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 of the target turn representation for optimal empathy estimation. The client’s turns (interpersonal influence) 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.