Abstract
Mental health counseling is an enterprise with
profound societal importance where conversations play a primary role. In order to acquire the conversational skills needed to face a
challenging range of situations, mental health
counselors must rely on training and on continued experience with actual clients. However, in the absence of large scale longitudinal studies, the nature and significance of this
developmental process remain unclear. For
example, prior literature suggests that experience might not translate into consequential
changes in counselor behavior. This has led
some to even argue that counseling is a profession without expertise.
In this work, we develop a computational
framework to quantify the extent to which individuals change their linguistic behavior with
experience and to study the nature of this evolution. We use our framework to conduct
a large longitudinal study of mental health
counseling conversations, tracking over 3,400
counselors across their tenure. We reveal
that overall, counselors do indeed change their
conversational behavior to become more diverse across interactions, developing an individual voice that distinguishes them from
other counselors. Furthermore, a finer-grained
investigation shows that the rate and nature
of this diversification vary across functionally
different conversational components.