Computerized Linguistic Analysis of Counselors' Clinical Notes in a University Counseling Center: Which Associations Correspond With Students' Symptom Reduction in a Brief Psychodynamic Intervention?

University counseling represents an effective tool for promoting students' mental health, for reducing a variety of psychological disorders, and to offer developmental support and guidance in the resolution of educational and academic challenges. Despite this, there is still a paucity of literature on which variables are involved in explaining the effectiveness of university counseling. For this reason, we applied the multiple code theory to the clinical process by analyzing therapists' clinical notes. Aims of the study are to investigate the usefulness of a university counseling intervention by evaluating changes in the psychological symptomatology between pre- and postintervention and in the linguistic measures applied to clinical reports of the first and last sessions. The sample consisted of 88 university students (mean age = 23.30, 73.9% identified as female) and 15 psychologists (mean age = 33.93). Measures used are Italian Discourse Attributes Analysis Program and Linguistic Measures of the Referential Process, Outcome Questionnaire-45, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Beck Depression Inventory-II, Personality Inventory for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 Brief Form. Results showed a significant reduction in patients' symptomatology in all the dimensions investigated. Moreover, some significant changes in linguistic measures applied to clinical reports emerged such as an increase in reflection/reorganization process. Finally, these findings are also confirmed by significant correlations between students' personality traits and linguistic measures of clinical reports, between pre/postintervention tests scores, and linguistic characteristics of first/last clinical reports that respectively emerged. In conclusion, our study shows that brief counseling intervention shows improvement in students' symptoms by both investigating the instruments and analyzing the writing style of counselors who performed the brief treatments.

Automated summary

University counseling is an effective tool for promoting students' mental health and reducing psychological disorders. However, there is limited literature on the variables that explain its effectiveness. This study used multiple code theory to analyze therapists' clinical notes and investigated the usefulness of university counseling intervention. Results showed a significant reduction in patients' symptomatology and changes in linguistic measures. The study highlights the importance of both instruments and counselors' writing style in improving students' symptoms.