Stress Management Training using Biofeedback guided by Social Agents

ABSTRACT Coping with stress is critical to mental health. Prolonged mental stress is the psychological and physiological response to a high frequency of or continuous stressors, which has a negative impact on health. This paper presents a virtual stress management training using biofeedback derived from the cardiovascular response of the heart rate variability (HRV) with an interactive social agent as biofeedback trainer. The evaluation includes both, a subject-matter expert interview and an experiment with 71 participants. In the experiment, we compared our novel stress management training to a stress management training using stress diaries. The results indicate that our social agent-based stress management training using biofeedback significantly decreased the self-assessed stress levels immediately after the training, as well as in a socially stressful task. Moreover, we found a significant correlation between stress level and the assessment of one’s performance in a socially stressful task. Participants that received our training assessed their performance higher than participants getting stress diaries. Taken this together, our novel virtual stress management training with an interactive social agent as a trainer can be evaluated as a valid method for learning techniques on how to cope with stressful situations.