Hyperscanning Psychotherapy
1 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Brain differences do not proffer guarantee of psychological states, of which follows that neither mental dysfunction nor proper treatments can be anchored on them beyond spurious correlations. Driving success of psychotherapy appears to scaffold on a diligent yet empathic rapport, which emerges during the interactive, intersubjective state-system of the therapist-client dyad. A heuristic view on the effects of psychotherapy thus demands a naturalistic, multilevel, multimodal paradigm, which accommodates a broader set of biomarkers as potential predictors of positive outcome. This project is set to explore whether there are large-scale, macroscopic, dynamic neural topographies which can constitute such functional biomarkers of inter-subjective alliance, hallmark predictor of success rates of psychotherapeutic sessions, by integrating neural synchrony into a three-way model which accounts for state-transitions throughout the dyadic setting with a Natural Language Inference model for discourse-level classification and clinical-behavioral measures stemming from the Open Dialogue framework. This Registered Report Protocol outlines the design, methods, and analysis plan for the hyperscanning experiment aimed at investigating the neural correlates of the Open Dialogue psychotherapy approach, with the aim to elucidate how real-time therapeutic interactions influence neural activity and connectivity patterns in the brains of both therapists and patients and these, in turn, can be co-symptomatic of positive outcomes of treatment.