In mental health counseling, a variety of earlier studies have focused on dialogue modeling. However, most of these studies give limited to no emphasis on the quality of interaction between a patient and a therapist. The therapeutic bond between a patient and a therapist directly correlates with effective mental health counseling. It involves developing the patient's trust on the therapist over the course of counseling. To assess the therapeutic bond in counseling, we introduce trust as a therapist-assistive metric. Our definition of trust involves patients' willingness and openness to express themselves and, consequently, receive better care. We conceptualize it as a dynamic trajectory observable through textual interactions during the counseling. To facilitate trust modeling, we present MENTAL-TRUST, a novel counseling dataset comprising manual annotation of 212 counseling sessions with first-of-its-kind seven expert-verified ordinal trust levels. We project our problem statement as an ordinal classification task for trust quantification and propose a new benchmark, TrustBench, comprising a suite of classical and state-of-the-art language models on MENTAL-TRUST. We evaluate the performance across a suite of metrics and lay out an exhaustive set of findings. Our study aims to unfold how trust evolves in therapeutic interactions.

本研究针对心理健康咨询中的互动质量缺乏关注这一问题，引入信任作为治疗师辅助指标，评估患者与治疗师之间的治疗关系。我们提出了包含212个咨询会话的MENTAL-TRUST数据集及七个专家验证的顺序信任水平，并将信任量化作为有序分类任务，通过新的基准TrustBench进行评估，旨在揭示信任在治疗互动中的演变。 

咨询对话中的信任建模：基准研究