The Relationship between Virtual Self Similarity and Social Anxiety

"To be or Not to be Me?": Exploration of Self-Similar Effects of Avatars on Social Virtual Reality Experiences

The growing interest in the self-similarity effect of avatars in virtual reality (VR) has spurred the creation of realistic avatars that closely mirror their users. However, despite extensive research on the self-similarity effect in single-user VR environments, our understanding of its impact in social VR settings remains underdeveloped. This shortfall exists despite the unique socio-psychological phenomena arising from the illusion of embodiment that could potentially alter these effects. To fill this gap, this paper provides an in-depth empirical investigation of how avatars' self-similarity influences social VR experiences. Our research uncovers several notable findings: 1) A high level of avatar self-similarity boosts users' sense of embodiment and social presence but has minimal effects on the overall presence and even slightly hinders immersion. These results are driven by increased self-awareness. 2) Among various factors that contribute to the self-similarity of avatars, voice stands out as a significant influencer of social VR experiences, surpassing other representational factors. 3) The impact of avatar self-similarity shows negligible differences between male and female users. Based on these findings, we discuss the pros and cons of incorporating self-similarity into social VR avatars. Our study serves as a foundation for further research in this field.

Beyond my Real Body: Characterization, Impacts, Applications and Perspectives of "Dissimilar" Avatars in Virtual Reality

In virtual reality, the avatar - the user's digital representation - is an important element which can drastically influence the immersive experience. In this paper, we especially focus on the use of "dissimilar" avatars i.e., avatars diverging from the real appearance of the user, whether they preserve an anthropomorphic aspect or not. Previous studies reported that dissimilar avatars can positively impact the user experience, in terms for example of interaction, perception or behaviour. However, given the sparsity and multi-disciplinary character of research related to dissimilar avatars, it tends to lack common understanding and methodology, hampering the establishment of novel knowledge on this topic. In this paper, we propose to address these limitations by discussing: (i) a methodology for dissimilar avatars characterization, (ii) their impacts on the user experience, (iii) their different fields of application, and finally, (iv) future research direction on this topic. Taken together, we believe that this paper can support future research related to dissimilar avatars, and help designers of VR applications to leverage dissimilar avatars appropriately.

Students' perception on immersive learning through 2D and 3D metaverse platforms

The main purpose of this paper is to add empirical data to the nascent field of metaverse learning and teaching by examining factors affecting student participation and their perceived experiences of different metaverse platforms. For data collection, 57 Korean undergraduates participated in a self-administered questionnaire and a short reflective essay regarding their experiences on three metaverse platforms (ifland, Gather Town, & Frame VR). For data analysis, exploratory factor analysis was first executed to derive the underlying factors that can explain student participation in metaverse platforms. The social and interactive learning as well as individualized and behavioral learning were identified as two main contributing factors. While the three platforms had no statistical difference in terms of social presence, students' sentimentally perceived differences among them. The sentiment analysis shows that 60.00% of ifland users were positive, followed by 53.66% of Frame VR users and 51.22% of Gather Town users. Furthermore, the additional keyword analysis shows why students expressed the perceived experiences of each platform in a different way. Given that the success of metaverse instruction can be dependent upon whether students regard it as beneficial, such measurements of student perception on the effectiveness of learning on metaverse platforms can offer meaningful recommendations for tech-savvy educators.

Origins of Anhedonia in Childhood and Adolescence

Anhedonia reflects a reduced ability to engage in previously pleasurable activities and has been reported in children as young as 3 years of age. It manifests early and is a strong predictor of psychiatric disease onset and progression over the course of development and into adulthood. However, little is known about its mechanistic origins, particularly in childhood and adolescence. In this chapter, we provide a socio-cognitive model of the development of anhedonia. This model is substantiated by past literature presented in this chapter to account for how the individual trajectories of emotion knowledge, autobiographical memory, and self-concept representations contribute to the onset, persistence, and progression of anhedonia from early childhood through adolescence.

