Predicting the Effectiveness of Systematic Desensitization Through Virtual Reality for Mitigating Public Speaking Anxiety

Public speaking is central to socialization in casual, professional, or academic settings. Yet, public speaking anxiety (PSA) is known to impact a considerable portion of the general population. This paper utilizes bio-behavioral indices captured from wearable devices to quantify the effectiveness of systematic exposure to virtual reality (VR) audiences for mitigating PSA. The effect of separate bio-behavioral features and demographic factors is studied, as well as the amount of necessary data from the VR sessions that can yield a reliable predictive model of the VR training effectiveness. Results indicate that acoustic and physiological reactivity during the VR exposure can reliably predict change in PSA before and after the training. With the addition of demographic features, both acoustic and physiological feature sets achieve improvements in performance. Finally, using bio-behavioral data from six to eight VR sessions can yield reliable prediction of PSA change. Findings of this study will enable researchers to better understand how bio-behavioral factors indicate improvements in PSA with VR training.