Jessica Borelli, PhD Named Director of Research for Making Therapy Better

We’re excited to welcome Jessica Borelli, PhD as Director of Research for Making Therapy Better. A professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, and a licensed clinical psychologist, Jessica brings deep expertise in the science of close relationships, emotion regulation, and the language that reveals how people truly connect.

Her work is central to the next chapter of our research program — the development and validation of the Psychotherapy Attunement Scale (PAS).

What is the Psychotherapy Attunement Scale?

The PAS measures how well a therapist and patient are in sync during a session. Instead of looking at what the two people say, it examines how they use language together — the rhythm, pacing, and similarity in their choice of words and parts of speech.

Language attunement of this kind is a well-studied signal of rapport and understanding. When two people are deeply engaged, their language subtly converges. When there is disconnection — a missed moment, a misunderstanding — that convergence drops.

CarePaths’ PAS uses this signal to give therapists a new window into the therapeutic alliance:

• A session-level score showing how attuned the therapist and patient were overall
• A session-by-session view tracking whether attunement is growing over the course of treatment
• Moment-level insights pointing to the parts of a session where attunement dipped, so those moments can be revisited and understood

Why Jessica’s research expertise matters here

Jessica has spent her career studying the unspoken dimensions of relationships — how parents and children attune to one another, how emotional states live in the language we use, and how reflective, mentally present connection predicts healthier outcomes.

That background is directly relevant to making the PAS rigorous and clinically useful. In her own words:

“Attunement is one of the most powerful signals of how well two people are truly connecting — and for the first time, we can measure it in therapy, session by session.”

As Director of Research for Making Therapy Better, Jessica is helping guide the PAS from a promising idea into a well-validated measurement tool that therapists can trust, and that meaningfully contributes to Measurement-Based Care.

A milestone for Measurement-Based Care

Measurement-Based Care has long relied on patient self-report measures — how a patient describes their symptoms and confidence in treatment. The Psychotherapy Attunement Scale takes a different, complementary approach: it measures the process of the session through the natural rhythm of the conversation itself.

We believe pairing these two kinds of information gives therapists a fuller, more honest picture of how therapy is going — and where it can be made better.

A note from Jessica

“I’ve spent decades studying how the quality of a relationship shows up in the smallest details of language and interaction. Joining CarePaths lets me bring that science directly into the therapy room — measuring something therapists have always sensed intuitively, but until now could not see clearly. I’m thrilled to be part of a team working to make therapy measurably better.”

Welcome to the team, Jessica.

Curious about the research behind linguistic attunement? Read our earlier introduction to the Psychotherapy Attunement Scale and the studies on language style matching in psychotherapy.