Abstract
Some embodied cognition literature has shown that some environmental factors contribute to reducing client protective attitude. We have applied this aspect to counseling in VR. The aims of this paper are (1) to confirm VR environmental factors affect the subject’s sense of openness, (2) explore the relationship between self-disclosure attitudes and environmental factors, and (3) investigating remote and semi-automatic counseling possibilities in this COVID-19 affected stressed world via virtual psychological experiment. We proposed the hypothesis: the large room would promote self-disclosure to a NPC virtual counselor more than the small room. We have made a “VRChat” based counseling rooms with the NPC virtual counselor. On self-disclosure attitude, the results of the Mann-Whitney U test showed that the large room promotes self-disclosure more than in the small room (U = 216, p = .01, d = −.657). These results suggest the potential for a remote and easy-to-participate virtual environment for casual counseling.
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This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 20K20850.
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Kawakita, T., Sasaki, T., Ishihara, S. (2021). Remote Virtual Counseling and Effects of Embodied Cues: Toward Casual On-Line Counseling Under COVID-19 Situation. In: Shin, C.S., Di Bucchianico, G., Fukuda, S., Ghim , YG., Montagna, G., Carvalho, C. (eds) Advances in Industrial Design. AHFE 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 260. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80829-7_116
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80829-7_116
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