Experimental studies of the interaction between people and virtual humans with a focus on social anxiety

Psychotherapy has been one of the major applications of Virtual Reality technology; examples include fear of flying, heights, spiders, and post‐traumatic stress disorder. Virtual reality has been shown to be useful, in the context of exposure therapy for the treatment of social anxiety, such as fear of public speaking, where the clients learn how to conquer their anxiety through interactions with Virtual Characters (avatars). This thesis is concerned with the interaction between human participants and avatars in a Virtual Environment (VE), with the main focus being on Social Anxiety. It is our hypothesis that interactions between people and avatars can evoke in people behaviours that correspond to their degree of social anxiety or confidence. Moreover the responses of people to avatars will also depend on their degree of exhibited social anxiety – they will react differently to a shy avatar compared to a confident avatar. The research started with an experimental study on the reaction of shy and confident male volunteers to an approach by an attractive and friendly virtual woman in a VE. The results show that the participants responded according to expectations towards the avatar at an emotional, physiological, and behavioural level. The research then studied a particular cue which represents shyness – “blushing”. Experiments were carried out on how participant responds towards a blushing avatar. The results suggested that, even without consciously noticing the avatar’s blushing, the participants had an improved relationship with her when she was blushing. Finally, the research further investigated how people respond towards a shy avatar as opposed to a confident one. The results show that participants gave more positive comments to the personality of the avatar displaying signs of shyness

Moral Foundations and Student Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty: A Mixed Methods Study

This mixed methods study explored students’ hypothetical choices of behavior in a series of ten academic vignettes. In addition, it examined student judgments of academic behaviors as acceptable or dishonest. Finally, it compared scores on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2 to the importance of factors that might influence student behavioral choices in real world scenarios and explored the differences in perceptions among demographic groups. Twenty-five undergraduate students participated in the study. In a semi-structured interview, each student discussed ten academic vignettes: predicting their own hypothetical behavioral choice, judging target behaviors as honest or dishonest, and identifying factors that would most influence their choice of behaviors. Students also completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2. Data analysis showed that most of the ten target behaviors were judged as dishonest by most students; however, some students were willing to engage in behaviors that they had labeled as dishonest. Students’ choices of factors that most influenced their behaviors were weakly positively related to their scores on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2. Some differences were found between demographic groups in perceptions, choices, and MFQ-2 scores

(Re)Turning Warriors: A Practical Theology of Military Moral Stress

The concept of military moral injury emerged in the past decade as a way to understand how traumatic levels of moral emotions (not posttraumatic fear) generate moral anguish experienced by some military service members. Interdisciplinary research on moral injury has included clinical psychologists (Litz et al., 2009; Drescher et al., 2011), theologians (Brock & Lettini, 2012), ethicists (Kinghorn, 2012), and philosophers (Sherman, 2015). This dissertation uses a pastoral theological method (Doehring, 2015a; Graham, Walton, & Ward, 2005) that draws upon life experience--memoirs written by veterans (Boudreau, 2008; Goodell, 2011; Mehl-Laituri, 2012; Peters, 2014)--to identify the inadequate understanding of moral identity within the existing discourse on moral injury. This project recognizes moral injury as radical moral suffering, but also considers moral stress in a broader spectrum of experiences. This project articulates a new key concept--moral orienting systems--a dynamic systems of values, beliefs, and behaviors learned and changed over time and through formative experiences and relationships such as family of origin, religious and other significant communities, mentors, and teachers. Military recruit training reengineers pre-existing moral orienting systems and indoctrinates a military moral orienting system designed to support functioning within the military context and the demands of the high-stress environment of combat, including immediate responses to perceived threat. This military moral orienting system includes new values and beliefs, new behaviors, and new meaningful relationships. Recognizing the profound impact of military recruit training, this project challenges dominant notions of post-deployment reentry and reintegration, and formulates a new paradigm for first, understanding the generative circumstances of ongoing moral stress that include moral emotions like guilt, shame, disgust, and contempt (Litz et al., 2009; Kim et al., 2011; Nash & Litz, 2013; La Bash & Papa, 2013), and, second, for responding to such human suffering through compassionate care and comprehensive restorative support. This paradigm is used to compare three significant programs providing resources for veteran reintegration: a government model (VA hospitals); a veterans\u27 organization model (The Mission Continues); and a congregational model (Rez Vets at The Church of the Resurrection). This project calls for more effective participation of religious communities in the reentry and reintegration process and for a military-wide post-deployment reentry program comparable to the encompassing bio-psycho-spiritual-social transformative intensity experienced in recruit-training boot camp

