Modeling empathy as synchrony in clinician and patient vocally encoded emotional arousal: A failure to replicate.

Abstract

Empathy is a well-defined active ingredient in clinical encounters. To measure empathy, the current gold standard is behavioral coding (i.e. trained coders attribute overall ratings of empathy to clinician behaviors within an encounter), which is labor intensive and subject to important reliability challenges. Recently, an alternative measurement has been proposed: capturing empathy as synchrony in vocally encoded arousal, which can be measured as the mean fundamental frequency of the voice (mean F0). This method has received preliminary support by one study . We aimed to replicate this study by using two large samples of clinical interactions (alcohol brief motivational interventions with young adults, N = 208; general practice consultations, N = 204). Audio files were segmented to identify respective speakers and mean F0 was measured using speech signal processing software. All sessions were independently rated by behavioral coders using two validated empathy scales. Synchrony between clinician and patient F0 was analyzed using multivariate multilevel models and compared to high and low levels of empathy derived from behavioral coding. Findings showed no support for our hypothesis that mean F0 synchrony between clinicians and patients would be higher in high-empathy sessions. This lack of replication was consistent for both clinical samples, both behavioral coding

Silence in the psychotherapy of adolescents with borderline personality pathology.

“…Such synchronization concerning silence was expected based on previous research of turn taking, mainly in mothers and infants (Jaffe et al, 2001). This observed synchronization might also occur in psychotherapy, making silence one of the synchronizing modalities in psychotherapy (see Gaume et al, 2019;Imel et al, 2014;Kleinbub, 2017;Paulick et al, 2018;Reich, Berman, Dale, & Levitt, 2014;Schultz et al, 2016 for other modalities). Interestingly, the second principal component (PC2), which explained 27% of variance in the silence data, showed a negative correlation mainly between patient and therapist pauses.…”

Using Vector Autoregression Modeling to Reveal Bidirectional Relationships in Gender/Sex-Related Interactions in Mother–Infant Dyads

“…The average kappa score across all measures was 0.73. All individual kappa scores were above the cutoff for "substantial" or "acceptable" agreement except for two variables (i.e., holding toy object and passive play-two variables that meet current standards for "moderate" agreement; Danko et al, 2016;Ladd et al, 2016;Marquis et al, 2017;Yao et al, 2017;Gaume et al, 2019). Neither of these variables were significant for the analysis presented in this paper.…”

Impact of physician empathy on patient outcomes: a gender analysis

“… 28 Patients’ and physicians’ MFF was automatically measured every 0.25 seconds using Praat software version 5.3.82. The correlation between the patient’s and physician’s MFF was then computed across minutes while controlling for physician’s and patient’s gender (see Gaume et al 29 and Baldwin et al 30 for model details), ending with SVMFF scores ranging from −1 = total dyssynchrony (for example, patient displaying elevation of voice pitch while physician uses low pitch) to 1 = total synchrony.…”

“…We also thank Dr Kevin Hallgren, who extracted Synchrony of Vocal Mean Fundamental Frequencies indices based on the models calculated in a previous study. 29 …”