The Development of Explicit and Implicit Game-Based Digital Behavioral Markers for the Assessment of Social Anxiety

Social relationships are essential for humans; neglecting our social needs can reduce wellbeing or even lead to the development of more severe issues such as depression or substance dependency. Although essential, some individuals face major challenges in forming and maintaining social relationships due to the experience of social anxiety. The burden of social anxiety can be reduced through accessible assessment that leads to treatment. However, socially anxious individuals who seek help face many barriers stemming from geography, fear, or disparities in access to systems of care. But recent research suggested digital behavioral markers as a way to deliver cheap and easily accessible digital assessment for social anxiety: As earlier work shows, players with social anxiety show similar behaviors in virtual worlds as in the physical world, including tending to walk farther around other avatars and standing farther away from other avatars. The characteristics of the movement behavior in-game can be harnessed for the development of digital behavioral markers for the assessment of social anxiety. In this paper, we investigate whether implicit as well as explicit digital behavioral markers, proposed by prior work, for social anxiety can be used for predicting the level of social anxiety. We show that both, explicit and implicit digital behavioral markers can be harnessed for the assessment. Our findings provide further insights about how game-based digital behavioral markers can be used for the assessment of social anxiety.

Psychological benefits of using social virtual reality platforms during the covid-19 pandemic: The role of social and spatial presence

Social virtual reality (VR) platforms are an emergent phenomenon, with growing numbers of users utilizing them to connect with others while experiencing feelings of presence (“being there”). This article examines the associations between feelings of presence and the activities performed by users, and the psychological benefits obtained in terms of relatedness, self-expansion, and enjoyment, in the context of the covid-19 pandemic. The results of a survey conducted among users (N = 220) indicate that feelings of spatial presence predict these three outcomes, while social presence predicts relatedness and enjoyment, but not self-expansion. Socialization activities like meeting friends in VR are associated with relatedness and enjoyment, while playful and creative activities allow for self-expansion. Moreover, the perceived impact of social distancing measures was associated with an increase in use, suggesting the utility of these platforms to help users meeting particularly frustrated psychological needs. These results provide a first quantitative account of the potential positive effects of social VR platforms on users’ wellbeing and encourage further research on the topic.

Protean Kinematics: A Blended Model of VR Physics

Avatar research largely focuses on the effects of the appearance and external characteristics of avatars, but may also warrant further consideration of the effects of avatar movement characteristics. With Protean kinematics, we offer an expansion the avatar-user appearances-based effects of the Proteus Effect to a systematic exploration into the role of movement in affecting social perceptions (about others) and idealized perceptions (about self). This work presents both a theoretical (typology) and methodological (physics-based measurement) approach to understanding the complex blend of physical inputs and virtual outputs that occur in the perceptual experience of VR, particularly in consideration of the collection of hippocampal (e.g., place cells, grid cells) and entorhinal neurons (e.g., speed cells) that fire topologically relative to physical movement in physical space. Offered is a novel method that distills the blend of physical and virtual kinematics to contribute to modern understandings of human-agent interaction and cognitive psychology.

The Effectiveness of Self-Guided Virtual-Reality Exposure Therapy for Public-Speaking Anxiety

Objectives: Self-guided virtual-reality exposure therapy (VRET) is a psychological intervention that enables a person to increase their own exposure to perceived threat. Public-speaking anxiety (PSA) is an anxiety-provoking social situation that is characterized by fear of negative evaluation from an audience. This pilot study aimed to determine whether self-guided VRET (1) increases exposure to PSA-specific virtual social threats, and (2) reduces anxiety, arousal, heartrate and PSA over repeated exposure. Methods: Thirty-two University students (27 completers) with high self-reported public-speaking anxiety attended 2 weekly self-guided VRET sessions. Each session involved the participant delivering a 20-min speech in a virtual classroom. Participants were able to increase their exposure to virtual social threat through the audience size, audience reaction, number of speech prompts, and their own salience in the virtual classroom at 4-min intervals. Participants' heartrates and self-reported anxiety and arousal were monitored during these intervals. Participants completed psychometric assessments after each session and 1 month later. Results: Participants increased their exposure to virtual social threat during each VRET session, which coincided with a reduction in heartrate and self-reported anxiety and arousal. Improvement in PSA occurred post-treatment and 1 month later. The in-session improvement in anxiety correlated with reductions in fear of negative evaluation post-treatment and 1 month later. Conclusions: Increased self-exposure to virtual social threat from self-guided VRET relieves anxiety and shows immediate reductions in subjective and physiological arousal during application, but also yields sustained improvement in PSA.

