Effects of Virtual Human Appearance Fidelity on Emotion Contagion in Affective Inter-Personal Simulations

Relationship Between Cognitive Load Theory, Intrinsic Motivation and Emotions in Healthcare Professions Education: A Perspective on the Missing Link

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is one of the key cognitive theories that have been used to assess learners' information and working memory load. CLT has been applied to Simulation Based Education (SBE) and optimizing instructional design. However, a challenge that occurs is that these high-fidelity simulations and mannequins of critically ill patients can elicit negative emotions in learners which can unfavorably impact the learning process. There is also a potential for cognitive overload if the simulation is more authentic and requires more dynamic interactions and lead to high levels of anxiety due to a novel learning environment, which can also have detrimental effects on learning process. Hence, it is critical for health professional educators (HPE) to know how to minimize cognitive load to improve learning as a professional in a workplace setting. The literature on the role of emotions, intrinsic motivation, cognitive load is scarce in HPE literature. Specifically when not being studied together at once since they move dynamically together and affect the learning for the learner. Therefore, the purpose of this perspective paper is to cover the gap in the literature and propose a framework and recommendation for future HPE research.

Improving counseling effectiveness with virtual counselors through nonverbal compassion involving eye contact, facial mimicry, and head-nodding

An effective way to reduce emotional distress is by sharing negative emotions with others. This is why counseling with a virtual counselor is an emerging methodology, where the sharer can consult freely anytime and anywhere without having to fear being judged. To improve counseling effectiveness, most studies so far have focused on designing verbal compassion for virtual counselors. However, recent studies showed that virtual counselors' nonverbal compassion through eye contact, facial mimicry, and head-nodding also have significant impact on the overall counseling experience. To verify this, we designed the virtual counselor's nonverbal compassion and examined its effects on counseling effectiveness (i.e., reduce the intensity of anger and improve general affect). A total of 40 participants were recruited from the university community. Participants were then randomly assigned to one of two virtual counselor conditions: a neutral virtual counselor condition without nonverbal compassion and a compassionate virtual counselor condition with nonverbal compassion (i.e., eye contact, facial mimicry, and head-nodding). Participants shared their anger-inducing episodes with the virtual counselor for an average of 16.30 min. Note that the virtual counselor was operated by the Wizard-of-Oz method without actually being technically implemented. Results showed that counseling with a compassionate virtual counselor reduced the intensity of anger significantly more than counseling with a neutral virtual counselor (F(1, 37) = 30.822, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.454). In addition, participants who counseled with a compassionate virtual counselor responded that they experienced higher empathy than those who counseled with a neutral virtual counselor (p < 0.001). These findings suggest that nonverbal compassion through eye contact, facial mimicry, and head-nodding of the virtual counselor makes the participants feel more empathy, which contributes to improving the counseling effectiveness by reducing the intensity of anger.

Visual Indicators Representing Avatars' Authenticity in Social Virtual Reality and Their Impacts on Perceived Trustworthiness

Photorealistic avatars show great potential in social VR and VR collaboration. However, identity and privacy issues are threatening avatars' authenticity in social VR. In addition to the necessary authentication and protection, effective solutions are needed to convey avatars' authenticity status to users and thereby enhance the overall trustworthiness. We designed several visual indicators (VIs) using static or dynamic visual effects on photorealistic avatars and evaluated their effectiveness in visualizing avatars' authenticity status. In this study we explored suitable attributes and designs for conveying the authenticity of photorealistic avatars and influencing their perceived trustworthiness. Furthermore, we investigated how different interactivity levels influence their effectiveness (the avatar was either presented in a static image, an animated video clip, or an immersive virtual environment). Our findings showed that using a full name can increase trust, while most other VIs could decrease users' trust. We also found that interactivity levels significantly impacted users' trust and the effectiveness of VIs. Based on our results, we developed design guidelines for visual indicators as effective tools to convey authenticity, as a first step towards the improvement of trustworthiness in social VR with identity management.

