Emotion recognition accuracy and training in psychotherapy education

Researchers, practitioners and legislators agree that it is important to understand which kinds of psychotherapeutic treatments lead to lasting positive changes in patients’ well-being, how those treatments can be administered in efficient ways and how it can be determined which patients would benefit from which treatment. In recent years, there has also been growing interest in those who practice psychotherapy; specifically, in the socio-emotional and interpersonal characteristics and competencies that psychotherapists should possess to provide high quality treatments for a variety of patients, irrespective of psychotherapy approach. This thesis studies one such important psychotherapist competency, namely the ability to recognize non-verbal emotional expressions in others. Psychotherapists need to be able to help patients experience, understand and express their emotions, and, in this context, it is crucial that they themselves have good socio-emotional competencies, like emotion recognition accuracy. Still, there is surprisingly little research about psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy and about how they could be supported in improving this ability in the course of their education. Study I explores trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy in the beginning and in the end of theoretical and practical psychotherapy education, and compares it to a control group of undergraduate students. The results reveal that trainee psychotherapists in the beginning of their education show superior emotion recognition accuracy for multimodal (audio, video, audio-video) emotional expressions and micro expressions (<200ms) compared to the control group. This suggests that those who choose to become psychotherapists might already possess elevated emotion recognition accuracy or might have developed it early on during their studies. However, after one and a half years of education, their multimodal and micro expression emotion recognition accuracy does not improve significantly more than the control groups’ accuracy. This suggests that standard (psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral) psychotherapy education does not automatically lead to improved emotion recognition accuracy, even though the trainees learn how to conduct psychotherapy and also treat their first patients at the university clinic. Or, alternatively, that the socio-emotional competencies that develop during the education might not be captured by the standardized computerized emotion recognition accuracy tasks used in this study. Nonetheless, this finding might also suggest that more explicit training of emotion recognition accuracy is needed. Study II then investigates two newly developed standardized computerized emotion recognition accuracy trainings, one for multimodal emotion recognition accuracy and one for micro expression recognition accuracy. The trainings are evaluated in a sample of undergraduate students using a mixed design. The trainings are compared to one another and to an active control training. Both trainings are found to significantly improve the participants’ emotion recognition accuracy in a oneweek posttest. Study III extends those findings using a sample of trainee psychotherapists. Also in the target population, both trainings are found to be effective in the one-week posttest. In addition to that, the multimodal training shows effects for unimodal emotion recognition accuracy for audio-only and video-only stimuli in the one-year follow-up towards the end of psychotherapy education. This indicates that standardized computerized emotion recognition accuracy training can be used as a tool for improving trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy, even though additional interventions might be needed for securing long-term success for all facets of emotion recognition. Future research should explore the practical impact of trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy and the training of this ability. The findings of this thesis are, on the one hand, surprising, in so far as psychotherapy education likely does not lead to improvements in trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy. On the other hand, they are encouraging, because they suggest that this ability can be trained with relatively simple and resource-efficient methods. Emotion recognition accuracy training could become part of standard or individualized psychotherapy training, alongside the training of other relevant verbal and non-verbal socio-emotional and interpersonal psychotherapist competencies.