Social Buffering of Fear through Virtual Agents

Many people worldwide suffer from anxiety disorders. The disorder is prevalent in two percent of the adult population in the EU and accounts for ten percent of mental disorders in primary care (1). It is usually treated with exposure therapy (2). In recent years, virtual reality exposure therapy has become more common and is at least as efficient as in vivo therapy (3) while being more flexible and cheaper. One phenomenon that can be used to enhance exposure therapy further is to buffer fear responses with social support. Recently, Qi et al. (4) have shown that even the mere presence of a stranger can reduce physiological responses to aversive sound cues. A follow-up study by Qi et al. (5) showed that this response also occurs in virtual reality with the mere presence of virtual agents. These findings yield high potential to evolve virtual exposure therapy with virtual agents for improved therapy outcomes.

This project is thus concerned with investigating the social buffering effect with virtual agents and is done in cooperation with the Translational Social Neuroscience Unit of the University Hospital Würzburg.

Literature

1: Roselind Lieb, Eni Becker, and Carlo Altamura. The epidemiology of generalized anxiety disorder in Europe. European Neuropsychopharmacology 15, no. 4 (2005), 445-452.
2: Thomas L. Rodebaugh, Robert M. Holaway, and Richard G. Heimberg. The treatment of social anxiety disorder. Clinical Psychology Review 24, no. 7 (2004), 883-908.
3: Mark B. Powers, and Paul MG Emmelkamp. Virtual reality exposure therapy for anxiety disorders: A meta-analysis. Journal of anxiety disorders 22, no. 3 (2008), 561-569.
4: Yanyan Qi, Martin J. Herrmann, Luisa Bell, Anna Fackler, Shihui Han, Jürgen Deckert, and Grit Hein. The mere physical presence of another person reduces human autonomic responses to aversive sounds. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 287, no. 1919 (2020), 20192241.
5: Yanyan Qi, Dorothée Bruch, Philipp Krop, Martin J. Herrmann, Marc E. Latoschik, Jürgen Deckert, and Grit Hein. Social buffering of human fear is shaped by gender, social concern, and the presence of real vs virtual agents. Translational psychiatry 11, no. 1 (2021), 641.

News

Winter Expo 2023/24 Recap

The Winter EXPO 2023/24 for MCS/HCI was a great success! Thank you to all those involved and to all visitors!

Theses and projects

Assigned

Louisa Maurer

Evaluating Social Buffering in Augmented Reality Using a Virtual Dog

This research aims to investigate if social buffering is achievable through virtual dogs.

Luca Höllinger

Enhancing Social Buffering in VR: The Effect of Group Size

This research aims to investigate if virtual social buffering effect can be enhanced when two or three confederates are present in the virtual world.

Closed

Pascal Rösch

Evaluating social buffering in AR: Replication of the Qi et al. experiment

Social buffering is the phenomenon of recovering more easily from stressful experiences when a conspecific is present. Qi et al. have recently shown that social buffering can also occur in virtual reality when a virtual agent is present in the virtual environment. This HCI-project will replicate this study in augmented reality instead.