A Multimodal Context-based Approach for Distress Assessment

The increasing prevalence of psychological distress disorders, such as depression and post-traumatic stress, necessitates a serious effort to create new tools and technologies to help with their diagnosis and treatment. In recent years, new computational approaches were proposed to objectively analyze patient non-verbal behaviors over the duration of the entire interaction between the patient and the clinician. In this paper, we go beyond non-verbal behaviors and propose a tri-modal approach which integrates verbal behaviors with acoustic and visual behaviors to analyze psychological distress during the course of the dyadic semi-structured interviews. Our approach exploits the advantages of the dyadic nature of these interactions to contextualize the participant responses based on the affective components (intimacy and polarity levels) of the questions. We validate our approach using one of the largest corpus of semi-structured interviews for distress assessment which consists of 154 multimodal dyadic interactions. Our results show significant improvement on distress prediction performance when integrating verbal behaviors with acoustic and visual behaviors. In addition, our analysis shows that contextualizing the responses improves the prediction performance, most significantly with positive and intimate questions.