The Justification of Prejudice Toward Childfree Women

Previous research suggests that women without children are perceived negatively by others and experience adverse outcomes in various settings. This study investigated psychosocial justifications of prejudice toward childfree women. Participants (N = 891) completed measures of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), the internal (IMS-S) and external (EMS-S) motivations to respond without sexism, and prejudice toward childfree women (i.e., perceived disadvantages of being childfree, evaluations of childfree women, and perceptions of childfree women’s warmth). Most participants also completed one or more justification measures of hostile sexism (HS), benevolent sexism (BS), gender-specific system justification (GSSJ), and femininity ideology. Results indicated that greater RWA was directly associated with greater perceived childfree disadvantages and coldness in childfree women. Additionally, greater IMS-S was directly associated with fewer perceived disadvantages, favorable evaluations, and greater perceived warmth; and greater EMS-S was directly associated with more negative evaluations and perceived coldness. Greater BS and GSSJ were also associated with greater disadvantages. Furthermore, femininity ideology was directly associated with greater disadvantages, unfavorable evaluations, and perceived coldness. In mediational analyses, IMS-S and EMS-S were associated with greater disadvantages, unfavorable evaluations, and perceived coldness indirectly through femininity ideology. EMS-S was also associated with greater disadvantages and unfavorable evaluations indirectly through BS. This study makes a unique contribution to the literature on attitudes toward childfree women by not only replicating that childfree prejudice persists, but also documenting why it potentially exists. Additionally, by identifying several psychosocial constructs that may justify childfree prejudice, this study suggests future research and possible interventions to reduce childfree prejudice

The Verbal and Non-Verbal Indicators of Deceit in Financial and Political Fraud: A Case Study of Bernard L. Madoff, Chen Shui-Bien and Bo Xilai

From the earliest financial scams of the seventeenth century, through the headlinegrabbing Wall Street scandals of our time, financial fraud and embezzlement have damaged both domestic and global economic systems. Preventative measures are the best way to reduce fraud. Fraudsters are adaptive and will find ways to circumvent such measures. Detecting fraud is essential once the prevention mechanisms have failed. This dissertation investigated the inherent problems of financial fraud detection for high stake fraudsters in the corporate and political fields in the United States, China and Taiwan. Both verbal and non-verbal signs of deception were examined in the case studies of Bernie Madoff, Taiwanese ex-president Chen Shiu-Bian, and former Chinese politician Bo Xilai. I was interested in determining what factors are key to the success of a highstake liar? What are the behaviors to look for in liars? Do these behaviors apply to Madoff, Chen and Bo? What was it about their communication styles that convinced their followers and clients to believe them and ignore signs of fraud? Do high-stake liars have different or the same verbal cues and non-verbal cues across the American, Chinese and Taiwanese cultures? Are there consistent patterns and indicators of their body language? If there are, can we apply these same patterns to predicate the next high-stake fraud? My research results show that while observing both verbal and non-verbal communication styles, patterns develop, and these patterns can be used as indicators to help business intelligence and to predict future financial fraud

E-AI : an emotion architecture for agents in games & virtual worlds

Characters in games and virtual worlds continue to gain improvements in both their visual appearance and more human-like behaviours with each successive generation of hardware. One area that seemingly would need to be addressed if this evolution in human-like characters is to continue is in the area of characters with emotions. To begin addressing this, the thesis focuses on answering the question “Can an emotional architecture be developed for characters in games and virtual worlds, that is built upon a foundation of formal psychology? Therefore a primary goal of the research was to both review and consolidate a range of background material based on the psychology of emotions to provide a cohesive foundation on which to base any subsequent work. Once this review was completed, a range of supplemental material was investigated including computational models of emotions, current implementations of emotions in games and virtual worlds, machine learning techniques suitable for implementing aspects of emotions in characters in virtual world, believability and the role of emotions, and finally a discussion of interactive characters in the form of chat bots and non-player characters. With these reviews completed, a synthesis of the research resulted in the defining of an emotion architecture for use with pre-existing agent behaviour systems, and a range of evaluation techniques applicable to agents with emotions. To support validation of the proposed architecture three case studies were conducted that involved applying the architecture to three very different software platforms featuring agents. The first was applying the architecture to combat bots in Quake 3, the second to a chat bot in the virtual world Second Life, and the third was to a web chat bot used for e-commerce, specifically dealing with question and answers about the companies services. The three case studies were supported with several small pilot evaluations that were intended to look at different aspects of the implemented architecture including; (1) Whether or not users noticed the emotional enhancements. Which in the two small pilot studies conducted, highlighted that the addition of emotions to characters seemed to affect the user experience when the encounter was more interactive such as in the Second Life implementation. Where the interaction occurred in a combat situation with enemies with short life spans, the user experience seemed to be greatly reduced. (2) An evaluation was conducted on how the combat effectiveness of combat bots was affected by the addition of emotions, and in this pilot study it was found that the combat effectiveness was not quite statistically reduced, even when the bots were running away when afraid, or attacking when angry even if close to death. In summary, an architecture grounded in formal psychology is presented that is suitable for interactive characters in games and virtual worlds, but not perhaps ideal for applications where user interaction is brief such as in fast paced combat situations. This architecture has been partially validated through three case studies and includes suggestions for further work especially in the mapping of secondary emotions, the emotional significance of conversations, and the need to conduct further evaluations based on the pilot studies.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Modelling cultural dimensions and social relationships to create cultural synthetic characters

The work presented in this thesis investigates studies and theories of culture, social power and the relationship between culture and emotion studied by psychologists and anthropology. We operationalised a Cultural Dimension model, proposed by Hofstede, and Social Power and integrated them into an already existing architecture for autonomous agents called “FAtiMA”. The purpose of the adapted system is to generate culturally-specific behaviour in character interaction which is recognisably different to users. Two different experiments, with human participants, were conducted to investigate the perceived differences between two different groups of characters: with and without cultural parameters. The main result shows that users do recognise the differences in character behaviour between the two experimental cases, which demonstrates that our model is able to create culturally-specific synthetic characters

Boundary work: An interpretive ethnographic perspective on negotiating and leveraging cross-cultural identity

The complexity of global organizations highlights the importance of members’ ability to span diverse boundaries that may be defined by organization structures, national borders, and/or a variety of cultures associated with organization, nation-based societal and work cultures, industries, and/or professions. Based on ethnographic research in a Japan–US binational firm, the paper describes and analyzes the boundary role performance of the firm\u27s Japanese members. It contributes toward theory on boundary spanning by introducing a “cultural identity negotiation” conceptual framework. We show boundary spanning as a process shaped through the interplay of the contextual issues that make a boundary problematic; an individual\u27s multiple repertoires of cultural knowledge; and the individual boundary spanner\u27s “negotiation”, through interaction with others, of his/her cultural identities – the sense of “who I am” as a cultural being that is fundamental to an individual\u27s self-concept. At the same time, we make transparent the epistemological and methodological foundations of an interpretive ethnographic approach, demonstrating its value for understanding complex organizational processes. Research findings have practical implications for the selection and training of an organization\u27s employees, particularly of persons who may be considered “bicultural”

The Natural History of Secular Christianity

Human beings are social animals, not solitary ones. Morality is an instinct we have because it helps us socialize, live together harmoniously. This paper reviews how the evolution of morality and other mental functions associated with our survival and sociality gave rise to cultural behavior among the small groups of humans during the Palaeolithic period when the tribe was personified as a supernatural identity and guardian, a totem, an ancestor and ultimately a god. Loyalty to the tribe required loyalty to the tribal god representing the tribe. Preservation of the tribe meant mistrust of other tribes and their gods. The merging of small groups rendered obsolete the tribal, locally cultural conception of religion, but it persisted as monotheism in the imperial stage of society from about 2000 BC, becoming the world religions. Today’s empires are global, and a belief system modelled on local tribes in competition is naïve divisive. Out-group hatred is more of a threat than any in-group moral benefits, and they too are disappearing with the failure to preserve small group coherence, and justice and fairness in capitalist society. The moral failure of imperial religion on the urban and global scale is the “Death of God”. Humans now cannot afford the moral laziness of constantly appealing to a supernatural totem in an otherwise do-nothing religion. Imperial religion was and still is a tool of the political right, used to manipulate us. Yet Christ offered an ethical scheme that is essentially a practical morality of mutual lovingkindness which does not require a supernatural God. It is Secular Christianity, a world view any scientist and atheist could adopt without compromise, and most Christians should