A new study found that the presence of a stranger lowered participants’ physiological responses to fear, but the effect was weaker among those who tend to feel anxious around others. The company of a virtual reality agent, however, was found to attenuate fear responses among participants regardless of their level of social concern. The findings were published in the journal Translational Psychiatry.
A phenomenon called social buffering suggests that having someone next to you during a fearful experience can lower your fear response, even if this person is a stranger and is not engaging with you. But researchers Yanyan Qi and team note that people differ in their sociability, and individuals who tend to feel anxiety in the presence of others may not experience the same reduction in fear in the company of a stranger.
The study authors conducted two experiments to see whether social concern — the extent that a person feels worried about appearing anxious in front of others — would impact the social buffering effect. They further explored whether the presence of a virtual reality (VR) agent would yield different effects compared to the presence of a real person.
An initial 134 subjects participated in an experiment where they were exposed to a neutral sound and an aversive, fear-inducing sound. Before the task, participants completed various psychological measures, including anxiety and social concern. They were then assigned to one of two conditions — 65 participants heard the sounds alone, and 69 participants heard the sounds in the presence of a confederate. The confederate, who was gender-matched to the participant, sat facing away from the participant and did not interact with them.
As expected, participants experienced worse negative affect (according to self-report ratings) and a stronger fear response (according to skin conductance responses (SCRs)) to the aversive sound compared to the neutral sound. There was also evidence of a social buffering effect, but only among females — women who heard the aversive sounds in the presence of a stranger had lower SCRs than women who heard the sounds alone. The authors say this gender effect falls in line with the perspective that men tend to experience social anxiety only within mating contexts (e.g., in the presence of a potential partner), while women experience social anxiety across a variety of contexts.
Next, the researchers found an effect of social concern. The lower their social concern, the more women’s skin conductance responses decreased in the presence of the confederate. In other words, the social buffering effect was weaker among women with higher social concern. This was true even after accounting for anxiety scores, suggesting the effect was specific to social concern.
The researchers next conducted a virtual reality version of the study, among a female-only sample. Participants wore VR goggles while they experienced an aversive or a neutral sound — 25 women heard the sounds alone, and 26 were in the presence of a virtual character. It was found that the women in the presence of a VR agent showed reduced SCRs compared to the women alone — again demonstrating a social buffering effect. And this time, the effect was unchanged by participants’ social concern. The authors say that this might suggest that the company of a VR agent can serve as a “safety cue” for women who are sensitive to social concern. Importantly, this cue dampened fear responses even though the agent was facing away from participants and was not being controlled by a human.
“Our finding that the mere virtual presence of another person can attenuate autonomic fear responses in females independently of individual differences in social concern is of potential practical relevance for the treatment of anxiety disorders,” Qi and colleagues say. “In future studies, it would be interesting to contrast these effects with the social presence on the processing of positive stimuli.”
The study, “Social buffering of human fear is shaped by gender, social concern, and the presence of real vs virtual agents”, was authored by Yanyan Qi, Dorothée Bruch, Philipp Krop, Martin J. Herrmann, Marc E. Latoschik, Jürgen Deckert, and Grit Hein.
