Symposia
Dissemination & Implementation Science
Adam S. Miner, M.S., Psy.D.
Stanford University School of Medicine
Palo Alto, California
Scott Fleming, MS
Doctoral Student
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
Established clinical wisdom and theory suggests both therapists and patients adjust their language to meet personal, social, and clinical goals within a therapy session. Previous research shows that language accommodation, the attunement of speaking partners’ speech to one another, is a foundational linguistic component of key therapeutic processes such as empathy and therapeutic alliance. In this way, psychotherapy can be evaluated as a conversation where utterances are evaluated not in isolation, but as contextual contributions to the shared activity of therapy. Therapists must decide when and how to adjust their language in psychotherapy. The amount and appropriateness of language accommodation may support or disrupt the goals of therapy. Although accommodation occurs to some extent in most conversations, the specific adjustments of patients and therapists have not been well documented, nor are established empirical methods available to provide inspectable evaluation in clinical practice. Here we connect communication accommodation theory and practical aspects of measuring language in psychotherapy. This talk will present theoretical framing and preliminary findings from computational text-based analysis of psychotherapy between therapist-patient dyads, focusing on clinically relevant language features such as emotionality and paralinguistic style. We demonstrate that accommodation is bidirectional: that is both patients and therapists accommodate each other, but not in the same ways or to the same extent. Our theoretical framing and preliminary findings have implications for evaluating theory-based mechanisms of change in cognitive-behavioral interventions. Specific considerations for crises-related mental health issues, such as PTSD, will be discussed. By combining approaches from clinical psychology, linguistics, and computer science, computational language analysis may allow direct inspection of the specific linguistic markers of high quality cognitive behavioral therapy.