Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors

Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 936–947 Florence, Italy, July 28 - August 2, 2019. c⃝2019 Association for Computational Linguistics 936 Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors Justine Zhang Cornell University jz727@cornell.edu Robert Filbin Crisis Text Line bob@crisistextline.org Christine Morrison Crisis Text Line christine@crisistextline.org Jaclyn Weiser Crisis Text Line jweiser@crisistextline.org Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil ∗ Cornell University cristian@cs.cornell.edu Abstract Mental health counseling is an enterprise with profound societal importance where conver- sations play a primary role. In order to ac- quire the conversational skills needed to face a challenging range of situations, mental health counselors must rely on training and on con- tinued experience with actual clients. How- ever, in the absence of large scale longitudi- nal studies, the nature and significance of this developmental process remain unclear. For example, prior literature suggests that expe- rience might not translate into consequential changes in counselor behavior. This has led some to even argue that counseling is a profes- sion without expertise. In this work, we develop a computational framework to quantify the extent to which in- dividuals change their linguistic behavior with experience and to study the nature of this evo- lution. 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 di- verse across interactions, developing an in- dividual 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. 1 Introduction Conversations are central to many human en- deavors and professions, from academic advis- ing, to business negotiations, to customer ser- vice, to mental health counseling. The choice of conversational language has been shown to correlate with a broad spectrum of consequential ∗Corresponding senior author. outcomes such as success in persuasion (Haber- nal and Gurevych, 2016; Tan et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2016; Packard et al., 2018), in team performance (Yang et al., 2015; Niculae and Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, 2016), or in social sup- port (Atkins et al., 2014; Althoff et al., 2016; Choudhury and Kıcıman, 2017). However, sur- prisingly little is known about how adults de- velop conversational skills. Understanding this challenging process has the potential to help with tracking and fostering behavioral development in conversation-focused endeavors. In this work, we address this knowledge gap by examining how individuals change their conversa- tional language in a domain with profound soci- etal importance, where conversations play a pri- mary role: mental health counseling. Counselors in this setting face a daunting task: through con- versations, they need to empathetically respond to and support clients undergoing psychological dis- tress (Althoff et al., 2016). Initial training can orient counselors towards the principles of counseling conversations, but cannot cover the broad range of situations they will in- evitably encounter. Practical experience, on the other hand, comes with scarce direct feedback: it is hard for …

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