Speech and language play an essential role in automatically assessing several psychotherapeutic qualities. These automation procedures require translating the manual rating qualities to speech and language features that accurately capture the assessed psychotherapeutic quality. Speech features can be determined by analysing recordings of psychotherapeutic conversations (acoustics), while language-based analyses rely on the transcriptions of such psychotherapeutic conversations (linguistics). Guided self-help is a psychotherapeutic intervention that mainly relay on therapeutic competency of practitioners. This paper investigates the feasibility of automatically analysing guided self-help sessions for mild-to-moderate anxiety to detect and predict practitioner competence. This analysis is performed on sessions drawn from a patient preference randomised controlled trial using actual patient-practitioner conversations manually rated using a valid and reliable measure of competency. The results show the efficacy and potential of automatically detecting practitioners’ competence using a system based on acoustic and linguistic features extracted from transcripts generated by an automatic speech recogniser. Feature extraction, feature selection and classification or regression have been implemented as blocks of the prediction model. The Lasso regression model achieved the best prediction results with an R of 0.92 and lower error rates with an MAE of 1.66 and RMSE of 2.25.

Functional/dissociative seizures (FDSs) are events characterized by alterations of awareness, self-control, and perception. [1][2][3] Although FDSs superficially resemble epileptic seizures, or in some cases syncope, they are not associated with epileptiform activity. FDSs are understood as an automatic response to internal or external triggers involving dysfunctional emotion regulation often occurring in the absence of conscious perception of adverse,

Purpose There is growing evidence examining mindfulness-based interventions (MI) for people with intellectual disabilities (IDs). As discussed in this paper, MI may be particularly suited for people with ID given high rates of difficulties in identifying and regulating emotions and as this approach may rely less on cognitive ability compared to other therapies. This study aims to assess the acceptability and preliminary effectiveness of a six-session MI group [the Coping Well Group (CWG)] delivered within routine clinical practice. Design/methodology/approach Six separate cohorts (n = 25) of adults with ID attended CWG. Quantitative data were collected from service users, including a pre- and post-quality of life (QoL) measure and qualitative data from group facilitators. Findings Roughly one-half (53%) of service users invited to the group attended at least one session, with low levels of dropout observed among group attendees. A significant improvement in QoL was reported demonstrating a small effect (d = 0.46, p = 0.022) after attending the group. Most service users (72%) were referred to the CWG for help managing difficult emotions. One-half (44%) of attendees required individual therapy after attending the group. Limitations of the evaluation and potential future research are discussed. Originality/value The current evaluation contributes a practice-based service evaluation of an MI group for people with ID and mental health difficulties to the currently limited evidence base. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to investigate the impact of group psychological interventions collecting data across cohorts and assessing QoL, a more general measure of well-being than has been used previously.