How Interpersonal Coordination Can Reflect Psychological Counseling: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

This study showed how interpersonal coordination between a psychotherapist and client changes during a psychological counseling session and how it reflects it. We aimed to evaluate psychological counseling sessions and understand psychotherapists' embodied skills. Recently, it is considered that bodily coordination between a therapist and a client as well as psychotherapists' embodied skills is important. We conducted an exploratory case study with quantitative analysis and a qualitative analysis. One female student and one female psychotherapist participated in our experiment. The student had a counseling session for 50 minutes in a session, which was video recorded. After quantifying both participants' bodily activities by video image processing, the data were analyzed using nonlinear time series analysis in terms of the degree of coordination and the direction of influence. The data were also analyzed qualitatively by multiple researchers observing the video and by interviewing the psychotherapist. We identified the critical points of the session when the state of the client's mind and the relationship between the therapist and client qualitatively changed. The results of qualitative and quantitative analyses were then compared. The results of the quantitative analysis showed that the degree of bodily coordination between the client and therapist was relatively high in three characteristic scenes: 1) building rapport, 2) clinical intervention, and 3) summarizing and closing the session. These results suggest that bodily coordination can highlight clinically important scenes. Moreover, the direction of influence also changed drastically in the clinical intervention scene. This case study suggests that interpersonal coordination between the client and therapist in a counseling session can partly reflect the quality of counseling (e.g. client-therapist relationship, clinical intervention).

Observational and Accelerometer Analysis of Head Movement Patterns in Psychotherapeutic Dialogue

“…The acceleration signals of the head in the upward and downward directions were used as they were, regardless of whether they were head nods or not. Although synchronization has been studied in psychotherapy domain, many studies measure entire bodies or parts of bodies by image processing [ 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ]. By using an accelerometer, we can consider the synchrony of specific parts of the body.…”

Motion energy analysis (MEA): A primer on the assessment of motion from video.

“…A similar association between premature termination and low movement synchrony was found in patients with social anxiety disorder (Schoenherr, Paulick, Strauss, et al, 2019b). A single-case study found clinically important scenes to be associated with higher synchrony (Kodama, Hori, Tanaka, & Matsui, 2018). In patients with schizophrenia, nonverbal synchrony was shown to be differentially related to symptomatology (Kupper, Ramseyer, Hoffmann, & Tschacher, 2015), and in the context of body psychotherapy for patients suffering from schizophrenia, a trend for an increase of synchrony during an interview conducted pretherapy versus posttherapy was found (Galbusera, Finn, & Fuchs, 2018).…”