What is it about?
Social anxiety is feeling intense fear or avoidance of social situations such as interacting with others or performing performance based tasks such as giving a presentation. Socially anxious individuals fear of being negatively evaluated by others and sensitive to threatening social information, often interpreting social situations negatively. Previous studies show that these individuals pay greater attention to emotional facial expressions, more sensitive to negative facial expressions, and tend to interpret neutral facial expressions as negative. This study mainly aims to identify the neural patterns associated with social anxiety by investigating participants' neural responses to different emotional facial expressions during social interactions. EEG (electroencephalography) measures the electrical activity from the surface of the scalp. In this study, it will be used to measure participants' millisecond neural responses. In addition to the neural measurements, physiological (hearth rate, hearth rate variability, electrodermal activity), behavioural (eye-tracking, finger pressure sensing) and subjective (social anxiety assessment questionnaires) measurements will be analysed to have an comprehensive understanding of social anxiety. To create believable social interactions that can elicit anxiety, the experiment will be conducted in virtual reality. Participants will engage in social interactions with virtual humans in an immersive virtual reality setup and their responses to various virtual humans with different emotional facial expressions will be compared.
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Why is it important?
Social anxiety is highly prevalent disorder among the population and this study aims to provide a better understanding of its assessment. In addition to that, this study offers a comprehensive understanding of social anxiety by recording multiple data streams. Unlike previous studies which used static face images of facial expressions, this study creates believable, real life-like social situations in virtual reality to assess social anxiety. Also, this study offers a multimodal data collection framework, which can also be applied to the assessment of other mental health disorders in the future research.
Perspectives
I believe this study is the first to analyse early face perception in socially anxious individuals during social interactions using VR and EEG. We focused on developing immersive social interactions with virtual humans to elicit anxiety, offering a setup that is more generalisable to real-life social interactions that can evoke anxiety compared to traditional methods.
Damla Kuleli
Bournemouth University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Exploring Influence of Social Anxiety on Embodied Face Perception during Affective Social Interactions in VR, September 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3652988.3673952.
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