This investigation tested the hypothesis that the probabilistic structure underlying psychotherapy interviews is Markovian. The "goodness of fit" of a first-order Markov chain model to actual therapy interviews was assessed using a x squared test of homogeneity, and by generating by Monte Carlo methods empirical sampling distributions of…

This project investigated the probabilistic interactional structure of counseling interviews conducted by two groups of counselors of differing levels of cognitive complexity, and the consistency of that structure within each group across sequences of two interviews. Analysis of the counselor-client interaction patterns between the two groups of…