Lillian Döllinger

Research is still limited on how psychologists recognize non-verbal emotional expressions in others and how psychology students can improve their ability to understand emotions in the context of their psychotherapy training.

In her doctoral thesis, Lillian Döllinger examined the emotion recognition of psychology students at the beginning and at the end of the clinical part of the psychology program (from semester 7 to semester 9) and compared this group with a control group of other students. In addition, she has evaluated two different emotion recognition accuracy training programs with the hope that these can be used to complement the regular clinical training.

When did you become interested in this area of research?

– My interest was sparked during my time as a trainee in Isabelle Letellier's research project on psychology students' ability to recognize non-verbal emotional expressions. I find it very fascinating to try to understand what happens in interpersonal processes in therapies. For example, it can be about the non-verbal communication in therapy or, more generally, about the interaction between patient and therapist.

– Being able to read or interpret other people's non-verbal emotional expressions (such as facial expressions, body movements or language tones) can be beneficial in all kinds of interpersonal situations. In different forms of psychotherapy, such as psychodynamic therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy, which I have explored, psychotherapists work to support their patients in identifying, experiencing, regulating and understanding their emotions.

Front cover of the thesis (detail)

– People are often not fully aware of their own emotions, and sometimes need help to distinguish or manage emotions or to experience emotions that they find frightening. The idea is that it can be important for a therapeutic process that the therapist is able to observe and try to understand non-verbal emotional expressions that the patient may not have access to in the moment. I think this is an extremely interesting area of research!

What can your thesis contribute to educational therapy?

– I think it is of utmost importance to increase the understanding of what factors contribute to the success of a therapy and how we can support our students in developing into competent and confident psychologists or psychotherapists. Our clinical training programs already include many important components, including teaching of psychotherapeutic theory and method, role play exercises, clinical supervision and clinical practice. At the same time, we know that the therapist's personal qualities and competences, such as warmth, empathy and the ability to repair alliance breaks, also play an important role in therapeutic encounters.

– My dissertation is about standardised computerised training procedures designed to increase psychology students' (or other people's) emotion recognition accuracy skills, a skill we consider to be one of these core competencies. Our research indicates that the training procedures are very effective in improving this ability, at least in the short term and in some aspects also in the long term.

What happens next?

– There are still many unanswered research questions regarding non-verbal emotion recognition in the therapy room. For example, it is important to investigate whether psychologists' emotion recognition accuracy skills and training of these skills actually affect therapy outcomes and process variables. We are currently analysing data from the Stockholm University Psychology Clinic to answer these questions. In other research projects, we will focus more on the non-verbal interaction between patient and therapist that we analyse using AI. At the same time, I continue to be active as an adjunct teacher in the psychology and psychotherapy programs and at the clinic. 

Being able to read or interpret other people's non-verbal emotional expressions can be beneficial in all sorts of interpersonal situations.

– However, I do not think that standardised training, in its isolated form, should replace other forms of training, but rather that it can complement them. For example, our results suggest that students with low emotion recognition accuracy skills benefit most from explicit training. This is something I see as very positive and could play an important role in individualized psychotherapy education. However, more research is needed before we can implement concrete training sessions on non-verbal processes in therapy.

Read the thesis