Effective psychological interventions for anxiety disorders often include exposure to fearful situations. However, individuals with low self-efficacy may find such exposure too overwhelming. We created a vicarious experience in virtual reality, which enables observation of one’s experience from a first person perspective without actual performance and which might increase self-efficacy. With similarities to both traditional vicarious experiences and direct experiences, the level of self-identification with the experience was hypothesized to affect self-efficacy and its relationship with direct experiences. To test this, vicarious experiences with two distinct levels of self-identification were compared in a between-subjects experiment ((Formula presented.)). After being exposed to a vicarious experience of giving lectures on elementary arithmetic in front of a virtual audience with either a high or low level of self-identification with the public speaker, participants from both conditions actively gave another lecture. The results revealed that self-identification affected people’s self-efficacy after vicarious experience. They further revealed that self-identification is a moderator of (1) the correlation between perceived performance and self-efficacy, (2) the correlation between self-efficacy measured after the vicarious and the follow-up direct experience; and (3) the correlation between the sense of presence reported in the vicarious and in the follow-up direct experience. We anticipate that the first-person-perspective experiences with high-level of self-identification have the potential to be beneficial for training where changing people’s self-efficacy is desirable. ... Read more

When preparing for a public speech, practicing with an audience is suggested to be effective in enhancing speech performance. However, it is often impractical to organize an audience to practice a presentation. Virtual reality can provide a solution, i.e., practicing with a virtual audience. This paper studied this practicing technique for enhancing speech performance and people’s training satisfaction. A randomized controlled trial (n = 40) was conducted to compare practicing in front of a virtual audience with another practicing technique whereby the presenter had to imagine an audience while practicing. Individuals practiced their presentations in three training sessions with either a virtual audience or an imaginary audience. Participants’ performance was assessed in an assessment session where they delivered their speech in front of a human audience. The results showed that individuals seemed to benefit more from a virtual audience than an imaginary audience in reducing speech anxiety. The clearest benefit of practicing with a virtual audience was the satisfaction it gave. Participants were more positive towards training with a virtual audience regarding both the training process and its effect on their presentation ability. We anticipate that virtual audiences can be beneficial in motivating individuals to practice their presentation skills. ... Read more

Whether we are talking about our research at a conference, making a speech at a friend’s wedding, or presenting a proposal in a businessmeeting,we have to speak in public from time to time. How well we deliver a presentation affects the way people think about us and our message. To deliver a well-received speech, preparation is necessary. Among various speech preparation activities, practicing with an audience is regarded as an effective way for enhancing speech performance. However, it is often impractical to organize an audience to practice a presentation and to arrange the diverse set of audience behaviours that are tailored to trainee’s individual skills and learning goals. Virtual reality can provide a solution by practicing with a virtual audience. Although virtual audiences have been used in many domains, e.g., evoking social stress, therapy for social phobia, and improving teaching performance, little research has been reported on the impact of virtual audiences on public speakers’ belief and performance. Therefore, this thesis aims to create a virtual audience which generates flexible expressive behaviours for a public speaking scenario and examines how public speaking experiences in front of such an audience affect the speakers’ belief and speech performance.
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Expressive virtual audiences are used in scientific research, psychotherapy, and training. To create an expressive virtual audience, developers need to know how specific audience behaviors are associated with certain characteristics of an audience, such as attitude, and how well people can recognize these characteristics. To examine this, four studies were conducted on a virtual audience and its behavioral models: (I) a perception study of a virtual audience showed that people (n = 24) could perceive changes in some of the mood, personality, and attitude parameters of the virtual audience; (II) a design experiment whereby individuals (n = 24) constructed 23 different audience scenarios indicated that the understanding of audience styles was consistent across individuals, and the clustering of similar settings of the virtual audience parameters revealed five distinct generic audience styles; (III) a perception validation study of these five audience styles showed that people (n = 100) could differentiate between some of the styles, and the audience's attentiveness was the most dominating audience characteristic that people perceived; (IV) the examination of the behavioral model of the virtual audience identified several typical audience behaviors for each style. We anticipate that future developers can use these findings to create distinct virtual audiences with recognizable behaviors. ... Read more