Explainable AI in Psychology: Enhancing Transparency and Trust in Mental Health Applications

Integrating Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) into psychology represents a transfor mational increase in diagnostics and psychotherapies. The research proposes a novel framework that extensively uses Tree SHAP, an XAI technique to enable global interpretability from ensemble models such as Random Forests. The framework addresses the evidence concerning the black-box-proof approach with AI systems: a transparent and interpretable framework. It is well suited to the utility of psychological practice and research. By providing intuition on the contribution of the features of the proposed model, clinicians can understand the possible reasons behind the predictions that engender trust and allow safe congruence with psychological theories. Upon validation of the psychological data sets, the framework demonstrated an increase in interpretability by 15% compared to the baseline methods. According to the survey, 92% of the clinicians found the explanations ’highly satisfactory.’ The model achieved a 20% reduction in false positives, improving algorithmic reliability, and reducing misdiagnosis. These improvements underscore Tree SHAP’s ability to boost model performance to assist reasoning and decision making in clinical examinations. In addition to application to diagnostics, this framework extends to applications in early intervention systems, personalized psychotherapy, and educational psychology. By integrating domain-specific interpretability, this framework ensures cross-cultural adaptability. This approach further manages ethical concerns, thus positioning it to operate well within a larger canvas for worldwide psychological application. Computational efficiency only helps its case for practicality in real-world clinical and research application settings. This new framework will establish high-level comfort in relation to scientific integrity while staying true to human values in the new premises of AI applications in psychology.