School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
Biol Psychol. 2012 Sep;91(1):17-21. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2012.05.008. Epub 2012 May 28.
Immersive virtual environment technology is increasingly used by psychologists as a tool for researching social influence in realistic, yet experimentally controllable, settings. The present study demonstrates the validity and reliability of facial electromyography as a marker of affect in immersive virtual environments and further shows that the mere presence of virtual humans is enough to elicit sociality effects on facial expressiveness. Participants viewed pleasant and unpleasant images in a virtual room either alone or with two virtual humans present. The patterns of smiling and frowning activity elicited by positive and negative stimuli in the virtual environment were the same as those found in laboratory settings. Moreover, when viewing positive stimuli, smiling activity was greater when two agents were present than in the alone condition. The results provide new psychophysiological evidence for the potency of social agents in immersive virtual environments.
沉浸式虚拟环境技术正越来越多地被心理学家用作研究现实中可实验控制的社会影响的工具。本研究证明了面部肌电图作为沉浸式虚拟环境中情感标记的有效性和可靠性，并进一步表明，仅仅存在虚拟人就足以对面部表情的表达产生社会性影响。参与者在一个虚拟房间里独自或与两个虚拟人一起观看愉快和不愉快的图像。在虚拟环境中，积极和消极刺激引起的微笑和皱眉活动模式与在实验室环境中发现的模式相同。此外，当观看积极刺激时，当有两个代理存在时，微笑活动比单独状态时更大。这些结果为社交代理在沉浸式虚拟环境中的效力提供了新的心理生理学证据。
