Therapy-FIS: A Dataset for Assessing Facilitative Interpersonal Skills in Psychotherapeutic Setting

Qijian Zheng, Wanqing Lin, Yuanfang Wang, Yijun Ge, Jordan Bate +2

Facilitative Interpersonal Skills (FIS) is a performance-based assessment method that provides a structured framework for evaluating the interpersonal competencies of mental health professionals. However, existing FIS assessment relies heavily on human observer ratings, making the evaluation process labor-intensive, costly, and difficult to scale. Progress toward automated FIS assessment has also been constrained by the lack of publicly available professional data in psychotherapy settings. To address this limitation, we introduce Therapy-FIS, a dataset for automated FIS assessment in standardized psychotherapy tasks. To our knowledge, Therapy-FIS is the first publicly available dataset in this domain. It contains facial, acoustic, and textual signals derived from standardized therapist responses to standardized mock patient stimulus clips, based on 890 therapist video recordings and 8 patient videos, and is rated with eight FIS subscale ratings and an overall FIS score. Built on Therapy-FIS, we further establish a benchmark with two downstream tasks: Therapist Performance Rating and Joint Therapist--mock-Patient Performance Rating. We also introduce a competitive baseline,…