Technology-Enhanced Human Interaction in Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is on the verge of a technology-inspired revolution. The concurrent maturation of communication, signal processing, and machine learning technologies begs an earnest look at how these technologies may be used to improve the quality of psychotherapy. Here, we discuss 3 research domains where technology is likely to have a significant impact: (1) mechanism and process, (2) training and feedback, and (3) technology-mediated treatment modalities. For each domain, we describe current and forthcoming examples of how new technologies may change established applications. Moreover, for each domain we present research questions that touch on theoretical, systemic, and implementation issues. Ultimately, psychotherapy is a decidedly human endeavor, and thus the application of modern technology to therapy must capitalize on—and enhance—our human capacities as counselors, students, and supervisors.

[1]  K. G. Bailey,et al.  Audiotape and videotape self-confrontation in psychotherapy. , 1970, Psychological bulletin.

[2]  P. Chodoff.  Supervision of psychotherapy with videotape: pros and cons. , 1972, The American journal of psychiatry.

[3]  C. Gelso.  Effect of audiorecording and videorecording on client satisfaction and self-expression. , 1973, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[4]  Joseph Weizenbaum,et al.  and Machine , 1977 .

[5]  B. Thyer,et al.  The "Bug-in-the-Ear" in Clinical Supervision: , 1989 .

[6]  J. Sweller.  COGNITIVE LOAD THEORY, LEARNING DIFFICULTY, AND INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN , 1994 .

[7]  A. Kluger,et al.  The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. , 1996 .

[8]  C. Hill,et al.  Nature, extent, and importance of what psychotherapy trainees do not disclose to their supervisors. , 1996 .

[9]  Nathaniel I. Durlach,et al.  Virtual Reality (VR) and Psychotherapy: Opportunities and Challenges , 1997, Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments.

[10]  H Gu,et al.  The effects of averaging subjective probability estimates between and within judges. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Applied.

[11]  James H. Martin,et al.  Speech and language processing: an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition, 2nd Edition , 2000, Prentice Hall series in artificial intelligence.

[12]  D. Milne,et al.  Evidence‐based clinical supervision: rationale and illustration , 2001 .

[13]  Slava Kalyuga,et al.  The Expertise Reversal Effect , 2003 .

[14]  Howard Kirschenbaum.  Carl Rogers's Life and Work: An Assessment on the 100th Anniversary of His Birth , 2004 .

[15]  L. Beutler,et al.  Virtual reality in psychotherapy training. , 2004, Journal of clinical psychology.

[16]  Giuseppe Riva,et al.  Virtual Reality in Psychotherapy: Review , 2005, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[17]  E. Hawkins,et al.  Providing feedback to psychotherapists on their patients' progress: clinical results and practice suggestions. , 2005, Journal of clinical psychology.

[18]  Jeremy R. Kinney.  Airplanes: The Life Story of a Technology , 2006 .

[19]  J. Hattie,et al.  The Power of Feedback , 2007 .

[20]  Richard G. Moore,et al.  Self-Evaluation of Cognitive Therapy Performance: Do Therapists Know How Competent They Are? , 2008, Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy.

[21]  K. Carroll,et al.  What is usual about "treatment-as-usual"? Data from two multisite effectiveness trials. , 2008, Journal of substance abuse treatment.

[22]  M. Lambert,et al.  Improving psychotherapy outcome: the use of immediate electronic feedback and revised clinical support tools. , 2008, Clinical psychology & psychotherapy.

[23]  R. J. Reese,et al.  Does a continuous feedback system improve psychotherapy outcome? , 2009, Psychotherapy.

[24]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree. , 2009, The American psychologist.

[25]  R. DeRubeis,et al.  Therapist adherence/competence and treatment outcome: A meta-analytic review. , 2010, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[26]  Derrik R. Tollefson,et al.  A Meta-Analysis of Motivational Interviewing: Twenty-Five Years of Empirical Studies , 2010 .

[27]  G. Simon,et al.  Predictors of early dropout from psychotherapy for depression in community practice. , 2010, Psychiatric services.

[28]  Jeffrey E Barnett,et al.  Utilizing technological innovations to enhance psychotherapy supervision, training, and outcomes. , 2011, Psychotherapy.

[29]  A. Horvath,et al.  Alliance in individual psychotherapy. , 2011, Psychotherapy.

[30]  M. Amerikaner,et al.  Direct Observation of Psychology Supervisees' Clinical Work: A Snapshot of Current Practice , 2012 .

[31]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks , 2012, Commun. ACM.

[32]  S. Walfish,et al.  An Investigation of Self-Assessment Bias in Mental Health Providers , 2012, Psychological reports.

[33]  Michael Barkham,et al.  Patterns of therapist variability: therapist effects and the contribution of patient severity and risk. , 2012, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[34]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  Speech recognition with deep recurrent neural networks , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[35]  Emily Butler,et al.  Emotional Coregulation in Close Relationships , 2013 .

[36]  Leonard E. Egede,et al.  Delivery of Evidence-Based Psychotherapy via Video Telehealth , 2013 .

[37]  Response to Clark. , 2013, The American journal of psychiatry.

[38]  T. Tracey,et al.  Expertise in psychotherapy: an elusive goal? , 2014, The American psychologist.

[39]  Caroline B. Adelman,et al.  A meta-analysis of computerized cognitive-behavioral therapy for the treatment of DSM-5 anxiety disorders. , 2014, The Journal of clinical psychiatry.

[40]  Shrikanth S. Narayanan,et al.  "Rate My Therapist": Automated Detection of Empathy in Drug and Alcohol Counseling via Speech and Language Processing , 2015, PloS one.

[41]  P. Emmelkamp,et al.  Can virtual reality exposure therapy gains be generalized to real-life? A meta-analysis of studies applying behavioral assessments. , 2015, Behaviour research and therapy.

[42]  J. Talbot,et al.  What clinicians want: findings from a psychotherapy practice research network survey. , 2015, Psychotherapy.

[43]  David C. Atkins,et al.  More than reflections: empathy in motivational interviewing includes language style synchrony between therapist and client. , 2015, Behavior therapy.

[44]  David C. Atkins,et al.  Computational psychotherapy research: scaling up the evaluation of patient-provider interactions. , 2015, Psychotherapy.

[45]  David C. Atkins,et al.  Removing very low-performing therapists: A simulation of performance-based retention in psychotherapy. , 2015, Psychotherapy.

[46]  Mark Dredze,et al.  Discovering Shifts to Suicidal Ideation from Mental Health Content in Social Media , 2016, CHI.

[47]  S. Salvatore,et al.  A dynamic systems approach to psychotherapy: A meta-theoretical framework for explaining psychotherapy change processes. , 2016, Journal of counseling psychology.

[48]  David C. Atkins,et al.  A Comparison of Natural Language Processing Methods for Automated Coding of Motivational Interviewing. , 2016, Journal of substance abuse treatment.

[49]  Lori Wozney,et al.  A Systematic Review of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Behavioral Activation Apps for Depression , 2016, PloS one.

[50]  Shrikanth S. Narayanan,et al.  Designing Contestability: Interaction Design, Machine Learning, and Mental Health , 2017, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.