Abstract
Social emotion regulation, which can be understood as the intentional efforts by one person to regulate emotions of another person, is something we encounter and benefit from every day, and becomes especially important when a person is unable to handle an emotion or an emotional event by themselves. A paradigm that examines whether someone can perceive and benefit from regulatory efforts by another person, represented here by a virtual agent, would be highly relevant for experimental studies investigating social emotion regulation, as well as for interventions in the clinical and sub-clinical context. Virtual reality (VR) provides perhaps the ideal opportunity to test social interactions and difficulties with them, as it counters typical methodological problems of behavioral experiments, such as the trade-off between ecological validity and experimental control, as well as the difficulty of replicating social situations. The goal of the present methods paper is twofold: to provide a detailed description of the development of a novel paradigm consisting of two scenarios in VR designed to test the efficacy of social emotion regulation, and to present the anticipated results for the target populations of typically developing and autistic youth. Participants are presented with a virtual school environment and take part in two activities with a class of students and a teacher, all of whom are virtual agents. In both scenarios, participants experience a potentially stressful situation and are subsequently offered emotional support by a friendly student. Throughout the experiment, self-reports in the form of virtual smiley scales and psychophysiological measurements are collected as markers of the participants’ emotional states. Pilot results will be discussed in line with anticipated outcomes, to indicate that the experiment will be able to show the efficacy of social support by a virtual agent and provide insight into social emotion regulation for different populations. The school environment and the character of the friendly student also have the potential to be adapted for follow-up experiments on additional aspects of social emotion regulation for a variety of contexts.
Highlights
Emotion regulation, the process of modifying how one experiences and expresses one’s emotions, is an integral part of a person’s life and highly relevant for their wellbeing (Gross 1998; Gross 2015)
A pilot study using an earlier version of the paradigm with a sample of 29 typically developed adults recruited through online study advertising and university bulletin boards, showed that the experimental design was able to elicit the desired emotional responses: participants reported more negative and less positive emotions in the exclusion conditions than in the inclusion condition, and less negative and more positive emotions after having received social support
Looking at the negative smiley scale, participants should report more negative emotions when being confronted with the difficult situations of both scenarios, and they should benefit from the support offered by virtual agent Pete
Summary
The process of modifying how one experiences and expresses one’s emotions, is an integral part of a person’s life and highly relevant for their wellbeing (Gross 1998; Gross 2015). Interpersonal, emotion regulation can be understood as the intentional efforts by one person, the regulator, to regulate the emotions of another person, the regulatee (or target) (Reeck et al, 2016; Nozaki and Mikolajczak 2020) It can be one person’s efforts to regulate their own emotions by receiving and implementing input from another person - this in turn is called intrinsic, as opposed to the extrinsic part played by the regulator (Zaki and Williams 2013). Social emotion regulation is essential in a variety of contexts, when someone is not able to appropriately deal with their emotions by themselves Such inability may be caused by age, when a child is still developing their emotional competences (Martin and Ochsner 2016), context, when one’s abilities are temporally impaired (Marroquín 2011), or the magnitude of the precipitating event, when a person is overwhelmed, but it appears to be prevalent for individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, since they consistently report emotion regulation difficulties (Cai et al, 2018)
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