Affective Computing in Psychotherapy

Key points

• Psychotherapy is evolving away from its roots as an individual, face-to-face interaction to cope with workforce shortages in the face of overwhelming demand and a destabilizing pandemic.
• Affective computing is the branch of computer science focused on detecting, interpreting, processing, and simulating human emotion. It has the potential to overcome the limitations of contemporary approaches to digital therapy.
• Advances in affective computing and adjacent technologies can enhance our understanding and delivery of psychotherapy, though several practical and ethical barriers remain.
• Effective partnerships between system developers and mental health clinicians and consumers will be crucial to widespread clinical adoption.

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