Characterizing Therapist's Speaking Style in Relation to Empathy in Psychotherapy

TL;DR

This study analyzes therapists' speaking styles in psychotherapy sessions by examining prosody and utterance genres, revealing correlations with perceived empathy levels and achieving 71% classification accuracy between high and low empathy sessions.

Contribution

The paper introduces an automatic speech and text processing system combined with data-driven clustering to characterize therapist speaking styles related to empathy.

Findings

Salient utterance genres correlate with empathy levels.

Therapists with steady tone and volume tend to have higher empathy.

Long, slow utterances are associated with lower empathy.

Abstract

In conversation-based psychotherapy, therapists use verbal techniques to help clients express thoughts and feelings, and change behavior. In particular, how well therapists convey empathy is an essential quality index of psychotherapy sessions and is associated with psychotherapy outcome. In this paper, we analyze the prosody of therapist speech and attempt to associate the therapist's speaking style with subjectively perceived empathy. An automatic speech and text processing system is developed to segment long recordings of psychotherapy sessions into pause-delimited utterances with text transcriptions. Data-driven clustering is applied to the utterances from different therapists in multiple sessions. For each cluster, a typological representation of utterance genre is derived based on quantized prosodic feature parameters. Prominent speaking styles of the therapist can be observed and interpreted from salient utterance genres that are correlated with empathy. Using the salient utterance genres, an accuracy of $71\%$ is achieved in classifying psychotherapy sessions into ``high" and ``low" empathy level. Analysis of results suggests that empathy level tends to be (1) low if therapists speak long utterances slowly or speak short utterances quickly; and (2) high if therapists talk to clients with a steady tone and volume.