Therapy Practice and AI

• A natural language processing approach reveals first-person pronoun usage and non-fluency as markers of therapeutic alliance in psychotherapy
  It remains elusive what language markers derived from psychotherapy sessions are indicative of therapeutic alliance, limiting our capacity to assess and provide feedback on the trusting quality of the…
• AI Models Exceed Individual Human Accuracy in Predicting Everyday Social Norms
  A fundamental question in cognitive science concerns how social norms are acquired and represented. While humans typically learn norms through embodied social experience, we investigated whether large…
• AutoCBT: An Autonomous Multi-agent Framework for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Psychological Counseling
  online automated counseling offers a potential solution for those hesitant to seek help due to feelings of shame. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an essential and widely used approach in psychol…
• COMPASS: Computational Mapping of Patient-Therapist Alliance Strategies with Language Modeling
  The therapeutic working alliance is a critical factor in predicting the success of psychotherapy treatment. Traditionally, working alliance assessment relies on questionnaires completed by both therap…
• Can robots do therapy?: Examining the efficacy of a CBT bot in comparison with other behavioral intervention technologies in alleviating mental health symptoms
  In a recent systematic review of the literature, (Conley et al., 2022) note that this literature has yet to answer the question of whether BITs can be considered an effective and low-cost substitution…
• Challenges of Large Language Models for Mental Health Counseling
  large language models (LLMs) capable of understanding and generating human-like text may be used in supporting or providing psychological counseling. However, the application of LLMs in the mental hea…
• Comparing Human and AI Therapists in Behavioral Activation for Depression: Cross-Sectional Questionnaire Study
  A shortage of trained therapists and mental health care providers has driven informal use of LLMs for therapeutic support. However, their clinical utility remains poorly defined. Objective: This study…
• Detecting Cognitive Distortions from Patient-Therapist Interactions
  An important part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is to recognize and restructure certain negative thinking patterns that are also known as cognitive distortions. This project aims to detect the…
• Development and validation of large language model rating scales for automatically transcribed psychological therapy sessions
  Rating scales have shaped psychological research, but are resource-intensive and can burden participants. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a tool to assess latent constructs in text. This study intr…
• Empowering Psychotherapy with Large Language Models: Cognitive Distortion Detection through Diagnosis of Thought Prompting
  In the era of Large Language Models, we believe it is the right time to develop AI assistance for computational psychotherapy. We study the task of cognitive distortion detection and propose the Diagn…
• Evaluating the Efficacy of Interactive Language Therapy Based on LLM for High-Functioning Autistic Adolescent Psychological Counseling
  significant emphasis was placed on the development of prompts used to guide the Large LanguageModel (LLM). This process was intricate and involved multiple stages to ensure that the prompts were effec…
• Evaluating the Therapeutic Alliance With a Free-Text CBT Conversational Agent (Wysa): A Mixed-Methods Study
  The anonymised transcripts of user’s conversations with Wysa were also examined through content analysis for unprompted elements of bonding between the user and Wysa These mean bond subscale scores w…
• Evidence of Human-Level Bonds Established With a Digital Conversational Agent: Cross-sectional, Retrospective Observational Study
  We aimed to investigate whether users of a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)–based conversational agent would report therapeutic bond levels that are similar to those in literature about other CBT mo…
• Exploring the Frontiers of LLMs in Psychological Applications: A Comprehensive Review
  As general-purpose cognitive models (Binz & Schulz, 2023a), LLMs offer new perspectives and approaches for research in the fields of cognitive and behavioral psychology, clinical and counseling psycho…
• Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers
  Should a large language model (LLM) be used as a therapist? In this paper, we investigate the use of LLMs to replace mental health providers, a use case promoted in the tech startup and research space…
• From Five Dimensions to Many: Large Language Models as Precise and Interpretable Psychological Profilers
  We prompted various LLMs with Big Five Personality Scale responses from 816 human individuals to role-play their responses on nine other psychological scales. LLMs demonstrated remarkable accuracy in …
• H2HTalk: Evaluating Large Language Models as Emotional Companion
  We present Heart-to-Heart Talk (H2HTalk), a benchmark assessing companions across personality development and empathetic interaction, balancing emotional intelligence with linguistic fluency. H2HTalk …
• LLM-based Conversational AI Therapist for Daily Functioning Screening and Psychotherapeutic Intervention via Everyday Smart Devices
  Description automatically generated](file:////Users/adrianchan/Library/Group%20Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/TemporaryItems/msohtmlclip/clip_image011.png) When the user needs further attention during …