Neurophysiological and Subjective Analysis of VR Emotion Induction Paradigm

The ecological validity of emotion-inducing scenarios is essential for emotion research. In contrast to the classical passive induction paradigm, immersive VR fully engages the psychological and physiological components of the subject, which is considered an ecologically valid paradigm for studying emotion. Several studies investigate the emotional responses to different VR tasks or games using subjective scales. However, little research regards VR as an eliciting material, especially when systematically analyzing emotional processes in VR from a neurophysiological perspective. To fill this gap and scientifically evaluate VR's ability to be used as an active method for emotion elicitation, we investigate the dynamic relationship between explicit information (subjective evaluations) and implicit information (objective neurophysiological data). A total of 28 participants are enlisted to watch eight VR videos while their SAM/IPQ scores and EEG data are recorded simultaneously. In ecologically valid scenarios, the subjective results demonstrate that VR has significant advantages for evoking emotion in arousal-valence. This conclusion is backed by our examination of objective neurophysiological evidence that VR videos effectively induce high-arousal emotions. In addition, we obtain features of critical channels and frequency oscillations associated with emotional valence, thereby validating previous research in more lifelike circumstances. In particular, we discover hemispheric asymmetry in the occipital region under high and low emotional arousal, which adds to our understanding of neural features and the dynamics of emotional arousal. As a result, we successfully integrate EEG and VR to demonstrate that VR is more pragmatic for evoking natural feelings and is beneficial for emotional research. Our research has set a precedent for new methodologies of using VR induction paradigms to acquire a more reliable explanation of affective computing.

Effects of Small Talk With a Crowd of Virtual Humans on Users' Emotional and Behavioral Responses

In this contribution, we empirically investigated the effect of small talk on the users' non-verbal behaviors and emotions when users interacted with a crowd of virtual humans (VHs) with positive behavioral dispositions. Users were tasked with collecting items in a virtual marketplace via natural speech-based dialogue with a crowd of virtual pedestrians and vendors. The users were able to engage in natural speech-based conversation in a predefined corpus of small talk content that covered various commonplace small talk topics such as conversations about the weather, general concerns, and entertainment based on similar real-life situations. For instance, the VHs with the small talk ability would ask the users some simple questions to make small talk or remind the users of their belongings. We conducted a between-subjects empirical evaluation to investigate whether the user behaviors and emotions were different between a small talk condition and a non-small talk condition, and examined gender effects of the participants. We collected objective and subjective measures of the users to analyze users' emotions and social interaction behaviors, when in conversation with VHs that either possessed small-talk capability or not, besides task or goal oriented dialogue capabilities. Our result revealed that the VHs with small talk capability could alter the emotions and non-verbal behaviors of the users. Furthermore, the non-verbal behaviors between female and male participants differed greatly in the presence or absence of small talk.

Evaluating Virtual Hand Illusion through Realistic Appearance and Tactile Feedback

We conducted a virtual reality study to explore virtual hand illusion through three levels of appearance (Appearance dimension: realistic vs. pixelated vs. toon hand appearances) and two levels of tactile feedback (Tactile dimension: no tactile vs. tactile feedback). We instructed our participants to complete a virtual assembly task in this study. Immediately afterward, we asked them to provide self-reported ratings on a survey that captured presence and five embodiment dimensions (hand ownership, touch sensation, agency and motor control, external appearance, and response to external stimuli). The results of our study indicate that (1) tactile feedback generated a stronger sense of presence, touch sensation, and response to external stimuli; (2) the pixelated hand appearance provided the least hand ownership and external appearance; and (3) in the presence of the pixelated hand, prior virtual reality experience of participants impacted their agency and motor control and their response to external stimuli ratings. This paper discusses our findings and provides design considerations for virtual reality applications with respect to the realistic appearance of virtual hands and tactile feedback.

Work Emotion Intervention and Guidance Training Method for Enterprise Employees Based on Virtual Reality

Objective

Improper management of employees' emotions has a great impact on work status and work efficiency, and emotional management has increasingly become a very important part of corporate human resource management. How to adjust the various emotions of employees, so that employees can work in a fuller and more passionate attitude, is a problem that enterprise managers need to consider. From the perspective of employees themselves, a good mood will also bring happiness and satisfaction to life and work. Only in this way can the company and the employees be satisfied with each other and continue to maintain the good development momentum of the company.

