Therapist Empathy Assessment in Motivational Interviews

The quality and effectiveness of psychotherapy sessions are highly influenced by the therapists’ ability to lead the conversation with empathy and acceptance. Manual assessment of the quality of therapy sessions is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we propose a method for estimating session-level therapist empathy ratings for Motivational Interviewing (MI) using therapist language, which has applications in clinical assessment and training. We analyze different stages within therapy sessions to investigate the importance of each stage and its topics of conversation in estimating session-level therapist empathy. We perform experiments on two datasets of MI therapy sessions for alcohol use disorder with session-level empathy scores provided by expert annotators. We achieve average CCC (Concordance Correlation Coefficient) scores of 0.596 and 0.408 for estimating therapist empathy under therapist-dependent and therapist-independent evaluation settings. Our results suggest that therapist responses to client’s discussions on activities and experiences around the problematic behavior (in this case, alcohol abuse) along with the therapist’s usage of in-depth reflections, are the most significant factors in the perception of therapists’ empathy.