268 research outputs found
Hierarchical Attention Network for Evaluating Therapist Empathy in Counseling Session
Counseling typically takes the form of spoken conversation between a
therapist and a client. The empathy level expressed by the therapist is
considered to be an essential quality factor of counseling outcome. This paper
proposes a hierarchical recurrent network combined with two-level attention
mechanisms to determine the therapist's empathy level solely from the acoustic
features of conversational speech in a counseling session. The experimental
results show that the proposed model can achieve an accuracy of 72.1% in
classifying the therapist's empathy level as being "high" or "low". It is found
that the speech from both the therapist and the client are contributing to
predicting the empathy level that is subjectively rated by an expert observer.
By analyzing speaker turns assigned with high attention weights, it is observed
that 2 to 6 consecutive turns should be considered together to provide useful
clues for detecting empathy, and the observer tends to take the whole session
into consideration when rating the therapist empathy, instead of relying on a
few specific speaker turns.Comment: Submitted to INTERSPEECH 202
A Study on Prosodic Entrainment in Relation to Therapist Empathy in Counseling Conversation
Counseling is carried out as spoken conversation between a therapist and a
client. The empathy level expressed by the therapist is considered an important
index of the quality of counseling and often assessed by an observer or the
client. This research investigates the entrainment of speech prosody in
relation to subjectively rated empathy. Experimental results show that the
entrainment of intensity is more influential to empathy observation than that
of pitch or speech rate in client-therapist interaction. The observer and the
client have different perceptions of therapist empathy with the same entrained
phenomena in pitch and intensity. The client's intention to make adjustment on
pitch variation and intensity of speech is considered an indicator of the
client's perception of counseling quality.Comment: Accepted by INTERSPEECH 202
Modeling Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Influences for Automatic Estimation of Therapist Empathy in Counseling Conversation
Counseling is usually conducted through spoken conversation between a
therapist and a client. The empathy level of therapist is a key indicator of
outcomes. Presuming that therapist's empathy expression is shaped by their past
behavior and their perception of the client's behavior, we propose a model to
estimate the therapist empathy by considering both intrapersonal and
interpersonal influences. These dynamic influences are captured by applying an
attention mechanism to the therapist turn and the historical turns of both
therapist and client. Our findings suggest that the integration of dynamic
influences enhances empathy level estimation. The influence-derived embedding
should constitute a minor portion in the target turn representation for optimal
empathy estimation. The client's turns (interpersonal influence) appear to
slightly surpass the therapist's own turns (intrapersonal influence) in empathy
estimation effectiveness. It is noted that concentrating exclusively on recent
historical turns can significantly impact the estimation of therapist empathy
Anno-Mi : A dataset of expert- annotated counselling dialogues
This work has been funded by the EC in the H2020 Marie SkÅodowska-Curie PhilHumans project, contract no. 812882. We would also like to thank Dr. Mark Aloia for his guidance and support
A speech-based empathy training system - initial design insights
Empathy is an essential component of human communication since it increases our understanding and perception of others. However, studies show that students\u27 empathy skills have declined rapidly in the last decades. Against this background, practitioner reports predict that the importance of empathy will increase as a skill for successful agile teamwork in the future. Therefore, researchers have designed information systems to train empathy abilities of learners in different domains. Nevertheless, research on automated speech-based training is rather scarce. Hence, we aim to investigate how to design a speech-based empathy training system that helps students react emotionally adequately in communication. This research in progress paper presents five initial requirements that guide future research and development of a speech-based empathy training system intended to support students\u27 self-regulated learning. With this, we hope to provide guidance for the design and embedding of speech-based empathy training systems at scale
Using fundamental frequency of cancer survivorsā speech to investigate emotional distress in out-patient visits
Objective Emotions, are in part conveyed by varying levels of fundamental frequency of voice pitch (f0). This study tests the hypothesis that patients display heightened levels of emotional arousal (f0) during Verona Coding Definitions of Emotional Sequences (VR-CoDES) cues and concerns versus during neutral statements. Methods The audio recordings of sixteen head and neck cancer survivorsā follow-up consultations were coded for patientsā emotional distress. Pitch (f0) of coded cues and concerns, including neutral statements was extracted. These were compared using a hierarchical linear model, nested for patient and pitch range, controlling for statement speech length. Utterance content was also explored. Results Clustering by patient explained 30% of the variance in utterances f0. Cues and concerns were on average 13.07 Hz higher than neutral statements (p = 0.02). Cues and concerns in these consultations contained content with a high proportion of recurrence fears. Conclusion The present study highlights the benefits and challenges of adding f0 and potential other prosodic features to the toolkit of coding emotional distress in the health communication setting. Practice implications The assessment of f0 during clinical conversations can provide additional information for research into emotional expression.PostprintPeer reviewe
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