ArticleiScience2023
A natural language processing approach reveals first-person pronoun usage and non-fluency as markers of therapeutic alliance in psychotherapy.
Article in iScience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- A validated Mandarin Chinese Auditory Emotion Database of Subject-Personal-Pronoun Sentences (MCAE-SPPS).Scientific data · 2026Article
- A transdiagnostic conflict-square algorithm: a four-node computational framework for psychotherapy and functional diagnosis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Artificial Intelligence for Psychotherapy: A Review of the Current State and Future Directions.Indian journal of psychological medicine · 2025Review
- Evolution of Linguistic Markers of Agency, Centrality and Content During Metacognitive Therapy for Psychosis: A Pilot Exploratory Study.Early intervention in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Measuring Alliance and Symptom Severity in Psychotherapy Transcripts Using Bert Topic Modeling.Administration and policy in mental health · 2024Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
It remains elusive what language markers derived from psychotherapy sessions are indicative of therapeutic alliance, limiting our capacity to assess and provide feedback on the trusting quality of the patient-clinician relationship. To address this critical knowledge gap, we leveraged feature extraction methods from natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence, to quantify pronoun and non-fluency language markers that are relevant for communicative and emotional aspects of therapeutic relationships. From twenty-eight transcripts of non-manualized psychotherapy sessions recorded in outpatient clinics, we identified therapists' first-person pronoun usage frequency and patients' speech transition marking relaxed interaction style as potential metrics of alliance. Behavioral data from patients who played an economic game that measures social exchange (i.e. trust game) suggested that therapists' first-person pronoun usage may influence alliance ratings through their diminished trusting behavior toward therapists. Together, this work supports that communicative language features in patient-therapist dialogues could be markers of alliance.
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