Expressive Avatars in Psychological Intervention and Therapy

Abstract

A wide range of applications for virtual humans can be envisaged for the needs of both research and intervention in Psychology. This chapter describes the development and preliminary testing of an interactive virtual reality application “Virtual Spectators” – whereby virtual humans with expressive behaviour modelled on the basis of field research in human facial expression in real emotion contexts can be configured to interact with people in an interview or jury. We discuss the possibilities of this application in cognitive behavioural therapy using virtual reality and in nonverbal behaviour.