Automatic Detection of Reactive Attachment Disorder Through Turn-Taking Analysis in Clinical Child-Caregiver Sessions

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work aimed at automatic detection of Reactive Attachment Disorder, a psychiatric issue typically affecting children that experienced abuse and neglect. The proposed approach is based on the analysis of turn-taking during clinical sessions and the experiments involved 61 children and their caregivers. The results show that it is possible to detect the pathology with accuracy up to 69.2% (F1 Score 68.8%). In addition, the experiments show that the pathology tends to leave different behavioral traces in different activities. This might explain why Reactive Attachment Disorder is difficult to diagnose and tends to remain undetected. In such a context, methodologies like those proposed in this work can be a valuable support in clinical practice.