Abstract

Psychotherapy, from a narrative perspective, is the process in which a client relates an on-going life-story to a therapist. In each session, a client will recount events from their life, some of which stand out as more significant than others. These significant stories can ultimately shape one’s identity. In this work we study these narratives in the context of therapeutic alliance—a self-reported measure on the perception of a shared bond between client and therapist. We propose that alliance can be predicted from the interactions between certain types of clients with types of therapists. To validate this method, we obtained 1235 transcribed sessions with client-reported alliance to train an unsupervised approach to discover groups of therapists and clients based on common types of narrative characters, or personae. We measure the strength of the relation between personae and alliance in two experiments. Our results show …

Date

2019

Authors

Victor R Martinez, Nikolaos Flemotomos, Victor Ardulov, Krishna Somandepalli, Simon B Goldberg, Zac E Imel, David C Atkins, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

Interspeech

Volume

2019

Pages

1901