DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors

06/17/2019
by   Justine Zhang, et al.
Crisis Text Line
cornell university
0

Mental health counseling is an enterprise with profound societal importance where conversations play a primary role. In order to acquire the conversational skills needed to face a challenging range of situations, mental health counselors must rely on training and on continued experience with actual clients. However, in the absence of large scale longitudinal studies, the nature and significance of this developmental process remain unclear. For example, prior literature suggests that experience might not translate into consequential changes in counselor behavior. This has led some to even argue that counseling is a profession without expertise. In this work, we develop a computational framework to quantify the extent to which individuals change their linguistic behavior with experience and to study the nature of this evolution. We use our framework to conduct a large longitudinal study of mental health counseling conversations, tracking over 3,400 counselors across their tenure. We reveal that overall, counselors do indeed change their conversational behavior to become more diverse across interactions, developing an individual voice that distinguishes them from other counselors. Furthermore, a finer-grained investigation shows that the rate and nature of this diversification vary across functionally different conversational components.

READ FULL TEXT
11/16/2021

Coral: An Approach for Conversational Agents in Mental Health Applications

It may be difficult for some individuals to open up and share their thou...
09/17/2020

A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support

Empathy is critical to successful mental health support. Empathy measure...
06/22/2022

Then and Now: Quantifying the Longitudinal Validity of Self-Disclosed Depression Diagnoses

Self-disclosed mental health diagnoses, which serve as ground truth anno...
04/30/2023

SMILE: Single-turn to Multi-turn Inclusive Language Expansion via ChatGPT for Mental Health Support

There has been an increasing research interest in developing specialized...
09/28/2020

Risk of Interruption of Doctoral Studies and Mental Health in PhD Students

PhD students report a higher prevalence of mental illness symptoms than ...
10/21/2022

Exploration of the Usage of Color Terms by Color-blind Participants in Online Discussion Platforms

Prominent questions about the role of sensory vs. linguistic input in th...