A method for multi-level exploration of the psychotherapy process: New, user-friendly and expanded version of the Discourse Attributes Analysis Program (DAAP)

The focus of the workshop will be on presenting the new, user-friendly and expanded version of the Discourse Attributes Analysis Program (DAAP), for the purpose of exploring psychotherapy process in the context of the theory of the referential process. In addition to measures already in use - Disfluency (DF), which models the Arousal phase, and the Weighted Referential Activity Dictionary (WRAD), which models the Symbolizing phase of the process - we also use the new Weighted Reflection Reorganizing List (WRRL), which models the Reorganizing phase. The new program automatically produces numerical data and graphical images for varia]ons in these phases for both speakers. These images and data can be used to compare the psychotherapeutic process within the same treatment at different levels: turns of speech, or sessions or the entire treatment; they can also be used to compare different treatments at these different levels. The workshop will first briefly review the theoretical framework and some studies valida]ng the measures. Then we move on to the installa]on of the free user-friendly DAAP somware and dictionaries. Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops so they can install and run the software. We will run the software in English, Italian and Spanish on sample material that will be provided for the workshop. We then focus on interpretation of the software output, including graphical and numeric data and also discuss potential applications for clinical practice including supervision, and for process-outcome research, and address participants’ ideas and questions.