Exposure to Closed Loop Barriers Using Virtual Reality

BACKGROUND

Closed loop (CL) automated insulin delivery systems are demonstrated to be safe and effective in regulating glucose levels and reducing cognitive burden in people with type 1 diabetes (T1D). However, given the limited market options and the do-it-yourself nature of most systems, it can be difficult for potential users to shape their expectations fitting them into daily lives and management routines. As such, we examined the potential feasibility of a virtual reality (VR) intervention.

METHODS

A four-part VR intervention was created to expose adults with T1D to expected CL system barriers: body image, perceived hassles of using CL, deskilling fears, and unwanted social attention. Goals of the pilot were to assess feasibility and expose patients to CL. Surveys were conducted pre- and postparticipating in the VR experience.

RESULTS

A total of 20 adults with T1D completed the pilot. Average time to complete the experience was 14.1 minutes (8.8-39.9). Reported VR sickness was low. Willingness to use VR was maintained in 90% (n = 18) and did not change expectations of CL in 95% (n = 19). Virtual reality changed perceived hassles of CL in 25% (n = 5) with four concerned over alarms and one connectivity issues: positive diabetes technology attitudes, confidence in managing hypoglycemia, overall perceptions of appearance, and positive affect maintained after the VR intervention. Negative affect significantly decreased after exposure and perceptions of being overweight trended toward significance.

CONCLUSION

This pilot VR intervention demonstrated high potential in addressing expected barriers to uptake and usage of CL systems without decreasing enthusiasm or changing expectations of CL.

Virtual Reality for Anxiety Disorders: Rethinking a Field in Expansion

The principal aim to this chapter is to present the latest ideas in virtual reality (VR), some of which have already been applied to the field of anxiety disorders, and others are still pending to be materialized. More than 20 years ago, VR emerged as an exposure tool in order to provide patients and therapists with more appealing ways of delivering a technique that was undoubtedly effective but also rejected and thus underused. Throughout these years, many improvements were achieved. The first section of the chapter describes those improvements, both considering the research progresses and the applications in the real world. In a second part, our main interest is to expand the discussion of the new applications of VR beyond its already known role as an exposure tool. In particular, VR is enabling the materialization of numerous ideas that were previously confined to a merely philosophical discussion in the field of cognitive sciences. That is, VR has the enormous potential of providing feasible ways to explore nonclassical ways of cognition, such as embodied and situated information processing. Despite the fact that many of these developments are not fully developed, and not specifically designed for anxiety disorders, we want to introduce these new ideas in a context in which VR is experiencing an enormous transformation.

Avatars and the Disease: Digital Customization as a Resource for Self-Perception Assessment in Breast Cancer Patients

Avatars, or users' renditions within digital environments, may change depending on modifications of users' self-conception. According to literature, chronic health conditions influence patients and survivors' identity, because living with a disease requires people to reconfigure their self-representation and their own daily life and future plans. This is especially true for breast cancer, whose treatment and surgery also affect patients' body image, sexual identity, and sense of womanhood. In this study, 22 breast cancer survivors were asked to create multiple avatars resembling their actual self (AS), their ideal self (IS), and their self connected to the disease experience; then, they were asked to rate their attitudes toward their three avatars. Results show that disease avatars are significantly different in patients' attitudes toward them from AS and IS avatars. In addition, attitudes toward one's own avatars appeared partially related to clinically relevant psychological states, such as anxiety and depression. Discussion explores suggestions for usage of avatars in interventions for assessment and quality-of-life promotion among chronic patients.

