An Experiment on Public Speaking Anxiety in Response to
Three Different Types of Virtual Audience
David-Paul Pertaub*, Mel Slater*, Chris Barker**
*Department of Computer Science
**Department of Psychology
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
2
An Experiment on Public Speaking Anxiety in Response to
Three Different Types of Virtual Audience
Abstract
This paper describes an experiment to assess the anxiety responses of people giving five
minute presentations to virtual audiences consisting of eight male avatars. There were three
different types of audience behaviour - an emotionally neutral audience that remained static
throughout the talk, a positive audience which exhibited friendly and appreciative behaviour
towards the speaker, and a negative audience, which exhibited hostile and bored expressions
throughout the talk. A second factor was immersion: half of the 40 subjects experienced the virtual
seminar room through a head-tracked head-mounted display and the remainder on a desktop
system. Responses were measured using standard Personal Report of Confidence as a Public
Speaker (PRCS) which was elicited prior to the experiment and after each talk. Several other
standard psychological measures such as SCL-90-R (for screening for psychological disorder), the
SAD and the FNE were also measured prior to the experiment. Other response variables included
subjectively assessed somaticisation and a subject self-rating scale on performance during the talk.
The subjects gave the talk twice each to a different audience, but in the analysis only the results of
the first talk are presented - thus making this a between-groups design. The results show that post-
talk PRCS is significantly and positively correlated to PRCS measured prior to the experiment in
the case only of the positive and static audiences. For the negative audience, prior PRCS was not a
predictor of post-PRCS which was higher than for the other two audiences and constant. The
negative audience clearly prov