Analyzing psychotherapy process time series using neural maps

In psychotherapy research the success of a therapy often is judged by measuring characteristics of the personality by psychological self-reported questionnaires. These methods suggest to use 5 or 6 psychological dimensions of personality. In this study we use neural maps, especially the new growing self-organizing map (GSOM), to extract the intrinsic dimension, based on a patient database. We show that the nonlinear methods of neural maps leads to a verification of the expected assumption of that respective dimensions are comprised. Moreover, the presented GSOM-approach allows an estimation of the range of the psychological dimensions which coincide with theoretical results. We solve the question whether the database of psychotherapy process data allows a prediction of the relevant parameters of the process, which describes the therapy