Deception of the “elephant in the room”: Invisible auditing multi-party conversations to support caregivers in cognitive behavioral group therapies

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges in Group Therapy is to track each patient’s experience and feeling without him/her noticing. Altering the familiarity of the mutual support group routine may weaken the therapeutic efficacy of the intervention. It must be avoided the “Elephant in the room’s Effect”: everyone knows is being observed and acts consequently. Therapists struggle and spend years of training on developing the skills they need to “silently” monitor all patients at the same time. From our perspective, we wonder whether and how technology can be a support for therapists in such a challenging task. More precisely, how to provide them with a non-invasive support tool that is invisible to the end-users, but at the same time ever-present for the caregivers. Basically, we asked ourselves: Can we deceive “the Elephant in the room”? Therapists may benefit from automatic measures indicating how the participants perceive the session and gathering the participants’ feedback is one path to develop valuable mutual support interventions. Our work describes the design, development and assessment of a non-invasive tool to monitor a Group Session.