ISCA Archive Interspeech 2022
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2022

Automatic Detection of Reactive Attachment Disorder Through Turn-Taking Analysis in Clinical Child-Caregiver Sessions

Andrei Bîrlădeanu, Helen Minnis, Alessandro Vinciarelli

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work aimed at automatic detection of Reactive Attachment Disorder, a psychiatric issue typically affecting children that experienced abuse and neglect. The proposed approach is based on the analysis of turn-taking during clinical sessions and the exper- iments involved 61 children and their caregivers. The results show that it is possible to detect the pathology with accuracy up to 69.2% (F1 Score 68.8%). In addition, the experiments show that the pathology tends to leave different behavioral traces in different activities. This might explain why Reactive Attachment Disorder is difficult to diagnose and tends to re- main undetected. In such a context, methodologies like those proposed in this work can be a valuable support in clinical practice.