Fear of Public Speaking in Virtual Reality: 40-Subject Experiment on Audience Feedback

University College London researcher David-Paul Pertaub conducted an experiment on social anxiety induction in virtual reality. The study involved 40 subjects exposed to a virtual audience to assess fear of public speaking, specifically testing the influence of audience feedback type and display immersion. Results indicated that a hostile negative audience scenario generated strong affective responses in speakers.

Use Cases

• Training machine learning models to predict anxiety levels based on physiological or behavioral data collected during VR exposure.
• Analyzing the correlation between virtual audience feedback type and self-reported anxiety scores.
• Comparing the efficacy of different immersion levels (head-mounted display vs. desktop) for inducing social anxiety.

Strengths

• Experiment involved 40 subjects, a follow-up from a prior 10-person pilot study.
• Study design explicitly tested the variable of virtual audience feedback (hostile vs. other types).

Limitations

• Row count and specific data columns are unknown, limiting suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

University College London

Collection Method

Experimental study placing subjects before a virtual audience.