UC Irvine

Ever increasing evidence suggests that the quality of the unique partnership between psychotherapist and client, the therapeutic alliance, might be strongly predictive of treatment outcomes. However, therapeutic alliance is a complex construct that is difficult to measure directly and objectively. Moreover, there is a lack of established measures based on concrete behavioral phenomena that capture the therapeutic alliance as a dynamic, continuously evolving process. The behavioral synchrony literature supports the pursuit of indirect measures of the quality of the therapeutic alliance, with evidence indicating that language style matching (LSM) is predictive of treatment outcomes and could serve to index therapeutic alliance. The present language analysis study of psychotherapy session transcripts from 48 therapist-client dyads examined the relation between LSM and scores on an existing observer-rated therapeutic alliance measure, the revised version of the Collaborative Interactions Scale (CIS-R). LSM during the middle of the therapy session was a moderately strong positive predictor of CIS-R score for the same portion of the session, suggesting that LSM could be phenomenologically related to therapeutic alliance. Future research should examine different aspects of the therapeutic alliance more closely in order to clarify these findings, and replicate them in other samples.