A Virtual Reality Study of Help Recognition and Metacognition with an Affective Agent

Advances in the use of virtual affective agents for therapeutic purposes in mental health opened a research avenue to improve the way patients interpret other's behavior as helpful instead of menacing. Here, the authors propose an original paradigm based on affective computing and virtual reality technologies requiring the assessment of helping intentions as well as self-monitoring metacognition. Sixteen healthy subjects played a 38-turns card games with a virtual affective agent MARC during which they had to guess between two cards the one that would be color-matched with another card. Their guesses could be oriented by the agent's emotional displays. Three subjective ratings on a percentage analog scale were recorded after each trial: helpfulness, self-monitoring, and sympathy. Help recognition and self-monitoring metacognitive ratings raise the question of the importance to enhance both components in therapeutic situations within psychiatric populations. Overall, this study exemplifies the promising use of virtual reality settings for future studies in the medical psychology field.