Jeroen de Man

Evoking and Measuring Arousal in Game Settings

Serious games seem to be more effective if the participant feels more involved in the game. The participant should experience a high sense of presence which can be obtained by matching the level of excitement to the level of arousal a participant experiences. The level of arousal should be measured at runtime to make the game adaptive to the participant’s physiological state. In this paper an experiment is presented that has as main goal to see whether it is possible to evoke arousal during different types of computer games and to monitor the physiological response. Using three online games, participants reported different levels of stress and understanding between games. Furthermore, an increase of skin conductance was found as well as a decrease in heart rate for the most difficult to understand game.

Analysing Emotional Video Using Consumer EEG Hardware

Low-cost, easy to use EEG hardware produced for the consumer-market provide interesting possibilities for human-computer interaction in a wide variety of applications. Recent years have produced numerous papers discussing the use of these types of devices in various ways, but only some of this work looks into what these devices can actually measure. In this paper, data is used that has been collected using a Myndplay Brainband, while 30 participants viewed emotional videos eliciting different mental states. This data is analysed by looking at average power in multiple frequency bands and eSenseTM values, as well as peaks in the measurements detected throughout the videos. Although average values do not differentiate well between the mental states, peak detection provides some promising results worthy of future research.

Inducing Anxiety through Video Material

For professionals in various domains, training based on Virtual Reality can be an interesting method to improve their emotion regulation skills. However, for such a training system to be effective, it is essential to trigger the desired emotional state in the trainee. Hence, an important question is to what extent virtual stimuli have the ability to induce an emotional stress response. This paper addresses this question by studying the impact of anxiety-inducing video material on skin conductance, heart rate and subjective experience of participants that watch the videos. The results indicate that the scary videos significantly increased skin conductance and subjective response, while no significant effect on heart rate was found.

Learning Emotion Regulation Strategies: A Cognitive Agent Model

Learning to cope with negative emotions is an important challenge, which has received considerable attention in domains like the military and law enforcement. Driven by the aim to develop better training in coping skills, this paper presents an adaptive computational model of emotion regulation strategies, which is inspired by recent neurological literature. The model can be used both to gain more insight in emotion regulation training itself and to develop intelligent virtual reality-based training environments. The behaviour of the model is illustrated by a number of simulation experiments and by a mathematical analysis. In addition, a preliminary validation points out that it is able to approximate empirical data obtained from an experiment with human participants.

Physiological and Subjective Response to Injustice: The Effects of Unjust Evaluations on Physiological Responses and Subjective Experiences

Professionals with high pressure jobs such as police officers and military personnel often have to deal with difficult situations. In order to train such professionals to deal with their emotions and prevent possible anxiety disorders an ambient virtual training environment is being developed. This environment enables the trainee to deal with different scenarios and learn to appropriately regulate his/her emotions. An example of an emotion that can be experienced by emergency service workers is anger or distress caused by feelings of injustice. In this paper an experiment is presented that has as main goal to see whether it is possible to make the trainees feel unjustly treated in a virtual environment and to monitor their physiological response.

Adaptive Training for Aggression de-Escalation

The ability to de-escalate confrontations with aggressive individuals is a useful skill, in particular within professions in public domains. Nevertheless, offering appropriate training that enables students to develop such skills is a nontrivial matter. As a complementary approach to real-world training, the STRESS project proposes a simulation-based environment for training of aggression de-escalation. The main focus of the current paper is to make this system adaptive to the performance of the trainee. To realize this, first a number of learning goals have been identified. Based on these, several levels of difficulty were established, as well as a mechanism to switch up and down between these levels based on the user’s score. A preliminary evaluation demonstrated that the system successfully adapts its difficulty level to the performance of the user, and that users are generally positive about the adaptation mechanism.