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.

Negotiating serves as an essential skill in our daily life, however, it is quite challenging to negotiate well. Various negotiation training systems have been developed to solve this problem and improve people's performance in negotiation. Nevertheless, these systems mainly focus on skills practice and less on negotiation understanding or self-efficacy development. Aiming at improving both people's negotiation knowledge and self-efficacy, a virtual reality negotiation training system is proposed that exposes users to virtual cognitions during negotiating with virtual characters. The virtual cognitions, delivered as a personalised voice-over, provide users with a stream of thoughts that reflects on the negotiation progress and their performance, and also presents self-motivational statements. To study the effectiveness of the system and the self-motivational statements included in virtual cognitions, an empirical study with 48 participants was conducted. The study employed a between-subjects design with three groups: waitlist, training with self-motivational statements, and training without self-motivational statements. 24 waitlist participants were also randomly assigned to and completed the training following the waiting period. The results indicated that 1) the system significantly enhanced people's knowledge about negotiation and increased their self-efficacy, 2) the self-motivational statements included in virtual cognitions even further improved self-efficacy. Furthermore, these effects remained after multiple weeks.

Virtual cognitions (VCs) are a stream of simulated thoughts people hear while emerged in a virtual environment, e.g. by hearing a simulated inner voice presented as a voice over. They can enhance people's self-efficacy and knowledge about, for example, social interactions as previous studies have shown. Ownership and plausibility of these VCs are regarded as important for their effect, and enhancing both might, therefore, be beneficial. A potential strategy for achieving this is the synchronization of the VCs with people's eye fixation using eye-tracking technology embedded in a head-mounted display. Hence, this paper tests this idea in the context of a pre-therapy for spider and snake phobia to examine the ability to guide people's eye fixation. An experiment with 24 participants was conducted using a within-subjects design. Each participant was exposed to two conditions: one where the VCs were adapted to eye gaze of the participant and the other where they were not adapted, i.e. the control condition. The findings of a Bayesian analysis suggest that credibly more ownership was reported and more eye-gaze shift behaviour was observed in the eye-gaze-adapted condition than in the control condition. Compared to the alternative of no or negative mediation, the findings also give some more credibility to the hypothesis that ownership, at least partly, positively mediates the effect eye-gaze-adapted VCs have on eye-gaze shift behaviour. Only weak support was found for plausibility as a mediator. These findings help improve insight into how VCs affect people.

A number of negotiation training systems have been developed to improve people’s performance in negotiation. They mainly focus on the skills development, and less on negotiation understanding and improving self-efficacy. We propose a virtual reality negotiation training system that exposes users to virtual cognitions during negotiation with virtual characters with the aim of improving people’s negotiation knowledge and self-efficacy. The virtual cognitions, delivered as a personalized voice-over, provide users with a stream of thoughts that reflects on the negotiation and people’s performance. To study the effectiveness of the system, a pilot study with eight participants was conducted. The results suggest that the system significantly enhanced people’s knowledge about negotiation and increased their self-efficacy.