Virtual humans elicit socially anxiousinteractants’ verbal self-disclosureBy Sin-Hwa Kang*and Jonathan Gratch*********************************************************************************************We explored the relationship between interactants’ social anxiety and the interactionalfidelity of virtual humans. We specifically addressed whether the contingent non-verbalfeedback of virtual humans affects the association between interactants’ social anxiety andtheir verbal self-disclosure. This subject was investigated across three experimentalconditions where participants interacted with real human videos and virtual humans incomputer-mediated interview interactions. The results demonstrated that socially anxiouspeople revealed more information and greater intimate information about themselves wheninteracting with a virtual human when compared with real human video interaction,whereas less socially anxious people did not show this difference. We discuss the implicationof this association between the interactional fidelity of virtual humans and social anxiety ina human interactant on the design of an embodied virtual agent for social skills’ training andpsychotherapy. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.KEY WORD S: virtual humans; social anxiety; self-disclosure; contingent non-verbal feedback;rapport; virtual agents; anonymity; evaluationIntroductionThere are numerous studies on the application of virtualhumans toward the problems of social skills trainingand psychotherapy. A predominantly interesting appli-cation of the technology is in helping people who haveproblems functioning normally, through a variety ofsocial disorders, in social situations, such as treatingsocial phobias1,2or autism spectrum disorder3,4. In thissense, virtual humans can be proposed to facilitate socialinteractions among people who have difficulty inshaping social relationships or help improve their socialskills via virtual practice.In existing work, virtual humans and interactivevirtual environments have been studied as promisingtherapeutic approaches for psycho-social disorders,such as social anxiety. Herbelin5reports that virtualreality (VR) exposure therapy has shown empiricalsuccess in treating social phobias, although currentsystems have been facing many technical and theoreticallimitations, as well as dealing with restrictive socialsituations. The studies conducted on such systems haveprimarily focused on investigating the effect of inter-faces (e.g. head-mounted vs. desktop displays), appear-ances (photo-real vs. cartoonish characters) and simplemotor behaviours (e.g. eye gaze patterns or randombody motions) on interactants’ feeling of being togetherand connected (co-presence). Such research has notexplored virtual humans that are able to respond tohuman interactants in evocative social ways.Earlier studies showed that people were able to bettercommunicate in their social interactions, through feelinggreater co-presence, when their interaction partnerswere represented visually but anonymously6,7.Inmediated social interactions, the use of virtual humanshas been studied to explore interactants’ engagementand self-disclosure, which is critical in shaping strongersocial relationships and is a pre-requisite for verbalpsychotherapy. The virtual humans, in those inter-actions, are suggested to secure interactants’ identityhiding to allow the revealing of more intimateinformation about themselves.In this study, we explored the association betweensocial anxiety in human interactants and their self-disclosure. We assumed that self-disclosure wouldpromote socially anxious people’s social skills to formstronger and more intimate relationships in computer-mediated interactions. We specifically considered theCOMPUTER ANIMATION AND VIRTUAL WORLDSComp. Anim. Virtual Worlds (2010)Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/cav.345********************************************************************************************************************Correspondence to: S.-H. Kang, Institute for Creative Technol-ogies, University of Southern California, 13274 Fiji Way, CA90292, USA. E-mail: [email protected]*******************************************************************************************************************Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.relationship between interactants’ social anxiety andtheir self-disclosure facilitated by non-verbal feedbackassociated with rapport—a phenomenon wherebypeople are inclined to mirror each other’s behaviourand provide timely positive feedback over theirinteraction. We conclude that virtual humans can bemore effective in eliciting self-disclosure in sociallyanxious people than real human interviewers, therebyproviding key insights into the design of virtualcharacters for social skills training and psychotherapy.Related Work and ResearchQuestionsSocial Anxiety and Self-Disclosure inMedia ted Int er a ctions w ithVirtualHumansResearchers8,9have been exploring associationsbetween self-disclosure and personality characteristics,such as self-consciousness, which has three subscales:private self-consciousness, public-self-consciousnessand social anxiety8. Private self-consciousness isdefined as ‘dispositional tendency to focus attentionon the more private and covert aspects of oneself’. Publicself-consciousness refers to ‘the awareness of how oneappears in the eyes of others’9. Researchers furtherdefined that ‘social anxiety resembles public self-consciousness, but while public self-consciousness onlyrefers to the awareness of how one appears to others,social anxiety also implies that one is worried about itand, consequently, inhibited in social interactions’9.Social anxiety disorder (also social phobia) has beenreported to be ‘one of the most frequent chronicpsychological disorders’ with a prevalence of up to16% in western countries5. Researchers10,11describesocial anxiety as a condition in which ‘some people,especially those who are shy or easily embarrassed, feelanxious in almost any situation in which they might beevaluated’.Social psychologists have studied self-disclosurebased on the work of Lewin in 1935, who investigatedinitial self-disclosure to strangers8. Self-disclosure isdefined as any private information that can be revealedto be shared knowledge between or among commu-nicators12,13. Researchers characterized self-disclosureas verbal messages that disclose personal