ABSTRACT

Effective psychological interventions for anxiety disorders often include exposure to fearful situations. However, individuals with low self-efficacy may find such exposure too overwhelming. We created a vicarious experience in virtual reality, which enables observation of one’s experience from a first person perspective without actual performance and which might increase self-efficacy. With similarities to both traditional vicarious experiences and direct experiences, the level of self-identification with the experience was hypothesized to affect self-efficacy and its relationship with direct experiences. To test this, vicarious experiences with two distinct levels of self-identification were compared in a between-subjects experiment ($n=60$). After being exposed to a vicarious experience of giving lectures on elementary arithmetic in front of a virtual audience with either a high or low level of self-identification with the public speaker, participants from both conditions actively gave another lecture. The results revealed that self-identification affected people’s self-efficacy after vicarious experience. They further revealed that self-identification is a moderator of (1) the correlation between perceived performance and self-efficacy, (2) the correlation between self-efficacy measured after the vicarious and the follow-up direct experience; and (3) the correlation between the sense of presence reported in the vicarious and in the follow-up direct experience. We anticipate that the first-person-perspective experiences with high-level of self-identification have the potential to be beneficial for training where changing people’s self-efficacy is desirable.

摘要

有效的焦虑症心理干预措施通常包括暴露于恐惧状况。但是，自我效能感低下的人可能会发现这种接触过于压倒性。我们在虚拟现实中创造了一种替代性的体验，该体验可以从第一人称视角观察一个人的体验而无需实际表现，并且可以提高自我效能。由于与传统的替代经验和直接经验都相似，因此假设与经验的自我认同水平会影响自我效能及其与直接经验的关系。为了测试这一点，在受试者之间的实验中比较了具有两种不同水平的自我认同的替代经历（$ñ=60$）。在公开演讲者面前，他们经历了在具有较高或较低自我识别水平的虚拟观众面前进行基本算术演讲的替代经验，这两种情况的参与者都积极地进行了另一场演讲。结果表明，自我认同会影响他人的经验，进而影响人们的自我效能。他们进一步揭示，自我认同是（1）感知的绩效与自我效能之间的相关性；（2）在替代和后续直接经历后测得的自我效能之间的相关性的调节剂；（3）替代者报告的存在感与后续直接经历中的存在感之间的相关性。