{"doi":"10.31234/osf.io/sh6x7_v1","title":"A Topological Data Analysis Method for Revealing Dynamic Changes in Psychotherapy Microprocesses","abstract":"Understanding moment-to-moment therapeutic change is critical for advancing clinical science, yet existing tools rarely capture these dynamics. Dynamical systems theory offers a transtheoretical framework for modeling how therapeutic microprocesses shift and stabilize, but few methods can quantitatively link features such as stable states (“attractors”) and shifts (“transitions”) with empirical data, especially when governing equations are unknown. We introduce Temporal Mapper, a topological data analysis (TDA) method that detects these features and represents their organization as attractor transition networks. As a proof-of-concept, we apply Temporal Mapper to psychotherapy microprocess data, examining interpersonal behaviors and alliance ruptures. The method revealed that therapist warmth stabilized dyadic states within and between sessions, whereas confrontation ruptures stabilized states within sessions but diversified and destabilized them across sessions. Beyond this example, Temporal Mapper offers a generalizable approach for uncovering fine-grained dynamic patterns in psychotherapy and identifying mechanisms of change to inform more effective interventions.","journal":"PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)","year":2025,"id":575005,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9385,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":872998,"name":"Mengsen Zhang","orcid":"0000-0003-3085-152X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1482595,"name":"Xiaochen Luo","orcid":"0000-0002-4857-3102","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:57:44.572630Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}