From Words to Therapeutic Processes: An Exploratory Computational Linguistics Study of Emerging Adults in Photolangage-Based Group Psychotherapy

The present study investigates the therapeutic process in brief group psychotherapy for emerging adults, mediated by the Photolangage technique and analysed through Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. The research was conducted with a group of university students participating in a Photolangage-based intervention at the Centro di Ateneo dei Servizi Clinici Universitari Psicologici of the University of Padova. In recent years, psychotherapy research has increasingly incorporated computational approaches, including NLP, to examine linguistic and emotional patterns in clinical discourse. In parallel, Photolangage has been conceptualised as a mediational technique that supports the expression of verbal contents through images. However, both lines of research remain relatively limited in the existing literature. The current research, applying computational text analysis to post-session clinical reports within a brief image-mediated group psychotherapy setting, has a twofold aim: first, to contribute to the growing field of computational psychotherapy research; second, to extend the literature on Photolangage by examining its potential as a mediational tool that facilitates the expression and elaboration of contents in group psychotherapy contexts.