Analyzing speech rate entrainment and its relation to therapist empathy in drug addiction counseling

A key quality index in drug addiction counseling such as Motivational Interviewing is the degree of therapist’s empathy towards the client. Empathy ratings are meant to evaluate the therapist’s understanding of the patient’s feelings, through their sensitivity and care of response. Empathy is also associated with the manifestation of behavioral entrainment in the interaction. In this paper, we compute a measure of entrainment in speech rate during dyadic interactions, and investigate its relation to perceived empathy. We show that the averaged absolute difference of turn-level speech rates between the therapist and the patient correlates with the ratings of therapist empathy. We also present the correlation of empathy to the statistics of speech and silence durations. Finally we show that in the task of automatically predicting high or low empathy, speech rate cues provide complementary information to previously proposed prosodic cues. These findings suggest speech rate as an important behavioral cue that is modulated by entrainment and contributes to empathy modeling.

[1]  Panayiotis G. Georgiou,et al.  Modeling therapist empathy and vocal entrainment in drug addiction counseling , 2013, INTERSPEECH.

[2]  Mohamed Chetouani,et al.  Interpersonal Synchrony: A Survey of Evaluation Methods across Disciplines , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

[3]  John J. Godfrey,et al.  SWITCHBOARD: telephone speech corpus for research and development , 1992, [Proceedings] ICASSP-92: 1992 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[4]  N. Feshbach.  Parental empathy and child adjustment/maladjustment. , 1987 .

[5]  W. Miller,et al.  Toward a theory of motivational interviewing. , 2009, The American psychologist.

[6]  Junji Yamato,et al.  Analyzing perceived empathy/antipathy based on reaction time in behavioral coordination , 2013, 2013 10th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG).

[7]  M. Iacoboni.  Imitation, empathy, and mirror neurons. , 2009, Annual review of psychology.

[8]  Sean J. Tollison,et al.  Questions and reflections: the use of motivational interviewing microskills in a peer-led brief alcohol intervention for college students. , 2008, Behavior therapy.

[9]  C. Batson.  These things called empathy: Eight related but distinct phenomena. , 2009 .

[10]  G. Bryant,et al.  Convergence of speech rate in conversation predicts cooperation , 2013 .

[11]  M J Maloney,et al.  The importance of empathy as an interviewing skill in medicine. , 1991, JAMA.

[12]  David C. Atkins,et al.  A randomized controlled trial of event-specific prevention strategies for reducing problematic drinking associated with 21st birthday celebrations. , 2012, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[13]  Alex Black,et al.  Motor mimicry as primitive empathy. , 1987 .

[14]  G. Tober.  Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change , 2013 .

[15]  J. Decety,et al.  The functional architecture of human empathy. , 2004, Behavioral and cognitive neuroscience reviews.

[16]  Panayiotis G. Georgiou,et al.  Analyzing the language of therapist empathy in Motivational Interview based psychotherapy , 2012, Proceedings of The 2012 Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference.

[17]  Thomas G. Arizmendi,et al.  Linking mechanisms: Emotional contagion, empathy, and imagery. , 2011 .

[18]  Junji Yamato,et al.  Analyzing empathetic interactions based on the probabilistic modeling of the co-occurrence patterns of facial expressions in group meetings , 2011, Face and Gesture 2011.

[19]  R. Hayward.  Empathy , 1971, The Lancet.

[20]  Athanasios Katsamanis,et al.  Computing vocal entrainment: A signal-derived PCA-based quantification scheme with application to affect analysis in married couple interactions , 2014, Comput. Speech Lang..

[21]  Panayiotis G. Georgiou,et al.  Modeling therapist empathy through prosody in drug addiction counseling , 2014, INTERSPEECH.

[22]  David C. Atkins,et al.  Indicated prevention for college student marijuana use: a randomized controlled trial. , 2013, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[23]  David C. Atkins,et al.  Brief intervention for problem drug use in safety-net primary care settings: a randomized clinical trial. , 2014, JAMA.

[24]  B. Guitar,et al.  Influence of mothers' slower speech on their children's speech rate. , 2001, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[25]  Daniel A. Schneider,et al.  The differential contribution of facial expressions, prosody, and speech content to empathy , 2012, Cognition & emotion.

[26]  Bryan Hartzler,et al.  Agency context and tailored training in technology transfer: a pilot evaluation of motivational interviewing training for community counselors. , 2009, Journal of substance abuse treatment.

[27]  Daniel Povey,et al.  The Kaldi Speech Recognition Toolkit , 2011 .

[28]  David C. Atkins,et al.  Randomized controlled trial of a Spring Break intervention to reduce high-risk drinking. , 2014, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[29]  S. Preston,et al.  Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. , 2001, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[30]  T. Wheatley,et al.  From Mind Perception to Mental Connection: Synchrony as a Mechanism for Social Understanding , 2012 .

[31]  Panayiotis G. Georgiou,et al.  Behavioral Signal Processing: Deriving Human Behavioral Informatics From Speech and Language , 2013, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[32]  W. Miller,et al.  Is low therapist empathy toxic? , 2013, Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors.