Real enough: A virtual classroom can induce an increase in anxiety and speech disfluencies in adolescents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) enables the user to navigate and interact in real time with computer-generated 3D environments. There is an increasing interest in using virtual environments to study psychological phenomena such as anxiety (Wiederhold & Bouchard, 2014). In this study, we assess the feasibility of a virtual classroom to evoke anxiety and speech disfluencies in adolescents. Twenty adolescents who do not stutter or suffer from social anxiety disorder, were asked to talk for approximately four minutes in front of the examiner, in a virtual classroom and in a VR neutral environment. They repeatedly rated their level of anxiety while speaking. Our results show an increase in speech disfluencies when speaking in front of a virtual classroom compared with speaking to the examiner. Moreover, we observed higher levels of anxiety when speaking in a virtual classroom than when speaking in an empty apartment. These preliminary results underline the capacity of a virtual classroom to induce anxiety and speech disfluencies in youth. These results, alongside previous research into adults (Brundage & Hancock, 2015; Brundage et al., 2006, 2016), are encouraging for the clinical use of VR environments to assess and treat anxiety and speech disfluencies in people who stutter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".