COMPASS: Computational mapping of patient-therapist alliance strategies with language modeling.

ABSTRACT: The therapeutic working alliance is a critical predictor of psychotherapy success. Traditionally, working alliance assessment relies on questionnaires completed by both therapists and patients. In this paper, we present COMPASS, a novel framework to directly infer the therapeutic working alliance from the natural language used in psychotherapy sessions. Our approach leverages advanced large language models (LLMs) to analyze session transcripts and map them to distributed representations. These representations capture the semantic similarities between the dialogues and psychometric instruments, such as the Working Alliance Inventory. Analyzing a dataset of over 950 sessions spanning diverse psychiatric conditions -- including anxiety (N = 498), depression (N = 377), schizophrenia (N = 71),

SUBMITTER: Lin B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12081631 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature