Large-scale Analysis of Counseling Conversations:An Application of Natural Language Processing to Mental Health
Table 3: Differences between more and less successful counselors (C; More S. and Less S.) in responses to nearly identical situation setters (Sec. 6.1) by the texter (T). Last column contains significance levels of Wilcoxon Signed Rank Tests (*** p<0.001, – p>0.05).
['[EMPTY]', 'More S.', 'Less S.', 'Test']
Results. While situation setters tend to be slightly longer for more successful counselors (suggesting that conversations are not perfectly randomly assigned), counselor responses are significantly longer and also spur longer texter responses. Further, the more successful counselors respond in a way that is less similar to the original situation setter (measured by cosine similarity in TF-IDF space) compared to less successful counselors (but the texter’s response does not seem affected). We do find that more successful counselors use more check questions, check for suicide ideation more often, show the texter more appreciation, and use more hedges, but we did not find a significant difference with respect to responding with surprise.