Examining interpersonal coordination in psychotherapeutic interactions and exploring its relationship with therapeutic processes

Abstract

Previous research indicates that coordination of client-therapist body movements is associated with a better psychotherapeutic alliance which, in turn, has been robustly linked to better therapeutic outcomes. This thesis includes a systematic review which set out to examine: 1) how movement coordination is conceptualised and assessed in existing research, 2) the relationship between movement coordination and therapeutic processes in psychotherapy, and 3) what measurement-related factors have been found to influence this relationship. The subsequent empirical study primarily aimed to pilot a novel set of methods for assessing movement coordination and its relationship with the therapeutic alliance in roleplay dyadic psychotherapy sessions. Machine-learning enabled automatic, real-time analysis of participants’ facially-expressed affective valence and arousal was employed. A bespoke coding system was developed to describe and categorise types of therapeutic communication displayed during sessions. Windowed cross-recurrence quantification analysis, a non-linear method which is particularly suited to investigating naturalistic human interactions, was used to analyse rates and patterns of facial affect coordination between ‘clients’ and ‘therapists’. It was hypothesised that coordination of facially-expressed affect would be more pronounced when therapist communication was focused on building the therapeutic alliance, as opposed to information gathering.

Thesis is embargoed until 31 December 2027.

Date of Award	Dec 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Mary Lavelle (Supervisor), Gary McKeown (Supervisor) & Magdalena Rychlowska (Supervisor)