Exploring Individual Differences of Public Speaking Anxiety in Real-Life and Virtual Presentations

Public speaking is a vital skill for making good impressions, effectively exchanging ideas, and influencing others. Yet, public speaking anxiety (PSA) ranks as a top social phobia. Recent advancements in wearable devices and ubiquitous virtual reality (VR) interfaces can help measure and mitigate PSA. This research quantifies PSA through bio-behavioral markers related to individuals’ physiological and acoustic characteristics. The effect of virtual reality (VR) training on alleviating PSA is measured through self-reported and bio-behavioral indices. Psychological (e.g., general trait anxiety, personality) and demographic (e.g., age, gender, highest education, native language) traits are examined as moderating factors between bio-behavioral indices and PSA, as well as moderating factors for measuring the VR effectiveness in mitigating PSA. These measures are also used as clustering criteria for stratifying participants in group-based models of PSA. Results indicate the significance of such traits to modeling PSA with the proposed group-based models yielding Spearman’s correlation of 0.55 ( $p<0.05$ ) between the actual and predicted outcome. Results further demonstrate that systematic exposure to public speaking in VR can alleviate PSA in terms of both self-reported ( $p<0.05$ ) and physiological ( $p<0.05$ ) indices. Findings from this study will enable researchers to better understand antecedents and causes of PSA and lay the foundation for personalized adaptive feedback for PSA interventions.