Psychological Distress
Psychological Distress is a group of overlapping mental disorders which include depression, anxiety, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). While depressed individuals often lose interest in activities and feel sad or overwhelmed, PTSD is mainly characterized by flashbacks to traumatic events.
We evaluated behaviors of a large group of individuals in interviews with a virtual human. In these interviews, people answered questions related to symptoms of depression and PTSD. During these interactions, we observed more downwards gaze behavior for self-reported depression, a more tense voice for self-reported PTSD and self-reported depression, and less smile intensity for self-reported PTSD. Currently, we focus on automatically estimating behavioral markers which are typically measured by therapists and clinicians.
Publications
T. Wörtwein and S. Scherer. What really matters — An information gain analysis of questions and reactions in automated PTSD screenings. In Proceedings of International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2017
A. Rizzo, G. Lucas, J. Gratch, G. Stratou, L.-P. Morency, K. Chavez, R. Shilling, and S. Scherer, Automatic Behavior Analysis During a Clinical Interview with a Virtual Human, In Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (NextMed/MMVR), J. D. Westwood et al. (Ed), IOS Press, 2016
A. Rizzo, G. Lucas, J. Gratch, G. Stratou, L.-P. Morency, R. Shilling, A. Hartholt and S. Scherer, Clinical interviewing by a virtual human agent with automatic behavior analysis, In Proceedings of the International Conference on Disability, Virtual Reality & Associated Technologies (ICDVRAT), 2016 ** Best Paper Award **
S. Stratou and L.-P. Morency, MultiSense – Context-Aware Nonverbal Behavior Analysis Framework: A Psychological Distress Use Case, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2016
S.Scherer, L.-P. Morency, J. Gratch, and J. Pestian. Reduced Vowel Space is a Robust Indicator of Psychological Distress: A Cross-Corpus Analysis. In Proceedings of the 40th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2015
T.Wörtwein, L.-P. Morency and S. Scherer, Automatic Assessment and Analysis of Public Speaking Anxiety: A Virtual Audience Case Study. In Proceedings of International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2015
G. Stratou, L.-P. Morency, D. Devault, A. Hartholt, E. Fast, M. Lhommet, G. Lucas, F. Morbini, K. Georgila, S. Scherer, J. Gratch, S. Marsella, D. Traum and A. Rizzo, A Demonstration of the Perception System in SimSensei, a Virtual Human Application for Healthcare Interviews, Demo Paper at the sixth International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2015 **Best demo paper award**
A. Rizzo, R. Shilling, E. Forbell, S. Scherer, J. Gratch, and L.-P. Morency, Autonomous Virtual Human Agents for Healthcare Information Support and Clinical Interviewing, Luxton, D.D. (Ed). Artifical Intelligence in Mental Healthcare Practice. Academic Press, 2015, pp. 53 – 80.
S. Scherer, J. Gratch, A. Rizzo and L.-P. Morency. Self-reported symptoms of depression and PTSD are associated with reduced vowel space in screening interviews. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, June 2015
S. Scherer, G. Stratou, G. Lucas, M. Mahmoud, J. Boberg, J. Gratch, A. Rizzo and L.-P. Morency, Automatic Audiovisual Behavior Descriptors for Psychological Disorder Analysis, Image and Vision Computing Journal, Elsevier, Volume 32, Issue 10, October 2014, Pages 648–658
G. Stratou, S. Scherer, J. Gratch and L.-P. Morency, Automatic Nonverbal Behavior Indicators of Depression and PTSD: The Effect of Gender, Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, June 2014
D. Devault, A. Rizzo and L.-P. Morency, SimSensei: A Virtual Human Interviewer for Healthcare Decision Support. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2014
J.Gratch, G. Lucas, A. King, and L.-P. Morency, It’s Only a Computer: The Impact of Human-agent Interaction in Clinical Interviews. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2014
M. Chatterjee, G. Stratou, S. Scherer and L.-P. Morency, Context-based Signal Descriptors of Heart-rate Variability for Anxiety Assessment, In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2014
S. Ghosh, M. Chatterjee, L.-P. Morency, A Multimodal Context-based Approach for Distress Assessment. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), 2014
S. Scherer, Z. Hammal, Y. Yang, L.-P. Morency and J. Cohn, Dyadic Behavior Analysis in Depression Severity Assessment Interviews. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), 2014
J. Gratch, R. Artstein, G. Lucas, G. Stratou, S. Scherer, A. Nazarian, R. Wood, J. Boberg, D. DeVault, S. Marsella, D. Traum, S. Rizzo, L.-P. Morency, The Distress Analysis Interview Corpus of human and computer interviews. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2014
Z. Yu, S. Scherer, D. Devault, J. Gratch, G. Stratou, L.-P. Morency and J. Cassell. Multimodal Prediction of Psychological Disorders: Learning Verbal and Nonverbal Commonalities in Adjacency Pairs. Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial), 2013
S.Scherer, G. Stratou, J. Boberg, J. Gratch, A. Rizzo and L.-P. Morency. Automatic Behavior Descriptors for Psychological Disorder Analysis. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), 2013 *** Best paper award ***
S.Scherer, G. Stratou, J. Gratch and L.-P. Morency. Investigating Voice Quality as a Speaker-Independent Indicator of Depression and PTSD. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), 2013
D. DeVault, K. Georgila, R. Artstein, F. Morbini, D. Traum, S. Scherer, A. Rizzo, L.-P. Morency. Verbal Indicators of Psychological Distress in Interactive Dialogue with a Virtual Human. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SigDial), 2013
S. Scherer, G. Stratou, J. Gratch and L.-P. Morency. Audiovisual Behavior Descriptors for Depression Assessment. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), 2013
G. Stratou, S. Scherer, J. Gratch and L.-P. Morency. Automatic Nonverbal Behavior Indicators of Depression and PTSD: Exploring Gender Differences. In Proceedings of International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2013
J. Gratch, L.-P. Morency, S. Scherer, G. Stratou, J. Boberg, S. Koenig, T. Adamson and A. Rizzo. User-State Sensing for Virtual Health Agents and TeleHealth Applications. In Proceedings of Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR), 2013
S. Kang, C. Sidner, J. Gratch, R. Artstein, L. Huang and L.-P. Morency. Modeling Nonverbal Behavior of a Virtual Counselor during Intimate Self-Disclosure. In Proceedings of the Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), 2011