The Association of Transformer-based Sentiment Analysis with Symptom Distress and Deterioration in Routine Psychotherapy Care

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Faust, Douglas K., Awad, Peter, Vaz, Alexandre, Rousmaniere, Tony
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866917479589085184
author Faust, Douglas K.
Awad, Peter
Vaz, Alexandre
Rousmaniere, Tony
author_facet Faust, Douglas K.
Awad, Peter
Vaz, Alexandre
Rousmaniere, Tony
contents Sentiment analysis has been of long-standing interest in psychotherapy research. Recently, the Transformer deep learning architecture has produced text-based sentiment analysis models that are highly accurate and context-aware. These models have been explored as proxies for emotion measurement instruments in psychotherapy, but not investigated as stand-alone psychometric tools. Using proposed utterance-level and session-level sentiment features derived from a fine-grained sentiment model on a large corpus of psychotherapy sessions (N = 751), we investigate the distribution of session aggregated sentiment scores. Further, we characterize the relationship of these features to individual components and the overall score of the OQ-45 instrument and find that this sentiment feature is most strongly correlated to components related to emotional valence in directionally intuitive ways. Finally, we report that there are statistically significant differences between the sentiment distributions for patients flagged as at risk of deterioration or dropping out of care via either the OQ Rational or Empirical outcome models. These correlations to a fully-validated psychometric instrument demonstrate that these proposed sentiment features are, at least, adjunctive measures of client distress and deterioration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09838
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Association of Transformer-based Sentiment Analysis with Symptom Distress and Deterioration in Routine Psychotherapy Care
Faust, Douglas K.
Awad, Peter
Vaz, Alexandre
Rousmaniere, Tony
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
62P10 (Primary) 68T50, 91E45 (Secondary)
J.3; I.2.7
Sentiment analysis has been of long-standing interest in psychotherapy research. Recently, the Transformer deep learning architecture has produced text-based sentiment analysis models that are highly accurate and context-aware. These models have been explored as proxies for emotion measurement instruments in psychotherapy, but not investigated as stand-alone psychometric tools. Using proposed utterance-level and session-level sentiment features derived from a fine-grained sentiment model on a large corpus of psychotherapy sessions (N = 751), we investigate the distribution of session aggregated sentiment scores. Further, we characterize the relationship of these features to individual components and the overall score of the OQ-45 instrument and find that this sentiment feature is most strongly correlated to components related to emotional valence in directionally intuitive ways. Finally, we report that there are statistically significant differences between the sentiment distributions for patients flagged as at risk of deterioration or dropping out of care via either the OQ Rational or Empirical outcome models. These correlations to a fully-validated psychometric instrument demonstrate that these proposed sentiment features are, at least, adjunctive measures of client distress and deterioration.
title The Association of Transformer-based Sentiment Analysis with Symptom Distress and Deterioration in Routine Psychotherapy Care
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
62P10 (Primary) 68T50, 91E45 (Secondary)
J.3; I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09838