Clients' and therapists' parasympathetic interpersonal and intrapersonal regulation dynamics during psychotherapy for depression.

Objective: The literature on affective regulation in psychotherapy has traditionally relied on explicit client self-report measures. However, both clients' and therapists' affect fluctuate moment-to-moment during a session, highlighting the need for more implicit and continuous indices to better understand these dynamics. This study examined parasympathetic interpersonal and intrapersonal regulation dynamics between therapists and clients with Major Depressive Disorder during Supportive-Expressive Therapy.

Intrapersonal and interpersonal vocal affect dynamics during psychotherapy.

Objective: The present study implements an automatic method of assessing arousal in vocal data as well as dynamic system models to explore intrapersonal and interpersonal affect dynamics within psychotherapy and to determine whether these dynamics are associated with treatment outcomes.

Method: The data of 21,133 mean vocal arousal observations were extracted from 279 therapy sessions in a sample of 30 clients treated by 24 therapists. Before and after each session, clients self-reported their well-being level, using the Outcome Rating Scale.