Virtual Selves Real Persons PDF Download

One fundamental aspect of the human brain is that it is highly shaped by experience and interaction with the surrounding environment. Signals coming from different sensory streams are integrated to create a coherent representation of the environment and of the "self", as a part of this environment. The boundaries of the self are defined through the constant and dynamic exchanges between an individual and their physical and social environment. Self-perception and self-representation are complex processes that seem to be linked to perception and representation of others. We know that humans experience a sense of self-awareness, but the neural bases of this phenomenon are not clearly understood yet. In this thesis we focus on three different aspects of the "self" as a dynamic process: body representation, social identity, and conceptual representation of a personal problem. We report on three behavioural studies using immersive virtual reality that demonstrate how self-representation is highly influenced by social feedback. In the first experiment, we re-created a virtual representation of the internal image participants had of their own body shape. We also re-created a virtual body corresponding to their ideal body shape, and another virtual body representing their real body shape. Participants saw the three different virtual bodies from a first-person perspective and from a third-person perspective and they had to evaluate the appearance of those virtual bodies. We observed that female participants evaluated their real body as more attractive when they saw it from a third-person perspective, and that their level of body dissatisfaction was lower after the experimental procedure. We believe that third-person perspective allowed female participants to perceive their real body shape without applying the negative prior beliefs usually associated to the "self", and that this resulted in a more positive evaluation of their body shape. In the second experiment, we showed how the influence of a group can determine behaviour of an individual. We created a social situation of verbal harassment in virtual reality, and embodied participants in different agents of that scene. In one condition, participants experienced the scene from the perspective of the victim (female avatar). In the other condition, participants saw the situation from the perspective of a member of the group of males performing the harassment (in-group condition). One week later, participants went through a virtual reproduction of the Milgram experiment, and we measured their behaviour in terms of the number of shocks they would give to the victim (again a female avatar). All participants were sitting with a group of three virtual experimenters (male avatars), who were instructing them to give shocks to the victim until the end of the procedure. Our results show that participants of the in-group condition, behaved according to the instructions received from the virtual experimenters, and were more likely to finish the procedure. We argue that social feedback and group influence is critical in determining individual behaviour. In the third experiment, we show how subjective evaluation of a personal problem, can be modified by getting a third-person perspective of oneself. Participants were asked to describe a personal problem causing mid-level distress in their daily life and had the opportunity to discuss it, in virtual reality, with an avatar of Dr Sigmund Freud. In the experimental condition, participants were embodied alternatively in their own virtual avatar and in the virtual body of Freud, allowing them to enter in a "self-conversation". In the control condition, participants were embodied in their own virtual body, and received general counselling from the avatar of Freud. Our results show that the self- conversation condition helped participants to get a new perspective on their problem, leading them to get a better understanding of it and new ideas on how to solve it. Participants in the self-conversation condition also reported less negative automatic thoughts after their experience in virtual reality. We believe that the psychological distance given by the third-person perspective, allowed participants to get a more rational understanding of their situation. Overall, we demonstrate in this thesis, that self-perception, self-representation, self- evaluation and behavioral responses are highly influenced by social feedback. We show that third-person perspective enables to decrease negative bias in self-evaluation. We hope to be able to develop those findings in future clinical applications of immersive virtual reality.