Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors
Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors
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DOI：
10.18653/v1/p19-1089
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发表时间：
2019-06
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Justine Zhang;Robert Filbin;C. Morrison;Jaclyn Weiser;Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Justine Zhang;Robert Filbin;C. Morrison;Jaclyn Weiser;Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
心理健康咨询是一项具有深远社会重要性的事业，对话在其中发挥着主要作用。为了获得面对一系列具有挑战性的情况所需的对话技能，心理健康咨询师必须依靠培训和与实际客户的持续经验。然而，由于缺乏大规模的纵向研究，这一发展过程的性质和意义仍不清楚。例如，先前的文献表明，经验可能不会转化为咨询师行为的相应变化。这导致一些人甚至认为咨询是一个没有专业知识的职业。在这项工作中，我们开发了一个计算框架来量化个体根据经验改变其语言行为的程度，并研究这种进化的本质。我们使用我们的框架对心理健康咨询对话进行了大规模的纵向研究，跟踪了 3,400 多名咨询师在他们的任期内的情况。我们发现，总体而言，辅导员确实改变了他们的对话行为，使互动变得更加多样化，形成了将他们与其他辅导员区分开来的个人声音。此外，更细粒度的调查表明，这种多样化的速度和性质因功能不同的对话组件而异。
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.