Evaluation of active listening in psychotherapy

Comparison of clinical psychologists and students

Abstract

Active listening is one of the indispensable axes in evaluating the dialogue of psychotherapy. Although there have been discussions about it in the area of clinical psychology, the method for evaluating active listening has been missing. It is thus necessary to establish it to improve the quality of listening in the interview. The authors have proposed a measurement method of the degree of active listening with a device we originally developed to evaluate emotion (EMO system). This paper reports on the experiment conducted to compare the evaluations of a psychotherapy by expert clinical psychologists with those by undergraduate students as one of the coursework tasks for a clinical psychology course. A new experimental setup was proposed including a multiresolutional analysis to detect the change of active listening evaluation.