Method

This paper proposes a new method of using virtual reality scenes to induce human emotions. Based on computer science and psychological cognitive science, a scene library of "virtual reality emotion induction system" is constructed. Emotion induction based on virtual reality scenes has better interactivity and generalization, as well as stronger immersion and user operability. Its emotional arousal is high, the data is reliable, and the interference of environmental factors in the induction process is weakened, and relatively objective emotional data can be obtained. The factors affecting the emotional management of the enterprise are investigated by means of a questionnaire survey, statistics and problems are found, and the objective problems existing in the emotional management work of the company are determined. According to the analysis, the problems are summarized, and it is believed that the company still has certain room for improvement and improvement potential in terms of corporate culture construction, emotional counseling system construction, and human resource career planning. In the research of this paper, through the combination of theory and practice, the enterprise's emotional management work has been comprehensively analyzed, and the practical problems existing in its emotional management work have been found through questionnaires. Results/Discussion. In the field of enterprise human resource management, emotion management is always an eternal topic worthy of our attention. But unfortunately, emotional management has not been given enough attention by managers. Most companies often think that emotions are their own business. Employees should self-regulate, control, and tolerate themselves. They should not bring personal emotions to work and even think that emotional work is unprofessional. This kind of misunderstanding has led to the fact that emotional management has not received due attention and affirmation in many enterprises.

On the Plausibility of Virtual Body Animation Features in Virtual Reality

We present two experiments to assess the relative impact of different levels of body animation fidelity on plausibility illusion (Psi). The first experiment presents a virtual character that is not controlled by the user ( n=13), while the second experiment presents a user-controlled virtual avatar ( n=24, all male). Psi concerns how realistic and coherent the events in a virtual environment look and feel and is part of Slater's proposition of two orthogonal components of presence in virtual reality (VR). In the experiments, the face, hands, upper and lower bodies of the character or self-avatar were manipulated to present different degrees of animation fidelity, such as no animation, procedural animation, and motion captured animation. Participants started the experiment experiencing the best animation configuration. Then, animation features were reduced to limit the amount of captured information made available to the system. Participants had to move from this basic animation configuration towards a more complete one, and declare when the avatar animation realism felt equivalent to the initial and most complete configuration, which could happen before all animation features were maxed out. Participants in the self-avatar experiment were also asked to rate how each animation feature affected their sense of control of the virtual body. We found that a virtual body with upper and lower body animated using eight tracked rigid bodies and inverse kinematics (IK) was often perceived as equivalent to a professional capture pipeline relying on 53 markers. Compared to what standard VR kits in the market are offering, i.e., a tracked headset and two hand controllers, we found that foot tracking, followed by mouth animation and finger tracking, were the features that added the most to the sense of control of a self-representing avatar. In addition, these features were often among the first to be improved in both experiments.

Designing Empathic Virtual Agents: Manipulating Animation, Voice, Rendering, and Empathy to Create Persuasive Agents

Designers of virtual agents have a combinatorically large space of choices for the look and behavior of their characters. We conducted two between-subjects studies to explore the systematic manipulation of animation quality, speech quality, rendering style, and simulated empathy, and its impact on perceptions of virtual agents in terms of naturalness, engagement, trust, credibility, and persuasion within a health counseling domain. In the first study, animation was varied between manually created, procedural, or no animations; voice quality was varied between recorded audio and synthetic speech; and rendering style was varied between realistic and toon-shaded. In the second study, simulated empathy of the agent was varied between no empathy, verbal-only empathic responses, and full empathy involving verbal, facial, and immediacy feedback. Results show that natural animations and recorded voice are more appropriate for the agent's general acceptance, trust, credibility, and appropriateness for the task. However, for a brief health counseling task, animation might actually be distracting from the persuasive message, with the highest levels of persuasion found when the amount of agent animation is minimized. Further, consistent and high levels of empathy improve agent perception but may interfere with forming a trusting bond with the agent.

Effects on Co-Presence of a Virtual Human: A Comparison of Display and Interaction Types

Recently, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled virtual humans have been widely used in various fields in our everyday lives, such as for museum exhibitions and as information guides. Given the continued technological innovations in extended reality (XR), immersive display devices and interaction methods are evolving to provide a feeling of togetherness with a virtual human, termed co-presence. With regard to such technical developments, one main concern is how to improve the experience through the sense of co-presence as felt by participants. However, virtual human systems still have limited guidelines on effective methods, and there is a lack of research on how to visualize and interact with virtual humans. In this paper, we report a novel method to support a strong sense of co-presence with a virtual human, and we investigated the effects on co-presence with a comparison of display and interaction types. We conducted the experiment according to a specified scenario between the participant and the virtual human, and our experimental study showed that subjects who participated in an immersive 3D display with non-verbal interaction felt the greatest co-presence. Our results are expected to provide guidelines on how to focus on constructing AI-based interactive virtual humans.

Virtual environments to study emotional responses to clinical communication: A scoping review

OBJECTIVE

This scoping review explores the potential for virtual environments (VE) to evaluate emotional outcomes in clinical communication research. Authors representing multiple disciplines use review results to propose potential research opportunities and considerations.

METHODS

We utilized a structured framework for scoping reviews. We searched four literature databases for relevant articles. We applied multidisciplinary perspectives to synthesize relevant potential opportunities for emotion-focused communications research using VE.

RESULTS

Twenty-one articles met inclusion criteria. They applied different methodological approaches, including a range of VE technologies and diverse emotional outcome measures, such as psychophysiological arousal, emotional valence, or empathy. Major research topics included use of virtual reality to provoke and measure emotional responses, train clinicians in communication skills, and increase clinician empathy.

CONCLUSION

Researchers may leverage VE technologies to ethically and systematically examine how characteristics of clinical interactions, environments, and communication impact emotional reactions and responses among patients and clinicians. Variability exists in how VE technologies are employed and reported in published literature, and this may limit the internal and external validity of the research. However, virtual reality can provide a low-cost, low-risk, experimentally controlled, and ecologically valid approach for studying clinician-patient communication.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS

Future research should leverage psychophysiological measures to further examine emotional responses during clinical communication scenarios and clearly report virtual environment characteristics to support evaluation of study conclusions, study replicability, and meta-analyses.

Visual Expression of Emotion in Dynamic 3D Painting System Based on Emotion Synthesis Model

Emotion is a unique ability possessed by human beings as advanced creatures. Emotions give people a unique physical and mental experience. Assigning emotions to computer systems is one of the latest topics in artificial intelligence research. The purpose is to allow machines to achieve natural coordination between humans and computers. This article focuses on the visual expression of emotion in the dynamic three-dimensional painting system, creating an intelligent painting system and realizing a good user experience. In this paper, the discrete method is used to qualitatively analyze emotions, and the continuous method is used to quantify basic emotions, and emotional modeling and emotional quantitative analysis are proposed to realize quantitative analysis of emotions. Combining these two methods, a comprehensive method is proposed, which uses a continuous method to quantify the basic emotions of each discrete dimension, and finally superimposes them into a comprehensive emotional synthesis model. Emotion modeling is the basis of emotion visualization. Borrowing the relationship between emotion synthesis model and visual emotion elements, this article puts forward the concept of qualitative and quantitative visual emotion elements, and expounds that the multidimensional superposition of visual emotion elements makes dynamic three-dimensional painting system emotions. The experimental results in this article show that the emotional visualization scheme of 100 samples is tested by quantitative statistical methods to demonstrate its effectiveness. Starting from 5 points of concern, the emotion visualization method discussed in this article can indeed convey or suggest a certain positive emotion (the average value of experience, transitivity, and infectiousness > 2.5, and the variance is close to 0), but we also found this recognition at the same time The degree is not high enough, and individual differences are large (mean value < 2.5, variance close to 1). This can indicate that different subjects have different feelings and evaluations of this emotional visualization. As long as the difference is within a reasonable range, this emotional visualization also has practical value, and has the ability to convey or suggest emotions.

Topic modeling for systematic review of visual analytics in incomplete longitudinal behavioral trial data

Longitudinal observational and randomized controlled trials (RCT) are widely applied in biomedical behavioral studies and increasingly implemented in smart health systems. These trials frequently produce data that are high-dimensional, correlated, and contain missing values, posing significant analytic challenges. Notably, visual analytics are underdeveloped in this area. In this paper, we developed a longitudinal topic model to implement the systematic review of visual analytic methods presented at the IEEE VIS conference over its 28 year history, in comparison with MIFuzzy, an integrated and comprehensive soft computing tool for behavioral trajectory pattern recognition, validation, and visualization of incomplete longitudinal data. The findings of our longitudinal topic modeling highlight the trend patterns of visual analytics development in longitudinal behavioral trials and underscore the gigantic gap of existing robust visual analytic methods and actual working algorithms for longitudinal behavioral trial data. Future research areas for visual analytics in behavioral trial studies and smart health systems are discussed.

Exploring the Effects of Scale and Color Differences on Users’ Perception for Everyday Mixed Reality (MR) Experience: Toward Comparative Analysis Using MR Devices

With continued technological innovations in the fields of mixed reality (MR), wearable type MR devices, such as head-mounted display (HMD), have been released and are frequently used in various fields, such as entertainment, training, education, and shopping. However, because each product has different parts and specifications in terms of design and manufacturing process, users feel that the virtual objects overlaying real environments in MR are visualized differently, depending on the scale and color used by the MR device. In this paper, we compare the effect of scale and color parameters on users’ perceptions in using different types of MR devices to improve their MR experiences in real life. We conducted two experiments (scale and color), and our experimental study showed that the subjects who participated in the scale perception experiment clearly tended to underestimate virtual objects, in comparison with real objects, and overestimated color in MR environments.

From Robot to Virtual Doppelganger: Impact of Visual Fidelity of Avatars Controlled in Third-Person Perspective on Embodiment and Behavior in Immersive Virtual Environments

This study presents the second phase of a series of experiments investigating the impact of avatar visual fidelity on the sense of embodiment and users' behavior in immersive virtual environments. Our main focus concerns the similarity between users and avatars, a factor known as truthfulness. Our experiment requires the participants to control three avatars using a third-person perspective: a robot, a suit and their virtual doppelganger (virtual representation of the self). In order to analyze users' reactions and strategies, each task of the scenario of the virtual reality application can potentially affect the integrity of their characters. Our results revealed that ownership, one of the three factors of the sense of embodiment, is higher for the participants controlling their self-representation than with abstract representations. Furthermore, avatar visual fidelity seems to affect users' subjective experience, half of the panel reported having different behavior depending on the controlled character. Abstract representations allow the users to adopt more risky behaviors, while self-representations maintain a connection with the real world and encourage users to preserve the integrity of their avatar.

Universality vs. Cultural Specificity in the Relations Among Emotional Contagion, Emotion Regulation, and Mood State: An Emotion Process Perspective

To investigate the universality and cultural specificity of emotion processing in children from three different ethnic groups (Han, Jingpo, and Dai), we administered three questionnaires, including the emotional contagion scale, emotion regulation scale, and the Chinese mood adjective check list, to 1,362 ethnic Han, Dai, and Jingpo participants (M_age = 13.78 years). Structural equation modeling was used to examine the universality and cultural specificity in the relations among emotional contagion, emotion regulation, and mood state. The results revealed that emotion regulation mediated the relation between emotional contagion and mood state: positive emotional contagion increased positive mood state and decreased negative mood state by the mediated role of reappraisal, negative emotional contagion decreased positive contagion and increased negative mood state by the inconsistent mediated role of reappraisal; negative contagion increased negative mood state by the mediated role of suppression. We found both universality and cultural specificity in the relations among emotional contagion, emotion regulation, and mood state. Regarding cultural specificity, among Dai and Jingpo participants, negative contagion positively predicted reappraisal, while for Han participants, it did not; Jingpo participants demonstrated a weaker negative relation between reappraisal and negative mood state, and a stronger positive relation between negative contagion and suppression; and Dai participants were the only ethnic group that showed a negative connection between negative contagion and positive mood state. Regarding emotion universality, the three ethnic groups all showed positive relations between negative contagion and negative mood, and between suppression and negative mood; additionally, positive contagion positively predicted positive mood state, mediated by reappraisal. Thus, some emotion processes are universal and others more specific. In this paper, we discuss universal emotion processes and ethnic cultural differences in these emotion processes.