Abstract
Psychotherapists, who use their communicative skills to assist people, review their dialogue practices and improve their skills from their experiences. However, technology has not been fully exploited for this purpose. In this study, we analyze the use of head movements during actual psychotherapeutic dialogues between two participants—therapist and client—using video recordings and head-mounted accelerometers. Accelerometers have been utilized in the mental health domain but not for analyzing mental health related communications. We examined the relationship between the state of the interaction and temporally varying head nod and movement patterns in psychological counseling sessions. Head nods were manually annotated and the head movements were measured using accelerometers. Head nod counts were analyzed based on annotations taken from video data. We conducted cross-correlation analysis of the head movements of the two participants using the accelerometer data. The results of two case studies suggest that upward and downward head nod count patterns may reflect stage transitions in counseling dialogues and that peaks of head movement synchrony may be related to emphasis in the interaction.
Highlights
It is essential for psychotherapists to review their dialogue practices and improve their communicative skills to assist people in need
We present the results on the first analysis using manually annotated head nod labels here to observe any patterns in the two psychotherapy cases
We found that distinctive communication events occurred when head movements were strongly correlated
Summary
It is essential for psychotherapists to review their dialogue practices and improve their communicative skills to assist people in need. For the purpose of reflection, handwritten notes and voice recorders have typically been used as memory aids; for example, voice recordings were used by Rogers [1]. Video-based reflection has been used in psychotherapy [2]. The procedure for quantitative analysis of non-verbal behavior during an entire interview session is still being explored. Non-verbal behavior has been emphasized to be important for establishing therapist–client relationships, this is taught conceptually (i.e., in terms of attitudes rather than specific actions). Many practitioners—even experienced ones—may find it difficult to observe their own or their colleagues’ dialogue videos analytically from a non-verbal point of view. We describe a method of analyzing face-to-face interactions to identify structural patterns in dialogues
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