Modeling therapist empathy through prosody in drug addiction counseling

Empathy measures the capacity of the therapist to experience the same cognitive and emotional dispositions as the patient, and is a key quality factor in counseling. In this work we build computational models to infer the empathy of therapist using prosodic cues. We extract pitch, energy, jitter, shimmer and utterance duration from the speech signal, and normalize and quantize these features in order to estimate the distribution of certain prosodic patterns during each interaction. We find significant correlation between empathy and the distribution of prosodic patterns, and achieve 75% accuracy in classifying therapist empathy levels using this distribution. Experiment results suggest high pitch and energy of the therapist are negatively correlated with empathy. These observations agree with domain literature and human intuition.

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

[2]  Richard C. Hendriks,et al.  Unbiased MMSE-Based Noise Power Estimation With Low Complexity and Low Tracking Delay , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[3]  G. Barrett‐Lennard,et al.  The empathy cycle: Refinement of a nuclear concept. , 1981 .

[4]  Anssi Peräkylä,et al.  Prosody and empathic communication in psychotherapy interaction , 2014, Psychotherapy research : journal of the Society for Psychotherapy Research.

[5]  Shrikanth S. Narayanan,et al.  The psychologist as an interlocutor in autism spectrum disorder assessment: insights from a study of spontaneous prosody. , 2014, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[6]  David C. Atkins,et al.  The association of therapist empathy and synchrony in vocally encoded arousal. , 2014, Journal of counseling psychology.

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

[8]  Lisa Aziz-Zadeh,et al.  Common Premotor Regions for the Perception and Production of Prosody and Correlations with Empathy and Prosodic Ability , 2010, PloS one.

[9]  P. J. Green,et al.  Probability and Statistical Inference , 1978 .

[10]  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.

[11]  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.

[12]  Ipke Wachsmuth,et al.  A Computational Model of Empathy: Empirical Evaluation , 2013, 2013 Humaine Association Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction.

[13]  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).

[14]  H. Van hamme,et al.  Robust speech recognition using cepstral domain missing data techniques and noisy masks , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[15]  Branka Zei Pollermann.  A place for prosody in a unified model of cognition and emotion , 2002, Speech Prosody 2002.

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

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

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

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

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

[21]  James C. Lester,et al.  Modeling and evaluating empathy in embodied companion agents , 2007, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[22]  J. Sundberg,et al.  Acoustic measurements and perceptual evaluation of hoarseness in children's voices , 1998 .

[23]  References , 1971 .

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

[25]  D. J. Hermes,et al.  Measurement of pitch by subharmonic summation. , 1988, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[26]  Shrikanth S. Narayanan,et al.  A robust frontend for VAD: exploiting contextual, discriminative and spectral cues of human voice , 2013, INTERSPEECH.

[27]  M. Kendall.  Probability and Statistical Inference , 1956, Nature.

[28]  Nancy Eisenberg,et al.  Empathic responding: Sympathy and personal distress. , 2009 .

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