Using Expressive and Talkative Virtual Characters in Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment

Ana Paula Cláudio, Maria Beatriz Carmo, Augusta Gaspar, Renato Teixeira

2015

Abstract

Social Anxiety affects a significant number of people, limiting their personal and social life. We describe an interactive Virtual Reality approach to the exposure therapy for social anxiety, resorting to virtual characters that exhibit combinations of facial and body expressions controllable in real-time by the therapist. The application described in this paper updates and significantly improves a former version: ameliorating the graphical quality of the virtual characters and providing them with the ability of articulating a set of sentences. The application executes in ordinary computers and it is easily used in counselling and research contexts. Although we have only resorted to free or very low cost 3D models of virtual humans, we adopted strategies to obtain an adequate final quality that we were able to validate with a significant number of observers. Moreover, a set of therapists tested the application and gave positive feedback about its potential effectiveness in Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy.

References

  1. APA- American Psychiatric Association, 2000. DSM-IVTR. American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc..
  2. Beidel, D. C., Turner, S. M., 2007. Shy Children, Phobic Adults: Nature and Treatment of Social Anxiety Disorder. Washington, DC: APA, 2nd edition.
  3. Bradley, M. M. and LANG, P. J., 1994. Measuring Emotion: the Self-Assessment Manikin and the Semantic Differential. J. Behav. Therap.. and Exp. Psvchyatry, 25, 1, 49-59.
  4. Cláudio, A.P., Carmo, M.B., Pinheiro, T., Esteves, F., 2013. A Virtual Reality Solution to Handle Social Anxiety. Int. J. of Creative Interfaces and Computer Graphics, 4(2):57-72.
  5. Cláudio, A.P., Gaspar, A., Lopes, E., Carmo, M. B., 2014. Virtual Characters with Affective Facial Behavior. In Proc. GRAPP 2014, pp 348-355, SciTePress.
  6. Douilliez, C. Yzerbyt, V., Gilboa-Schechtman, E., Philippot, P., 2012. Social anxiety biases the evaluation of facial displays: Evidence from single face and multifacial stimuli. Cog and Emo, 26(6): 1107-1115.
  7. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., 1989. Human Ethology. NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
  8. Ekman, P, Friesen, WV., Hager, J C., 2002. Facial action coding system. Salt Lake City, UT: Research Nexus.
  9. Gaspar, A., Esteves, F., 2012. Preschoolers faces in spontaneous emotional contexts - how well do they match adult facial expression prototypes? Int J Behav Dev. 36(5), 348-357.
  10. Gaspar, A., Esteves, F., Arriaga, P., 2014. On prototypical facial expressions vs variation in facial behavior: lessons learned on the “visibility” of emotions from measuring facial actions in humans and apes. In M. Pina and N. Gontier (Eds), The Evol. of Social Comm. in poserPrimates: A Multidisciplinary Approach, Interdisciplinary Evolution Research. New York: Springer (pp.101-145).
  11. Grillon, H., 2009. Simulating interactions with virtual characters for the treatment of social phobia. Doctoral dissertation, EPFL.
  12. Haworth, M. B., Baljko, M., Faloutsos, P., 2012. PhoVR: a virtual reality system to treat phobias. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual-Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry, 171-174.
  13. Herbelin, B., 2005. Virtual reality exposure therapy for social phobia. Doctoral dissertation, EPFL.
  14. James, L. K., et al., 2003. Social anxiety in virtual environments: Results of a pilot study. Cyberpsychology and behavior, 6(3), 237-243.
  15. Klinger, E., et al., 2004. Virtual reality exposure in the treatment of social phobia. Studies in health tech. and informatics, 99, 91.
  16. LaViola Jr, J. J., 2000. A discussion of cybersickness in virtual environments. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 32(1), 47-56.
  17. North, M. M., et al., 1998. Virtual reality therapy: an effective treatment for the fear of public speaking. The International Journal of Virtual Reality 3, 1-6.
  18. Pertaub, D. P., Slater, M., Barker, C., 2001. An experiment on fear of public speaking in virtual reality. Studies in health tech. and informatics, 372-378.
  19. Pertaub, D. P., Slater, M., Barker, C., 2002. An experiment on public speaking anxiety in response to three different types of virtual audience. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 11(1), 68-78.
  20. Russell, J. A., Fernandez-Dols, J. M., 1997. What does a facial expression mean? In The psychology of facial expression, pp. 3-30. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  21. Slater, M., Pertaub, D. P., Steed, A., 1999. Public speaking in virtual reality: Facing an audience of avatars. IEEE CGandA, 19(2), 6-9.
  22. Slater, M., et al., 2006. A virtual reprise of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments. PloS one, 1(1), e39.
  23. Stein, M.B. and Kean, Y.M., 2000. Disability and Quality of Life in Social Phobia: Epidemiologic Findings. Am J Psychiatry 157: 1606-1613.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Paula Cláudio A., Beatriz Carmo M., Gaspar A. and Teixeira R. (2015). Using Expressive and Talkative Virtual Characters in Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment . In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2015) ISBN 978-989-758-087-1, pages 348-355. DOI: 10.5220/0005312203480355


in Bibtex Style

@conference{grapp15,
author={Ana Paula Cláudio and Maria Beatriz Carmo and Augusta Gaspar and Renato Teixeira},
title={Using Expressive and Talkative Virtual Characters in Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2015)},
year={2015},
pages={348-355},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005312203480355},
isbn={978-989-758-087-1},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2015)
TI - Using Expressive and Talkative Virtual Characters in Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment
SN - 978-989-758-087-1
AU - Paula Cláudio A.
AU - Beatriz Carmo M.
AU - Gaspar A.
AU - Teixeira R.
PY - 2015
SP - 348
EP - 355
DO - 10.5220/0005312203480355