Behaviour in Context

The inference of emotional information from social contexts in virtual reality

Systemic psychotherapy (SPT) assumes that patients' dysfunctional behaviour is triggered by internal social contexts that are inferred from external social situations. SPT uses spatial constellations of people to activate social contexts in patients. On the one hand, this serves to uncover context patterns that may underlie a dysfunction and, on the other hand, to intervene live in the activated context. Although this method is well established in SPT, its systematic investigation faces severe limitations, e.g. enough people must be available to form the constellations, and systematic switching between different constellations to create different contexts is practically impossible. To solve this problem, we use full-body virtual reality (VR). We use VR to present subjects with different constellations and environments and investigate how these evoke contexts in the subjects. We will use VR's unique ability to change stimuli gradually or instantaneously to study the change of contexts in subjects. We will investigate the measurement of induced contexts through emotional ratings, observation of body posture and physiological measurements, e.g. heart rate and skin conductance.

The investigation of the evocation of social contexts in VR by means of spatial constellations of people is to be regarded experimentally as an open procedure. Accordingly, we accompany this investigation with an experimentally tightly controlled procedure in which test subjects work on a cognitive task in different virtual environments. We link the task difficulty to specific VR environments in order to activate different contexts and investigate how these affect very precisely measurable aspects of attention.

The interplay of the two approaches, with their respective advantages in terms of external validity and experimental control, lays the foundation for psychological applications of VR in the EXU cluster and at the same time establishes regular productive collaboration between the Departments of Computer Science and Psychology.

Partners

Chair of psychological methods and cognitive modelling https://tu-dresden.de/mn/psychologie/ifap/methpsy

Publications

Dutschke, R.; Zeidler, D.; Senftleben, U.; McGinity, M.; Surrey, C.; Dshemuchadse, M.; Scherbaum, S. (2024). Exploring Systemic Constellations in Virtual Reality. In 53rd Congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie, Vienna, (ACCEPTED)

Funding

Saxon State Ministry for Science and the Arts (SMWK), Behaviour in Context Cluster of Excellence Initiative.