• Large Language Models Do Not Simulate Human Psychology
  In response to the LLM CENTAUR [Binz et al., 2025], Bowers et al. [2025] argued that CENTAUR is unlikely to contribute to building a theory of human cognition for three reasons: First, CENTAUR was not…
• Large language models could change the future of behavioral healthcare: a proposal for responsible development and evaluation
  LLMs and psychotherapy skills For certain use cases, LLM show a promising ability to conduct tasks or skills needed for psychotherapy, such as conducting assessment, providing psychoeducation, or demo…
• Measuring Alliance and Symptom Severity in Psychotherapy Transcripts Using Bert Topic Modeling
  We aim to use topic modeling, an approach for discovering clusters of related words (“topics”), to predict symptom severity and therapeutic alliance in psychotherapy transcripts, while also identifyin…
• MoodAngels: A Retrieval-augmented Multi-agent Framework for Psychiatry Diagnosis
  The application of AI in psychiatric diagnosis faces significant challenges, including the subjective nature of mental health assessments, symptom overlap across disorders, and privacy constraints lim…
• Neural Topic Modeling of Psychotherapy Sessions
  During the session, the dialogue between the patient and therapist are transcribed into pairs of turns. We take the full records of a patient, or a cohort of patients belonging to the same condition. …
• PATIENT-Ψ: Using Large Language Models to Simulate Patients for Training Mental Health Professionals
  Mental illness remains one of the most critical public health issues. Despite its importance, many mental health professionals highlight a disconnect between their training and actual real-world patie…
• PsyDT: Using LLMs to Construct the Digital Twin of Psychological Counselor with Personalized Counseling Style for Psychological Counseling
  LLMs fail to satisfy the individual needs of clients who seek different counseling styles. To help bridge this gap, we propose PsyDT, a novel framework using LLMs to construct the Digital Twin of Psyc…
• PsychAdapter: Adapting LLM Transformers to Reflect Traits, Personality and Mental Health
  Artificial intelligence-based language generators are now a part of most people’s lives. However, by default, they tend to generate “average” language without reflecting the ways in which people diffe…
• Psychotherapy AI Companion with Reinforcement Learning Recommendations and Interpretable Policy Dynamics
  We introduce a Reinforcement Learning Psychotherapy AI Companion that generates topic recommendations for therapists based on patient responses. The system uses Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to ge…
• Rethinking Large Language Models in Mental Health Applications
  the instability of generative models for prediction and the potential for generating hallucinatory outputs, underscoring the need for ongoing audits and evaluations to maintain their reliability and d…
• SupervisorBot: NLP-Annotated Real-Time Recommendations of Psychotherapy Treatment Strategies with Deep Reinforcement Learning
  The base of our recommendation system relies on a rating system that evaluates how good a treatment strategy is. Here we propose the Reinforced Recommendation model for Dialogue topics in psychiatric…
• The Digital Therapeutic Alliance and Human-Computer Interaction
  This conceptual paper explores one such instrument that has been proposed in the literature, the Mobile Agnew Relationship Measure, and examines it through a human-computer interaction (HCI) lens. Thr…
• The Digital Therapeutic Alliance: Prospects and Considerations
  The increasing prevalence of digital mental health research and interventions has given rise to the term “digital therapeutic alliance” (DTA), which aims to conceptually capture and measure the therap…
• The Incomplete Bridge: How AI Research (Mis)Engages with Psychology
  Social sciences have accumulated a rich body of theories and methodologies for investigating the human mind and behaviors, while offering valuable insights into the design and understanding of Artific…
• Towards Understanding Counseling Conversations: Domain Knowledge and Large Language Models
  This paper proposes a systematic approach to examine the efficacy of domain knowledge and large language models (LLMs) in better representing conversations between a crisis counselor and a help seeker…
• Understanding the Therapeutic Relationship between Counselors and Clients in Online Text-based Counseling using LLMs
  Robust therapeutic relationships between counselors and clients are fundamental to counseling effectiveness. The assessment of therapeutic alliance is well-established in traditional face-to-face ther…
• Using Linguistic Synchrony to Evaluate Large Language Models for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
  Synchrony describes responsive communication between individuals and is known to be important in building social relationships and supporting mental health outcomes (Delaherche et al., 2012; Klein, 20…
• Using Topic Models to Identify Clients’ Functioning Levels and Alliance Ruptures in Psychotherapy
  Computerized Natural Language Processing techniques can analyze psychotherapy sessions as texts; thus generating information about the therapy process and outcome and supporting the scaling-up of psyc…
• Working Alliance Transformer for Psychotherapy Dialogue Classification
  As a predictive measure of the treatment outcome in psychotherapy, the working alliance measures the agreement of the patient and the therapist in terms of their bond, task and goal. Long been a clini…