Prof. Perusquía and Ms. Matsuda (D1) gave the following oral presentations at ACII 2023 (the annual Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing) which was held from September 10th to 13th, 2023, in Cambridge, USA.
Prof. Perusquía presented our effort for the Emotion Physiology and Experience Collaboration (EPiC) Competition on behalf of the team. The EPiC Competition was held as one of the Sunday workshops of ACII 2023. At the competition, 12 teams (50 researchers) competed to see who could best use measures of physiology to model moment-to-moment ratings of two elementary components of emotional experience: feelings of valence and arousal. We won the first prize in the competition.
- Xin Wei (M2), Huakun Liu (M2), Felix Dollack, Monica Perusquía-Hernández, Chirag Raman (Delft University of Technology), Hideaki Uchiyama, and Kiyoshi Kiyokawa,
“Ensemble Learning to Assess Dynamics of Affective Experience Ratings and Physiological Change” - Abstract:
Ms. Matsuda presented her research at the Doctoral Consortium of ACII 2023. This study aims to develop XR drama therapy as a new therapy integrating the advantages of both real drama therapy and the metaverse.
- Yoriko Matsuda,
“Exploring New Art Therapies by Integrating Drama Therapy and XR Technology” - Abstract:
Nowadays, people live with strong stress and search for ways to relate to others. In particular, Japanese people tend to try to relieve their stress through self-help efforts without resorting to professionals. However, solving essential mental health problems with self-help is difficult. Therefore, I propose to focus on drama therapy. Drama therapy uses playful theatrical experiences to build a casual support system where everybody can participate without hesitation.
However, current drama therapy has various shortcomings. The main issue is the shortage of drama therapists and shyness toward acting. Furthermore, drama therapy is limited in the number of places it is held, and in the number of sessions available per user. Therefore, during my Ph.D., I aim to develop XR Drama Therapy (XRDT) as a game-like therapy held in the metaverse, and conducted by an emotionally-intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) therapist.
Four phases will be implemented to achieve this aim. First, I will investigate the session content necessary to implement drama therapy in XR. Second, I will implement a basic conversational AI therapist. Third, I will explore what non-verbal behaviors are instrumental to the therapy. Finally, I will assess different haptic technologies to convey affective touch.
In the first experiment, I conducted psychological validation of the content of XRDT sessions and confirmed that perspective-taking and empathy could be improved.
