Simulating Couple Conflict: Designing A Multi-Agent System for Therapy Training and Practice
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , , , , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866908934084755456 |
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| author | Wang, Canwen Chen, Angela Bao, Catherine Jin, Siwei Swartz, Holly Wu, Tongshuang Kraut, Robert E Zhu, Haiyi |
| author_facet | Wang, Canwen Chen, Angela Bao, Catherine Jin, Siwei Swartz, Holly Wu, Tongshuang Kraut, Robert E Zhu, Haiyi |
| contents | Couples therapy requires managing complex, evolving emotional dynamics between partners, but traditional training methods for therapists, like role-play, lack realism, consistency, and control. We present a multi-modal simulation that models therapy as a controlled, multi-agent dynamical system with structured interaction stages. Therapists practice with a pair of client-agents who go through six evolving stages that respond to therapist actions. This simulation enables practice with demand-withdraw conflict patterns in a closed-loop environment. The simulation uses a sense-plan-act architecture: it detects the therapist's input, updates agents' interaction states based on psychotherapy theory and transcript analysis, and generates realistic verbal and emotional responses. In an experiment with 21 licensed U.S. therapists, participants more accurately identified state transitions and rated the system as more realistic and responsive than a prompt-based baseline, demonstrating the value of stateful, interpretable simulation for therapist training. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_10970 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Simulating Couple Conflict: Designing A Multi-Agent System for Therapy Training and Practice Wang, Canwen Chen, Angela Bao, Catherine Jin, Siwei Swartz, Holly Wu, Tongshuang Kraut, Robert E Zhu, Haiyi Computers and Society Human-Computer Interaction Couples therapy requires managing complex, evolving emotional dynamics between partners, but traditional training methods for therapists, like role-play, lack realism, consistency, and control. We present a multi-modal simulation that models therapy as a controlled, multi-agent dynamical system with structured interaction stages. Therapists practice with a pair of client-agents who go through six evolving stages that respond to therapist actions. This simulation enables practice with demand-withdraw conflict patterns in a closed-loop environment. The simulation uses a sense-plan-act architecture: it detects the therapist's input, updates agents' interaction states based on psychotherapy theory and transcript analysis, and generates realistic verbal and emotional responses. In an experiment with 21 licensed U.S. therapists, participants more accurately identified state transitions and rated the system as more realistic and responsive than a prompt-based baseline, demonstrating the value of stateful, interpretable simulation for therapist training. |
| title | Simulating Couple Conflict: Designing A Multi-Agent System for Therapy Training and Practice |
| topic | Computers and Society Human-Computer Interaction |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10970 |