Trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy improves after training: emotion recognition training as a tool for psychotherapy education

Abstract

IntroductionPsychotherapists’ emotional and empathic competencies have a positive influence on psychotherapy outcome and alliance. However, it is doubtful whether psychotherapy education in itself leads to improvements in trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy (ERA), which is an essential part of these competencies.MethodsIn a randomized, controlled, double-blind study (N = 68), we trained trainee psychotherapists (57% psychodynamic therapy and 43% cognitive behavioral therapy) to detect non-verbal emotional expressions in others using standardized computerized trainings – one for multimodal emotion recognition accuracy and one for micro expression recognition accuracy – and compared their results to an active control group one week after the training (n = 60) and at the one-year follow up (n = 55). The participants trained once weekly during a three-week period. As outcome measures, we used a multimodal emotion recognition accuracy task, a micro expression recognition accuracy task and an emotion recognition accuracy task for verbal and non-verbal (combined) emotional expressions in medical settings.ResultsThe results of mixed multilevel analyses suggest that the multimodal emotion recognition accuracy training led to significantly steeper increases than the other two conditions from pretest to the posttest one week after the last training session. When comparing the pretest to follow-up differences in slopes, the superiority of the multimodal training group was still detectable in the unimodal audio modality and the unimodal video modality (in comparison to the control training group), but not when considering the multimodal audio-video modality or the total score of the multimodal emotion recognition accuracy measure. The micro expression training group showed a significantly steeper change trajectory from pretest to posttest compared to the control training group, but not compared to the multimodal training group. However, the effect vanished again until the one-year follow-up. There were no differences in change trajectories for the outcome measure about emotion recognition accuracy in medical settings.DiscussionWe conclude that trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy can be effectively trained, especially multimodal emotion recognition accuracy, and suggest that the changes in unimodal emotion recognition accuracy (audio-only and video-only) are long-lasting. Implications of these findings for the psychotherapy education are discussed.

Development and feasibility of a protocol to improve clinical trainees awareness of interpersonal processes using continuous assessment of interpersonal dynamics.

“…Within this context, instruction and supervision help trainees develop competencies in forming therapeutic alliances, creating and maintaining treatment frames, and delivering specific interventions. While many different microprocesses take place in the therapy room (e.g., alliance ruptures, affective shifts, perceived helpfulness/hindrance), trainees’ ability to sensitively attend to and understand the interpersonal processes occurring during therapeutic exchanges with clients is a major foundation for most clinical competencies, and trainee ability can be strengthened with training (e.g., Döllinger et al, 2023; Kivlighan & Kivlighan, 2023; Levendosky & Hopwood, 2017; Perlman et al, 2023; Safran et al, 2014). The present study identifies key interpersonal processes as a foundational component of clinical training and reports on the development and feasibility of a training protocol to help clinical trainees become more attuned to these interpersonal processes as they unfold when working with their clients.…”