Objective To test the effectiveness of a stepped care intervention model targeting posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms after injury. Background Few investigations have evaluated interventions for injured patients with PTSD and related impairments that can be feasibly implemented in trauma surgical settings. Methods The investigation was a pragmatic effectiveness trial in which 207 acutely injured hospitalized trauma survivors were screened for high PTSD symptom levels and then randomized to a stepped combined, care management, psychopharmacology, and cognitive behavioral psychotherapy intervention (n = 104) or usual care control (n = 103) conditions. The symptoms of PTSD and functional limitations were reassessed at one-, three-, six-, nine-, and twelve-months after the index injury admission. Results Regression analyses demonstrated that over the course of the year after injury, intervention patients had significantly reduced PTSD symptoms when compared to controls (group by time effect, CAPS, F(2, 185) = 5.50, P < 0.01; PCL-C, F(4, 185) = 5.45, P < 0.001). Clinically and statistically significant PTSD treatment effects were observed at the six-, nine-, and twelve-month post-injury assessments. Over the course of the year after injury, intervention patients also demonstrated significant improvements in physical function (MOS SF-36 PCS main effect, F(1, 172) = 9.87, P < 0.01). Conclusion Stepped care interventions can reduce PTSD symptoms and improve functioning over the course of the year after surgical injury hospitalization. Orchestrated investigative and policy efforts could systematically introduce and evaluate screening and intervention procedures for PTSD at United States trauma centers. (Trial Registration: clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT00270959)

Empathy is a basic psychological process that involves the development of synchrony in dyads. It is also a foundational ingredient in specific, evidence-based behavioral treatments like motivational interviewing (MI). Ratings of therapist empathy typically rely on a gestalt, “felt sense” of therapist understanding and the presence of specific verbal behaviors like reflective listening. These ratings do not provide a direct test of psychological processes like behavioral synchrony that are theorized to be an important component of empathy in psychotherapy. To explore a new objective indicator of empathy, we hypothesized that synchrony in language style (i.e., matching how statements are phrased) between client and therapists would predict gestalt ratings of empathy over and above the contribution of reflections. We analyzed 122 MI transcripts with high and low empathy ratings based on the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) global rating scale. Linguistic inquiry and word count was used to estimate language style synchrony (LSS) of adjacent client and therapist talk turns. High empathy sessions showed greater LSS across 11 language style categories compared to low empathy sessions (p < .01), and overall, average LSS was notably higher in high empathy vs. low empathy sessions (d = 0.62). Regression analyses showed that LSS was predictive of empathy ratings over and above reflection counts; a 1 SD increase in LSS is associated with 2.4 times increase in the odds of a high empathy rating, controlling for therapist reflections (odds ratio = 2.4, 95% CI: 1.36, 4.24, p < .01). These findings suggest empathy ratings are related to synchrony in language style, over and above synchrony of content as measured by therapist reflections. Novel indicators of therapist empathy may have implications for the study of MI process as well as the training of therapists.

clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT00619255.

With the growing prevalence of psychological interventions, it is vital to have measures which rate the effectiveness of psychological care to assist in training, supervision, and quality assurance of services. Traditionally, quality assessment is addressed by human raters who evaluate recorded sessions along specific dimensions, often codified through constructs relevant to the approach and domain. This is, however, a cost-prohibitive and time-consuming method that leads to poor feasibility and limited use in real-world settings. To facilitate this process, we have developed an automated competency rating tool able to process the raw recorded audio of a session, analyzing who spoke when, what they said, and how the health professional used language to provide therapy. Focusing on a use case of a specific type of psychotherapy called "motivational interviewing", our system gives comprehensive feedback to the therapist, including information about the dynamics of the session (e.g., therapist's vs. client's talking time), low-level psychological language descriptors (e.g., type of questions asked), as well as other high-level behavioral constructs (e.g., the extent to which the therapist understands the clients' perspective). We describe our platform and its performance using a dataset of more than 5000 recordings drawn from its deployment in a real-world clinical setting used to assist training of new therapists. Widespread use of automated psychotherapy rating tools may augment experts' capabilities by providing an avenue for more effective training and skill improvement, eventually leading to more positive clinical outcomes.