Psychotherapy is Not One Thing: Simultaneous Modeling of Different Therapeutic Approaches

Maitrey Mehta, Derek Caperton, Katherine Axford, Lauren Weitzman, David Atkins, Vivek Srikumar, Zac Imel


Abstract
There are many different forms of psychotherapy. Itemized inventories of psychotherapeutic interventions provide a mechanism for evaluating the quality of care received by clients and for conducting research on how psychotherapy helps. However, evaluations such as these are slow, expensive, and are rarely used outside of well-funded research studies. Natural language processing research has progressed to allow automating such tasks. Yet, NLP work in this area has been restricted to evaluating a single approach to treatment, when prior research indicates therapists used a wide variety of interventions with their clients, often in the same session. In this paper, we frame this scenario as a multi-label classification task, and develop a group of models aimed at predicting a wide variety of therapist talk-turn level orientations. Our models achieve F1 macro scores of 0.5, with the class F1 ranging from 0.36 to 0.67. We present analyses which offer insights into the capability of such models to capture psychotherapy approaches, and which may complement human judgment.
Anthology ID:
2022.clpsych-1.5
Original:
2022.clpsych-1.5v1
Version 2:
2022.clpsych-1.5v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, USA
Editors:
Ayah Zirikly, Dana Atzil-Slonim, Maria Liakata, Steven Bedrick, Bart Desmet, Molly Ireland, Andrew Lee, Sean MacAvaney, Matthew Purver, Rebecca Resnik, Andrew Yates
Venue:
CLPsych
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
47–58
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.clpsych-1.5
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.clpsych-1.5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maitrey Mehta, Derek Caperton, Katherine Axford, Lauren Weitzman, David Atkins, Vivek Srikumar, and Zac Imel. 2022. Psychotherapy is Not One Thing: Simultaneous Modeling of Different Therapeutic Approaches. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology, pages 47–58, Seattle, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Psychotherapy is Not One Thing: Simultaneous Modeling of Different Therapeutic Approaches (Mehta et al., CLPsych 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.clpsych-1.5.pdf
Appendix:
 2022.clpsych-1.5.appendix.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.clpsych-1.5.mp4