Studies of non-verbal communication in psychotherapy

The aim of the research is to improve psychotherapy training and thereby therapy itself. To do so, the researchers are using AI and time series analyses to study non-verbal communication occurring in psychotherapy.

According to a WHO report published in 2011, mental ill-health is expected to be the main cause of illness and death in the world by 2030. The need for effective psychotherapies can therefore be expected to become ever more urgent over the next few decades. 

There has been very little research into the factors that make a therapist competent and psychotherapy effective. But there is a growing consensus in psychotherapy research that psychotherapy can be studied as dyadic dynamic systems. From this viewpoint, it is important to explore the verbal as well as the non-verbal communication patterns occurring over time between client and therapist. This interpersonal communication is highly complex, since both parties are simultaneously sender and recipient of non-verbal and verbal messages. Verbal communication is readily accessible for analysis, but to understand interpersonal communication in its entirety, non-verbal communication must also be analyzed systematically, and be linked to the verbal content. 

Non-verbal communication is multimodal and includes body and head position, eye movements, emotional prosody and physiological variables such as heart activity. These non-verbal signals also form part of the complex interactional synchronization patterns that include mirroring of emotional expressions. Following this complex communication dynamic is seldom possible, even for trained observers.

The researchers in the project intend to use new digital technology to measure the above non-verbal variables in an objective manner. Data will be analyzed using methods such as machine learning and time series analyses to identify the non-verbal behavioral patterns capable of predicting therapy outcomes. This will pave the way for completely new methods of analyzing the interpersonal processes that are key to the outcome of psychotherapy, and a better understanding of them. 

One overall aim is to fill the gaps in our knowledge about non-verbal communication and its relationship to verbal communication components and to treatment outcomes. This new knowledge is expected to improve training in psychotherapy, which will in turn produce better trained psychotherapists and more effective therapies, as well as lower levels of mental ill-health and reduced costs for society as a whole.

Project:
“Let's talk about non-verbal communication: Investigation of interpersonal psychotherapeutic interactions and their effect on treatment outcomes using AI and time series analysis”

Principal investigator:
Professor Stephan Hau

Co-investigators:
Stockholm University
Ioanna Miliou 
Panagiotis Papapetrou
Luis Quintero
Therese Anderbro
Lillian Döllinger
Håkan Fischer
Lennart Högman
Petri Laukka

Institution:
Stockholm University

Grant:
SEK 4.5 million