Avatars-mediated video conference system for mediating the stress and anxiety of response time of a person with communication difficulties

Abstract

People with stress and anxiety about response time (RT) management experience difficulties in talking with others online, causing situational communication apprehension and a fear of negative evaluation (FNE). Reducing stress and anxiety about RT management will provide them ease of talk. In this paper, to reduce stress and anxiety in RT management, we propose a system involving a teleoperated avatar agent and its supporting agent with interactive responses adaptive to RT variations for communication in video conferences, referred to as the proposed system. The proposed system was compared with another system involving only an avatar agent as a communication channel without interactive responses, referred to as the conventional system. In the video-based and field experiments, a human interviewer and interviewee discussed paying taxes and earning unethical money using the proposed and conventional systems; where situational communication apprehension measure (SCAM), FNE, and sense of being attended (SoBA) were measured indices. The proposed system with interactive responses adaptive to RT variations reduced the stress and anxiety of RT management significantly. A significant reduction in SCAM and FNE and an increase in SoBA scores were observed for the proposed system, as compared to the conventional system, for the video-based and field experiments.