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Assessing Affective Dimensions of Play in Psychodynamic Child Psychotherapy via Text Analysis

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Book cover Human Behavior Understanding (HBU 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 9997))

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Abstract

Assessment of emotional expressions of young children during clinical work is an important, yet arduous task. Especially in natural play scenarios, there are not many constraints on the behavior of the children, and the expression palette is rich. There are many approaches developed for the automatic analysis of affect, particularly from facial expressions, paralinguistic features of the voice, as well as from the myriads of non-verbal signals emitted during interactions. In this work, we describe a tool that analyzes verbal interactions of children during play therapy. Our approach uses natural language processing techniques and tailors a generic affect analysis framework to the psychotherapy domain, automatically annotating spoken sentences on valence and arousal dimensions. We work with Turkish texts, for which there are far less natural language processing resources than English, and our approach illustrates how to rapidly develop such a system for non-English languages. We evaluate our approach with longitudinal psychotherapy data, collected and annotated over a one year period, and show that our system produces good results in line with professional clinicians’ assessments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ethnologue estimates it as 71 millions as of 2006, related Wikipedia content suggests the numbers to be closer to 80 millions.

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Acknowledgments

This study is partially supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) grants 114E481 and 215K180.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Sibel Halfon

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Eda Aydın Oktay & Albert Ali Salah

Authors
  1. Sibel Halfon
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  2. Eda Aydın Oktay
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  3. Albert Ali Salah
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Correspondence to Albert Ali Salah .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université Pierre et Marie Curie , Paris, France

    Mohamed Chetouani

  2. University of Pittsburgh , Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Jeffrey Cohn

  3. Bogazici University , Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey

    Albert Ali Salah

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Halfon, S., Aydın Oktay, E., Salah, A.A. (2016). Assessing Affective Dimensions of Play in Psychodynamic Child Psychotherapy via Text Analysis. In: Chetouani, M., Cohn, J., Salah, A. (eds) Human Behavior Understanding. HBU 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9997. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46843-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46843-3_2

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