Paper Info
Title
Exploring Individual Differences of Public Speaking Anxiety in Real-Life and Virtual Presentations
Abstract
Public speaking is a vital skill for making good impressions, effectively exchanging ideas, and influencing others. Yet, public speaking anxiety (PSA) ranks as a top social phobia. Recent advancements in wearable devices and ubiquitous virtual reality (VR) interfaces can help measure and mitigate PSA. This research quantifies PSA through bio-behavioral markers related to individuals’ physiological and acoustic characteristics. The effect of virtual reality (VR) training on alleviating PSA is measured through self-reported and bio-behavioral indices. Psychological (e.g., general trait anxiety, personality) and demographic (e.g., age, gender, highest education, native language) traits are examined as moderating factors between bio-behavioral indices and PSA, as well as moderating factors for measuring the VR effectiveness in mitigating PSA. These measures are also used as clustering criteria for stratifying participants in group-based models of PSA. Results indicate the significance of such traits to modeling PSA with the proposed group-based models yielding Spearman’s correlation of 0.55 ( <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p&lt;0.05$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) between the actual and predicted outcome. Results further demonstrate that systematic exposure to public speaking in VR can alleviate PSA in terms of both self-reported ( <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p&lt;0.05$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) and physiological ( <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p&lt;0.05$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) indices. Findings from this study will enable researchers to better understand antecedents and causes of PSA and lay the foundation for personalized adaptive feedback for PSA interventions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TAFFC.2020.3048299
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Public speaking anxiety,virtual reality,physiology,speech,wearable devices,individual differences
Journal
13
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1949-3045
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
16
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Megha Yadav111.36
Nazmus Sakib210.34
Ehsanul Haque Nirjhar311.36
Kexin Feng423.53
Amir H. Behzadan512217.55
Theodora Chaspari63819.43