What follows is the results of an experiment performed on EVA.
The data was gathered from a Virtual
Reality (VR) experiment on Fear of Public Speaking (FOPS). Users
were asked to give a talk on a VR environment, on different
settings. During the experiment, data was gathered based on
physical (for example heart rate) and questionnaire responses. EVA
was used on this particular data, with the aim of expressing the
overall emotions of each of the users during their talk.
This experiment uses faces as the medium of
visualisation of our data set. Therefore, by applying EVA, each human face
represents the facial emotions a specific user had when giving a
talk to either a virtual audience or to an empty room.
The subjects were initially distinguished as
male/female, phobic/confident and whether they gave their VR talk
to an empty audience or to an audience of virtual people as shown
in below. There are a total of 40 subjects.
Condition |
Empty |
People |
|
|
|
Phobic |
|
|
Confident |
|
|
Here what is of interest to us is the
difference in response, phobic and confident speakers have, to
both audience conditions. In particular a relatively large
difference is expected in fear (anxiety) for phobic users
giving talks to a virtual audience rather than an empty room,
whereas, the difference in fear for confident users should be
relatively small with regards to the same two conditions. In
general, it is also expected that the phobic users are more
anxious than the confident ones, regardless of the condition
the speech was given. The 13 variables used in this analysis
are the following:
- Gender: Male or Female
subjects.
- Anxiety Level:} Phobic or Confident
subjects.
- Fear of Negative Evaluation (FNE): A
questionnaire driven measurement of social evaluative anxiety.
It is measured out of 30, where 30 is a perfectly phobic
response.
- State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI): A
questionnaire driven measure of trait anxiety. Anxiety scores
are in the range of 20, minimum anxiety, to 80
representing maximum anxiety.
- Personal Report of
Confidence as a Speaker (PRCS): A questionnaire driven
measurement used to screen subjects for the experiment. The
PRCS is scored out of 30, where 30 represents the response
of a "pure" phobic user. Subjects were accepted if they
scored 8 or less (confident group) and if they scored 20
or more (phobic group).
- Audience Type: Either
empty or with a virtual audience.
- Presentations: A
zero or one indicating whether users do not give presentations
at all or they sometimes give presentations.
- Subject: A 1-7 scale indicating subjects' comfort with the
subject of talk. A score of 1 indicates not at all
comfortable.
- Prepared: A 1-7 scale indicating
how prepared subjects felt for this talk, with 1 denoting not
at all.
- Emotions before: A 0-100 score of
confidence drawn out of 6 scales for adjectives (anxious,
happy, confident, relaxed, sad, angry). Zero represents
anxious, 100 confident.
- Emotions after: Same as
above but this time after the talk was given.
- Self
rate: a self assigned score out of 100 of their own
performance.
- Somatic: A questionnaire driven
measurement for subjectively assessed somatic responses.
Click here to see results from the experiment.