify pronoun and non-fluency language markers that are relevant for communicative and emotional aspects of therapeutic relationships. From twenty-eight transcripts of non-manualized psychotherapy sessions recorded in outpatient clinics, we identified therapists' first-person pronoun usage frequency and patients' speech transition marking relaxed interaction style as potential metrics of alliance. B

SUBMITTER: Ryu J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10225921 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature