Exploring Influence of Social Anxiety on Embodied Face Perception during Affective Social Interactions in VR
Damla Kuleli, Fred Charles, Liucheng Guo, Laura Vuillier, Chang Hong Liu, Nicola Jean Gregory, Xun He · 2024
Our research studies early face-body perception of socially anxious individuals during social interaction with a virtual agent (VA) in VR using EEG. VAs’ expressiveness is manipulated during social interactions through their facial animations portraying realistic positive/negative/neutral expressions. Facial expressions of the VAs are recorded using real-time facial animation performance capture and pre-validated. Wearing an HMD, tactile-based VR controllers and a mobile EEG system, participants will interact with individual VAs in a virtual office setting (an employee meeting their employer with a handshake), a scenario known to generate anxiety. Behavioural, physiological, and EEG data will be analysed to reveal the effect of emotional valence on early face-body perception during social interactions. This study provides a framework for synchronised multimodal data recording and analysis.