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

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

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

Middle temporal gyrus and sub-cortical areas are related to exdogenous temporal expectation

Temporal expectations are considered as implicit timing, which is different from explicit timing. Furthermore, temporal expectations could be divided into exogenous and endogenous temporal expectations. However, it is still unclear about the neural activation under temporal expectations. In the present study, experimental paradigm was designed for eliciting the related brain activation under exogenous temporal expectations. Brain activations were obtained by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found some brain areas related to exogenous temporal perceptions that including TPJ, MTG, and thalamus. ? 2012 IEEE.EI

An FMRI study of the neural systems involved in visually cued auditory top-down spatial and temporal attention.

Top-down attention to spatial and temporal cues has been thoroughly studied in the visual domain. However, because the neural systems that are important for auditory top-down temporal attention (i.e., attention based on time interval cues) remain undefined, the differences in brain activity between directed attention to auditory spatial location (compared with time intervals) are unclear. Using fMRI (magnetic resonance imaging), we measured the activations caused by cue-target paradigms by inducing the visual cueing of attention to an auditory target within a spatial or temporal domain. Imaging results showed that the dorsal frontoparietal network (dFPN), which consists of the bilateral intraparietal sulcus and the frontal eye field, responded to spatial orienting of attention, but activity was absent in the bilateral frontal eye field (FEF) during temporal orienting of attention. Furthermore, the fMRI results indicated that activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) was significantly stronger during spatial orienting of attention than during temporal orienting of attention, while the DLPFC showed no significant differences between the two processes. We conclude that the bilateral dFPN and the right VLPFC contribute to auditory spatial orienting of attention. Furthermore, specific activations related to temporal cognition were confirmed within the superior occipital gyrus, tegmentum, motor area, thalamus and putamen

Mass Spectral Profile for Rapid Differentiating Beta-Lactams from Their Ring-Opened Impurities

High performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC MS) has been widely used for β-lactam antibiotics determination. However, its application to identify impurities of these frequently used drugs is not sufficient at present. In this job, characteristic profiles of the collision induced dissociation (CID) spectra of both β-lactams and ring-opened β-lactams were extracted from the MS data of six β-lactam antibiotics and their forty-five impurities, and were confirmed by the MS data reported in the literature. These characteristics have been successfully applied to rapid differentiation of β-lactam and ring-opened β-lactam impurities in cefixime, cefdinir, and cefaclor. However, these characteristic profiles can only be obtained under low activating voltage. They did not display in the high energy activated CID spectra. Diagnostic fragmentations for determining the localization of double bond and substituents on the thiazine ring and the side chain were also observed. In addition, several characteristic fragmentations are hopeful to be used to differentiate the configurations of C-2 on the thiazine ring of ring-opened impurities, which is generally disadvantageous of mass spectrometry. Taken together, forty-five impurities were identified from the capsules of cefixime, cefdinir, and cefaclor

Activations related to attentional conditions.

<p>Significance was set at an uncorrected threshold of <i>p</i><0.0005 and K = 150 voxels. The approximate anatomical regions and Brodmann areas are shown according to the Talairach atlas, and the x, y, and z coordinates are from the SPM5. Abbreviations are as follows: SPL - Superior Parietal Lobe, IPL - Inferior Parietal Lobe, STG - Superior temporal Gyrus, MTG - Middle temporal Gyrus, SFG - Superior Frontal Gyrus, IFG - Inferior Frontal Gyrus, CC - Cingulate Cortex, PFG - Prefrontal Gyrus, MFG - Middle Frontal Gyrus, R - right hemisphere, L - left hemisphere, and M - bilateral hemisphere.</p