Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors
This addresses the problem of understanding expertise development in mental health counseling for practitioners and researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on prior computational and psychological work.
The study tackled the unclear developmental process of mental health counselors' conversational skills by conducting a large longitudinal analysis of over 3,400 counselors, revealing that they change their linguistic behavior to become more diverse and develop individual voices over time.
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.