The DAAPLab (Discourse Attributes Analysis Program Laboratory): A Tool to Monitor and Measure the Therapeutic Process for Supervision, Research, and Clinical Purposes

To bridge the gap between psychotherapy research and clinical practice, it is useful to adopt a complexity-oriented epistemological approach, in which internal and external views on the therapeutic process are considered a source of knowledge. Often in Routine Outcome Monitoring (ROM), only internal evaluations of sessions made by patient and therapist are considered. Analysis of the language and linguistic style adopted by patient and therapist can add an external perspective on the emotional processing path of psychotherapy. The referential process theory (Bucci, 1997, 2020) proposes a particularly effective hypothesis on how psychotherapy activates different pahses of emotional processing, typically moving from an arousal phase to a symbolizing/narrating phase and then a reflecting/reorganizing phase. The Discourse Attributes Analysis Program (DAAP, Maskit, 2011) allows for the application of a set of developed and validated computerized linguistic measures that can detect these phases through the analysis of the words and language style of the session. This presentation will focus on the functionality and potential of DAAPLab, an application recently developed to make DAAP easily applicable to psychotherapy sessions in therapists' daily practice, supervision, and clinical research. The analysis of a psychodynamic treatment will exemplify how the app, when used in daily clinical practice, can be a valuable tool that amplifies the subjective understanding processes of the therapist, supervisor, and even the researcher by making visually and quantitatively measurable the succession of arousal, symbolizing/narrating, reflecting/reorganizing phases both within the individual session and throughout the treatment