"That's aggravating, very aggravating": Is it possible to classify behaviors in couple interactions using automatically derived lexical features?

Abstract

Psychology is often grounded in observational studies of human interaction behavior, and hence on human perception and judgment. There are many practical and theoretical challenges in observational practice. Technology holds the promise of mitigating some of these difficulties by assisting in the evaluation of higher level human behavior. In this work we attempt to address two questions: (1) Does the lexical channel contain the necessary information towards such an evaluation; and if yes (2) Can such information be captured by a noisy automated transcription process. We utilize a large corpus of couple interaction data, collected in the context of a longitudinal study of couple therapy. In the original study, each spouse was manually evaluated with several session-level behavioral codes (e.g., level of acceptance toward other spouse). Our results will show that both of our research questions can be answered positively and encourage future research into such assistive observational technologies. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.