From Robot to Virtual Doppelganger: Impact of Visual Fidelity of Avatars Controlled in Third-Person Perspective on Embodiment and Behavior in Immersive Virtual Environments

This study presents the second phase of a series of experiments investigating the impact of avatar visual fidelity on the sense of embodiment and users' behavior in immersive virtual environments. Our main focus concerns the similarity between users and avatars, a factor known as truthfulness. Our experiment requires the participants to control three avatars using a third-person perspective: a robot, a suit and their virtual doppelganger (virtual representation of the self). In order to analyze users' reactions and strategies, each task of the scenario of the virtual reality application can potentially affect the integrity of their characters. Our results revealed that ownership, one of the three factors of the sense of embodiment, is higher for the participants controlling their self-representation than with abstract representations. Furthermore, avatar visual fidelity seems to affect users' subjective experience, half of the panel reported having different behavior depending on the controlled character. Abstract representations allow the users to adopt more risky behaviors, while self-representations maintain a connection with the real world and encourage users to preserve the integrity of their avatar.

Exploring the Influence of Haptic and Olfactory Cues of a Virtual Donut on Satiation and Eating Behavior

Olfactory research in immersive virtual environments (IVEs) have often examined the addition of scent as part of the environment or atmosphere that act as experimental stimuli. There appears to be a lack of research on the influence of virtual foods in IVEs on human satiation. Studies based on situational cues or self-perception theory provide support for the hypothesis that touching and smelling a virtual food item may lead to increased consumption as a result of modeling expected behavior. On the other hand, studies grounded in embodied cognition suggest that satiation may take place as a result of mental simulation that resembles actual consumption behavior. In this preliminary study, we sought to explore the effects of haptic and olfactory cues through virtual food on human satiation and eating behavior. In our study, 101 participants took part in a 2 (touch: present vs absent) × 2 (scent: present vs absent) experiment where they interacted with a donut in an IVE. Findings showed that participants in the touch and scent present conditions ate significantly fewer donuts than those who were not exposed to these cues, and reported higher satiation as compared to their counterparts. However, findings were less clear with respect to participants who received both haptic and olfactory cues. As a whole, results provide preliminary support for satiation effects as a result of sensory simulation.

Beat the Fear of Public Speaking: Mobile 360° Video Virtual Reality Exposure Training in Home Environment Reduces Public Speaking Anxiety

With this article, we aim to increase our understanding of how mobile virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) can help reduce speaking anxiety. Using the results of a longitudinal study, we examined the effect of a new VRET strategy (Public Speech Trainer, PST), that incorporates 360° live recorded VR environments, on the reduction of public speaking anxiety. The PST was developed as a 360° smartphone application for a VR head-mounted device that participants could use at home. Realistic anxiety experiences were created by means of live 360° video recordings of a lecture hall containing three training sessions based on graded exposure framework; empty classroom (a) and with a small (b) and large audience (c). Thirty-five students participated in all sessions using PST. Anxiety levels were measured before and after each session over a period of 4 weeks. As expected, speaking anxiety significantly decreased after the completion of all PST sessions, and the decrement was the strongest in participants with initially high speaking anxiety baseline levels. Results also revealed that participants with moderate and high speaking anxiety baseline level differ in the anxiety state pattern over time. Conclusively and in line with habituation theory, the results supported the notion that VRET is more effective when aimed at reducing high-state anxiety levels. Further implications for future research and improvement of current VRET strategies are discussed.

