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Virtual Agent for Real-Time Motivational Interviewing by Integrating Adaptive Nonverbal Behavior and Language Models
Published on: December 23, 2025
Emotional communication in medical consultations with native and non-native patients applying two different
Emine Kale1, Kristin Skjeldestad, Arnstein Finset
1Norwegian Centre for Minority Health Research (NAKMI), Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway. emine.kale@nakmi.no
Objective:
To explore the potential agreement between two different methods to investigate emotional communication of native and non-native patients in medical consultations.
Methods:
The data consisted of 12 videotaped hospital consultations with six native and six non-native patients. The consultations were coded according to coding rules of the Verona Coding definitions of Emotional Sequences (VR-CoDES) and afterwards analyzed by discourse analysis (DA) by two co-workers who were blind to the results from VR-CoDES.
Results:
The agreement between VR-CoDES and DA was high in consultations with many cues and concerns, both with native and non-native patients. In consultations with no (or one cue) according to VR-CoDES criteria the DA still indicated the presence of emotionally salient expressions and themes.
Conclusion:
In some consultations cues to underlying emotions are communicated so vaguely or veiled by language barriers that standard VR-CoDES coding may miss subtle cues. Many of these sub-threshold cues could potentially be coded as cues according to VR-CoDES main coding categories, if criteria for coding vague or ambiguous cues had been better specified.
Practice Implications:
Combining different analytical frameworks on the same dataset provide us new insights on emotional communication.
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