Client and Therapist Psychotherapy Sentiment Interaction Throughout Therapy
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ASSESSMENT
Client and Therapist Psychotherapy Sentiment Interaction Throughout Therapy Brian M. Syzdek1
Received: 18 May 2019 / Accepted: 13 August 2020 Ó National Academy of Psychology (NAOP) India 2020
Abstract Examining language used in psychotherapy can provide benefits for therapy outcomes and understanding therapeutic processes. Sentiment analysis is a type of content analysis using Natural Language Processing that can be applied to analyze the degree of positive or negative sentiment of therapist and client language in actual therapy sessions. Therapy transcripts were coded for degree of positive and negative sentiment at each exchange between therapist and client. Hierarchical linear models were constructed to evaluate change in sentiment within and across therapy sessions and the relationship between therapist and client sentiment. Results indicate that there was significant interaction effect, with increases in positive sentiment across therapy sessions, while positive sentiment tended to decrease within sessions. There was also found to be no difference, and instead significant correlation, between therapist and client sentiment in therapeutic dialogue over time, suggesting that client and therapist sentiment seemed to correspond over time. Keywords Psychotherapy language Sentiment analysis psychotherapy Therapy language Therapist client language therapy Therapy language content analysis
& Brian M. Syzdek [email protected] 1
Stoelting Psychology, 620 Wheat Lane, Wood Dale, IL 60191, USA
Introduction Hierarchical Linear Model Analysis of Sentiment of Language Used in Psychotherapy Sessions Being able to analyze communication in a psychotherapy session is desirable for several reasons, such as (1) to understand what therapeutic factors exert beneficial effects on clients, (2) for a therapist to be able to understand what therapeutic processes are occurring during therapy sessions to best aid those processes, and (3) to enhance the teaching of therapy skills. For these reasons and others, there has been a history of progressively more sophisticated attempts to understand language used in therapy. Early analysis of therapeutic language included detailed analysis of discourse in therapy, with analysis of individual sentences, the meaning these sentences conveyed, and attempts to understand the underlying meaning of verbal communication through analysis of tempo, inflection, and other paralinguistic forms of communication (Labov & Fanshel, 1977) and ethnographic studies of communicative competence in discourse, including linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence (Hymes, 1972). Though computer-assisted analysis of linguistic content in therapy has existed for some time (Stone, Dunphy, Smith, & Ogilvie, 1966), researchers have continued to refine methods to quantify therapeutic discourse, which has come to be known as content analysis. One way this has been done is by comparing language use in transcribed therapy sessions to similar language coded with preestablished meani
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