Positive Technologies for Understanding and Promoting Positive Emotions

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become increasingly present in our lives, and their use has spread considerably. This paper presents a review of the way ICTs can help practitioners and researchers to study, promote, and train positive emotions. It is framed within the field of Positive Technologies: the applied scientific approach to the study of the use of technology to improve the quality of personal experience, with the goal of increasing wellbeing. First, the article presents an introduction to the topic of technologies and positive emotions. Then, it describes how ICTs can aid in monitoring, assessing, promoting, modifying, and training positive emotions. Finally, implications and future directions of the role of Positive Technologies in positive emotions are discussed. The authors conclude that, in the near future, Positive Technologies and the field of positive emotions will interact synergistically, producing an exponential growth in the understanding and promotion of positive emotions.

Recent Progress in Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Phobias: A Systematic Review

This review is designed to systematically examine the available evidence about virtual reality exposure therapy's (VRET) efficacy for phobias, critically describe some of the most important challenges in the field and discuss possible directions. Evidence reveals that virtual reality (VR) is an effective treatment for phobias and useful for studying specific issues, such as pharmacological compounds and behavioral manipulations, that can enhance treatment outcomes. In addition, some variables, such as sense of presence in virtual environments, have a significant influence on outcomes, but further research is needed to better understand their role in therapeutic outcomes. We conclude that VR is a useful tool to improve exposure therapy and it can be a good option to analyze the processes and mechanisms involved in exposure therapy and the ways this strategy can be enhanced. In the coming years, there will be a significant expansion of VR in routine practice in clinical contexts.

Model of Illusions and Virtual Reality

In Virtual Reality (VR) it is possible to induce illusions in which users report and behave as if they have entered into altered situations and identities. The effect can be robust enough for participants to respond “realistically,” meaning behaviors are altered as if subjects had been exposed to the scenarios in reality. The circumstances in which such VR illusions take place were first introduced in the 80's. Since then, rigorous empirical evidence has explored a wide set of illusory experiences in VR. Here, we compile this research and propose a neuroscientific model explaining the underlying perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that enable illusions in VR. Furthermore, we describe the minimum instrumentation requirements to support illusory experiences in VR, and discuss the importance and shortcomings of the generic model.

Virtual Avatar for Emotion Recognition in Patients with Schizophrenia: A Pilot Study

Persons who suffer from schizophrenia have difficulties in recognizing emotions in others’ facial expressions, which affects their capabilities for social interaction and hinders their social integration. Photographic images have traditionally been used to explore emotion recognition impairments in schizophrenia patients, but they lack of the dynamism that is inherent to facial expressiveness. In order to overcome those inconveniences, over the last years different authors have proposed the use of virtual avatars. In this work, we present the results of a pilot study that explored the possibilities of using a realistic-looking avatar for the assessment of emotion recognition deficits in patients who suffer from schizophrenia. In the study, 20 subjects with schizophrenia of long evolution and 20 control subjects were invited to recognize a set of facial expressions of emotions showed by both the said virtual avatar and static images. Our results show that schizophrenic patients exhibit recognition deficits in emotion recognition from facial expressions regardless the type of stimuli (avatar or images), and that those deficits are related with the psychopathology. Finally, some improvements in recognition rates (RRs) for the patient group when using the avatar were observed for sadness or surprise expressions, and they even outperform the control group in the recognition of the happiness expression. This leads to conclude that, apart from the dynamism of the shown expression, the RRs for schizophrenia patients when employing animated avatars may depend on other factors which need to be further explored.

The role of functionality in the body model for self-attribution

Bodily self-attribution, the feeling that a body (or parts of it) is owned by me, is a fundamental component of one's self. Previous studies have suggested that, in addition to a necessary multi-sensory stimulation, the sense of body ownership is determined by the body model, a representation of our body in the brain. It is however unclear what features constitute the body representation. To examine this issue, we first briefly review results on embodiment of artificial limbs, whole bodies and virtual avatars to understand the apparent anatomical, volumetric and spatial constraints associated with the sense of ownership toward external entities. We then discuss how considering limb functionality in the body model can provide an integrated explanation for most of the varied embodiment results in literature. We propose that the self-attribution of an entity may be determined, not just by its physical features, but by whether the entity can afford actions that the brain has associated with the limb which it replaces.