Health and Behavior: Monitoring Interactions in Therapeutic Relationships

Led by Paul Peluso, Ph.D.

Paul R. Peluso, Ph.D., LMHC, LMFT is Professor and Chair of the Department of Counselor Education at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He is the co-author of five books, including Changing Aging, Changing Family Therapy: Practicing with 21st Century Realities (Routledge Publishing), Couples Therapy: Integrating Theory, Research, &Practice (Love Publishing), Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy: Learning the Essential Domains and Nonlinear Thinking of Master Practitioners (Routledge Publishing), as well as the editor of the book Infidelity: A Practitioner's Guide to Working with Couples in Crisis (Routledge Publishing). Peluso is the editor of the journal Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development author of over 25 articles and 12 chapters related to the therapeutic relationship, family therapy, couples counseling, and Adlerian Theory. He is currently directing a multi-year study of the quality of the therapeutic relationship using observational coding of verbal and non-verbal behavior, and mathematically modelling it using dynamical systems mathematics. He has written and produced a video series to accompany his Principles textbook, and has been a featured speaker in the THERAPY Talks video series by Alexander Street Press. Paul R. Peluso is also the current President of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counseling (a division of the American Counseling Association). His areas of clinical expertise include couples therapy, infidelity, family therapy, traumatic grief and loss, and domestic violence.

The Alliance Lab at FAU offers several opportunities for students.

1. We are investigating methods to extract audio and video data from a video recording in order to measure the degree of verbal and non-verbal synchrony between two people engaged in a (therapeutic) conversation.

2. We are also looking to apply Cross-Recourance Quantification Analysis (CRQA) to streams of Time Series data using an R package (and MATLAB) in order to look at temporal correspondence of verbal and non-verbal behavior that can indicate a successful (or unsuccessful) therapeutic relationship).