Physiological, acoustic, and self-reported responses to benign and challenging therapy situations: A pilot study with psychotherapy trainees.

Objective: Challenging therapy situations are interpersonally charged moments in therapy and can serve as a critical marker for assessing therapists' interpersonal skills. This study aimed to investigate trainee therapists' stress response during such situations.

Method: Trainees (n = 46) completed both the Facilitative Interpersonal Skills performance task to measure challenging therapy situations and an additional benign condition depicting interpersonally neutral moments in therapy. We assessed heart rate, heart rate variability, skin conductance level, fundamental frequency, speech rate, and self-reported distress to measure stress throughout the task.

Results: Analyses show differences on most outcome measures between the benign and challenging condition in the predicted direction (more arousal), although there was no alignment with self-reported distress.

Conclusion: These findings highlight the promising nature of considering trainees' stress responses in different therapy situations in future research.