Our goal is to help healing professionals gather powerful information and insights quickly and easily, so that they have even more time for connection with clients.
The analytics summary section is intended to show you your session's talking ratio, speech cadence and response time at-a-glance.
The analytics summary
In your session overview, you’ll see analytics summary underneath session recording.
This should be composed of talking ratio, speech cadence, and response time.
Why is it important?
Talking ratio
We define this as the talking time divided by the session time. In other words, the speaking time of the client versus the healing professional, during a single session.
Interpreting it
The talking ratio is a great way to quickly understand how long you spoke for compared to the client as a percentage of the session time. You’ll also see the absolute time too, i.e. the minutes of the session you spoke for compared to your client.
Why this may be important: there is some evidence that in bad sessions therapists over-participated compared to their clients or acted very passively – while in good sessions, the client-therapist participation levels were more balanced. (Friedlander, 1985). Therefore a balanced percentage share may be a good thing!
It can also be connected to LSM (Language Style Matching), as clients and therapists with speaking symmetry show heightened attunement to the other (Pennebaker, 2011). Therefore, it may be one of the factors predicting the strength of a therapeutic alliance, and potentially, therapeutic success. (Borelli et al., 2019.)
Speech cadence
We define this as the number of words per minute of talking time. Speech cadence measures both the client’s and therapists’ words per minute across time, i.e. over the course of a session. You can always easily benchmark client speech cadence against your own.
Interpreting it
Average cadence is about 150 words per minute (based on English speakers in the United States) but everyone has a unique average. As above, speech cadence may reflect LSM and levels of attunement in a therapeutic relationship. Therefore, we've made it easy to benchmark your values against a client's.
Another insight this measure may provide is potential indication of mood state changes such as in the manic or depressive states that, for example, accompany borderline disorder. (Notably: pressured speech and poverty of speech which would be visible at a glance from your analytics summary.)
Response time
The average time (in seconds) that it takes a client to respond to a healing professional’s question or statement and vice versa. In other words, this measures the time to reply or respond between therapist and client.
Interpreting it
There is some evidence that a faster response time may be more pleasing for the client, while longer time to respond may be anxiety-inducing. (Matarazzo & Wiens, 1967). A healing professional may therefore benefit from keeping an eye on their response times for each client, however, it should of course be differentiated from intentional work with silence. Potentially, there may also be a connection between therapeutic alliance and response time – however, there are many factors that go into the development of this relationship and so response time should only be seen as one constituent component.
Is the analytics summary helpful? We're introducing AI into the world of mental health to help healing professionals like you. Your feedback and ideas are essential. 🙏