Socially anxious and confident men interact with a forward virtual woman: an experimental study.

Xueni Pan,Mel Slater,Marco Gillies,Chris Barker,David M Clark,Susana Martinez-Conde

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032931

Abstract

BackgroundMale volunteers entered an immersive virtual reality that depicted a party, where they were approached by a lone virtual woman who initiated a conversation. The goal was to study how socially anxious and socially confident men would react to this event. Interest focused on whether the socially anxious participants would exhibit sustained anxiety during the conversation or whether this would diminish over time, and differ from the responses of the more socially confident men.MethodologyThe scenario was a party with five virtual characters, four sitting at a distance from the participant and talking amongst themselves and one lone woman standing closer. The woman approached the participant, introduced herself and initiated a conversation that was first about mundane matters and then became more personal and intimate. Participants were men who were either relatively socially confident (18) or socially anxious in their relationships with women (18). A second experimental factor was whether or not the other four characters occasionally looked towards the participant. There was a post-trial questionnaire about social anxiety in relation to the experience, and skin conductance and ECG physiological measures were recorded. Our expectation was that the socially anxious participants would show greater anxiety throughout.ConclusionsCompared to baseline readings both socially confident and socially anxious groups on average showed signs of significantly increased stress at the initial approach of the virtual woman. The stress then diminished once the conversation entered into the mundane phase and then did not significantly change. Comparing pre- and post-questionnaire anxiety scores there was no change for the more confident participants but a significant decrease in average score amongst the anxious group. The methodology of placing socially anxious participants in a virtual reality where they can gain experience of how to act in a stressful situation promises a novel way forward for treating social anxiety.

Highlights

One of the most striking types of experience in an immersive virtual reality (IVR) system is one that involves personal interaction with virtual characters
The specific context is that of using virtual reality to eventually help sufferers from social anxiety to overcome their fears, by demonstrating that people who experience social anxiety in real life, experience this when they engage with virtual characters, and that this technique can be used in the context of psychological therapy
The experiment that we describe in this paper is unique in the type of social encounter that is depicted – which should normally be experienced as a pleasant one were it to occur in everyday reality

Summary

Introduction

One of the most striking types of experience in an immersive virtual reality (IVR) system is one that involves personal interaction with virtual characters. If virtual characters can evoke a realistic response they can be used in a variety of settings where the utilisation of real people is either too costly, impractical, or unethical Using such a virtual reality system it was possible to produce a simulation of one of the most controversial experiments in social psychology, the Stanley Milgram obedience experiment [2]. Such experiments, potentially powerful in throwing light on an important area of human behaviour, have been banned for 50 years due to ethical considerations, a partial replication of the experiment has been performed with real people [3]. Interest focused on whether the socially anxious participants would exhibit sustained anxiety during the conversation or whether this would diminish over time, and differ from the responses of the more socially confident men

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Discussion

Conclusion