Coregulation of therapist and client emotion during psychotherapy

Soma, Christina S.; Baucom, Brian R.; Xiao, Bo; Butner, Jonathan; Hilpert, Peter; Narayanan, Shrikanth; Atkins, David C.; Imel, Zac E.

doi:10.1080/10503307.2019.1661541

Cited by 44 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 74 publications

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“…With respect to autonomic arousal, the observation that the therapist's arousal is markedly lower than the client's, and with lower variance over time, points to the differing roles of the two participants and the different intensity with which they engage in the affective work of the session. There is some evidence that therapists' affect regulation capacities are well-developed through their training and clinical experience (Messina et al, 2013;Soma et al, 2020). As can be seen in Figures 1, 2, as the session progresses, the therapist's physiological arousal is stable in both intensity and variance.…”

Section: Asv Datamentioning

confidence: 95%

“…With regards to nonverbal aspects of the interaction, there is a marked difference in the prosodic features of the participants' talk throughout this initial phase. The client speaks in fast tempo, in a loud, modulated and fairly highpitched voice; these prosodic characteristics are often associated with physiological and emotional arousal (Soma et al, 2020). The therapist, on the other hand, speaks very quietly, in a low volume, slow rhythm, and low pitch voice.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Exploring Conversational and Physiological Aspects of Psychotherapy Talk

Avdi

Evans

2020

Front. Psychol.

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This study is part of a larger exploration of 'talk and cure' that combines the examination of talk-in-interaction with nonverbal displays and measurements of the client's and therapist's autonomic arousal during therapy sessions. A key assumption of the study is that psychotherapy entails processes of intersubjective meaning-making that occur across different modalities and take place in both verbal/explicit and nonverbal/implicit domains. A single session of a psychodynamic psychotherapy is analyzed with a focus on the expression and management of affect, with an aim to describe key interactive events that promote change in both semantic and procedural domains. The clinical dialog is analyzed discursively, with a focus on the conversational processes through which new meanings are jointly constructed and affective states shared; detailed attention is paid to nonverbal displays of affiliation and affect. Furthermore, we explore whether the interactional patterns implicated in joint meaning-making, as revealed by analyzing the therapeutic conversation, have correlates in the autonomic arousal of the two protagonists, as reflected in their heart rates. Conversation analysis has still untapped potential to illuminate interactional patterns that underlie the practice of psychotherapy. In this exploratory study we suggest that discursive analyses of talkin-interaction can be enriched through detailed focus on nonverbal displays as well as measures of physiological arousal. Drawing upon the analysis, we suggest that bringing the methodological strengths of language-based analysis into fertile dialog with embodied quantitative data can help our explorations of what's really going on in psychotherapy.

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Section: Asv Datamentioning

confidence: 95%

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confidence: 99%

Exploring Conversational and Physiological Aspects of Psychotherapy Talk

Avdi

Evans

2020

Front. Psychol.

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“…Diarization in psychotherapy research is currently practiced in two different ways. On one side researchers rely on manual annotation of speaker identity, being time intensive but accurate ( Imel et al, 2014 ; Reich et al, 2014 ; Soma et al, 2019 ). On the other side researchers rely on unsupervised automated methods, presenting with a minor work intensity but also with higher error rates ( Xiao et al, 2015 ; Nasir et al, 2017a , b ).…”

Section: Speaker Diarization In Psychotherapy Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…During the dyadic interactions of psychotherapy, patients and therapists have been shown to synchronize in verbal, non-verbal, and physiological behavior (Marci et al, 2007;Ramseyer and Tschacher, 2008;Lord et al, 2015;Koole and Tschacher, 2016;Kleinbub, 2017). A growing body of empirical research has associated the degree to which interpersonal synchrony is present during therapy with therapeutic outcome (Ramseyer and Tschacher, 2014), empathy (Marci et al, 2007;Imel et al, 2014;Lord et al, 2015), the formation of the therapeutic relationship (Ramseyer and Tschacher, 2011), personality traits (Tschacher et al, 2018), and emotion regulation (Galbusera et al, 2019;Soma et al, 2019). Due to their integrative value, processes of interpersonal synchrony have thus moved to the center of attention of psychotherapy research and related fields (Ramseyer and Tschacher, 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the same line, autonomic measures (heart rate, skin conductance, breathing) applied in the field of interpersonal physiology (Kleinbub, 2017) also benefit from accessible measurement in the naturalistic setting (Weippert et al, 2010;Pijeira-Díaz et al, 2016;Barrios et al, 2019). In contrast, studies on vocal quality or vocal coordination have not gained the same amount of attention (Imel et al, 2014;Reich et al, 2014;Tomicic et al, 2017;Soma et al, 2019;Zimmermann et al, 2020). This is somewhat surprising because audio recordings are a widely used tool for educational, scientific, and supervisory activities (Aveline, 1992) and, in comparison to video or physiological measures, are non-invasive and inexpensive to attain in high quality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Supervised Speaker Diarization Using Random Forests: A Tool for Psychotherapy Process Research

Fürer¹,

Schenk²,

Röth

et al. 2020

Front. Psychol.

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Speaker diarization is the practice of determining who speaks when in audio recordings. Psychotherapy research often relies on labor intensive manual diarization. Unsupervised methods are available but yield higher error rates. We present a method for supervised speaker diarization based on random forests. It can be considered a compromise between commonly used labor-intensive manual coding and fully automated procedures. The method is validated using the EMRAI synthetic speech corpus and is made publicly available. It yields low diarization error rates (M: 5.61%, STD: 2.19). Supervised speaker diarization is a promising method for psychotherapy research and similar fields.

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It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it: An analysis of therapist vocal features during psychotherapy

Soma

Knox

Greer

et al. 2021

Couns and Psychother Res

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Psychotherapy is a conversation, whereby, at its foundation, many interventions are derived from the therapist talking. Research suggests that the voice can convey a variety of emotional and social information, and individuals may change their voice based on the context and content of the conversation (e.g. talking to a baby or delivering difficult news to patients with cancer). As such, therapists may adjust aspects of their voice throughout a therapy session depending on if they are beginning a therapy session and checking in with a client, conducting more therapeutic ‘work’ or ending the session. In this study, we modelled three vocal features—pitch, energy and rate—with linear and quadratic multilevel models to understand how therapists’ vocal features change throughout a therapy session. We hypothesised that all three vocal features would be best fit with a quadratic function—starting high and more congruent with a conversational voice, decreasing during the middle portions of therapy where more therapeutic interventions were being administered, and increasing again at the end of the session. Results indicated a quadratic model for all three vocal features was superior in fitting the data, as compared to a linear model, suggesting that therapists begin and end therapy using a different style of voice than in the middle of a session.

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Coregulation of therapist and client emotion during psychotherapy

Cited by 44 publications

References 74 publications

Exploring Conversational and Physiological Aspects of Psychotherapy Talk

Exploring Conversational and Physiological Aspects of Psychotherapy Talk

Supervised Speaker Diarization Using Random Forests: A Tool for Psychotherapy Process Research

It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it: An analysis of therapist vocal features during psychotherapy

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