Identifying Anxiety Through Tracked Head Movements in a Virtual Classroom

Abstract

Virtual reality allows the controlled simulation of complex social settings, such as classrooms, and thus provides an opportunity to test a range of theories in the social sciences in a way that is both naturalistic and controlled. Importantly, virtual environments also allow the body movements of participants in the virtual world to be tracked and recorded. In the following article, we discuss how tracked head movements were correlated with participants' reports of anxiety in a simulation of a classroom. Participants who reported a high sense of awareness of and concern about the other virtual people in the room showed different patterns of head movement (more lateral head movement, indicating scanning behavior) from those who reported a low level of concern. We discuss the implications of this research for understanding nonverbal behavior associated with anxiety and for the design of online educational systems.

A Public Database of Immersive VR Videos with Corresponding Ratings of Arousal, Valence, and Correlations between Head Movements and Self Report Measures

“…We demonstrated a significant relationship between the amount of head yaw and valence ratings, which suggests that individuals who displayed greater movement of side-to-side head movement gave higher ratings of pleasure. However, the positive relationship shown here is in contrast to that presented by Won et al ( 2016 ) who showed a significant relationship between the amount of head yaw and reported anxiety. It appears that content and context is an important differentiating factor when it comes to the effects of head movements.…”

“…These movements are presented in Figure 2 . As discussed earlier, Won et al ( 2016 ) found a relationship between lateral head rotations and anxiety. They showed that scanning behavior, defined as the standard deviation of head yaw, significantly correlated with the awareness and concern people had of virtual others.…”

“…An early study which investigated the influence of body movements on presence in virtual environments found a significant positive association between head yaw and reported presence (Slater et al, 1998 ). In a study on head movements in VR, participants saw themselves in a virtual classroom and participated in a learning experience (Won et al, 2016 ). Results showed a relationship between lateral head rotations and anxiety, where the standard deviation of head yaw significantly correlated to the awareness and concern individuals had regarding other virtual people in the room.…”

“…We also tracked participants' rotational head movements as they watched the clips, allowing us to correlate the observers' head movements and affect. Based on past research (Won et al, 2016 ), we predicted significant relationships between the standard deviation of head yaw with valence and arousal ratings.…”

Adapting the System to Users Based on Implicit Data: Ethical Risks and Possible Solutions

“…Indications about the verisimilarity of such a case are provided by [6,8,12,14] showing that the technology and the preconditions for much of the components of the scenario are already in place. …”