Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY Summer Meeting 2025 / University of Manchester, Manchester, İngiltere, 29 Haziran - 02 Temmuz 2025, ss.29-30, (Özet Bildiri)
Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is marked by anxious feelings and hyperarousal before, during, and after social situations. Developing reliable, valid ‘experimental models’ that elicit the behavioural and physiological characteristics of social anxiety will help evaluate and refine new therapeutic interventions for social anxiety. Research has shown that inhalation of 7.5% carbon dioxide (CO2) for 20 minutes induces subjective anxiety and the somatic symptoms of anxiety. We report a new experimental model of social anxiety that combines the CO2 model with concurrent exposure to social threat in Virtual Reality (VR). We measured subjective anxiety and autonomic arousal as participants prepared to give a presentation in VR while inhaling 7.5% CO2 or normal air.
Participants were screened for physical health and current mental health. 93 healthy participants (54 females, Mage = 22.47, SDage = 4.07) were randomised across two experimental inhalation/VR presentation conditions: CO2+VRaudience or Air+VRaudience or a control condition: Air+VRnoaudience. Participants were immersed in a 3D virtual university lecture hall presented in an Oculus headset. The VRaudience included 72 avatars and mix of gestures (nodding, head turning), genders and ethnicities. Self-reported anxiety and continuous heart rate were measured at baseline (pre-inhalation), before preparing the speech, before the speech and after completing the speech. Linear mixed models tested the effects of presentation condition, time and their interaction. Speech performance was evaluated by participants and an observer. Pre-registration is available at https://osf.io/fy8cr.
Self-reported anxiety and autonomic arousal increased during the VR speech preparation, peaked before the presentation and decreased after the speech. These effects were largest in the CO2 condition and significantly greater than responses during Air+VRaudience and Air+VRnoaudience conditions (F’s>4.52, p’s =< .001). Participants in the CO2+VRaudience condition reported more negative self-evaluations of their performance (F(2, 90) = 3.81, p = .026); however, external raters did not observe differences in speech performance.
Combining CO2 inhalation with virtual public speaking task can produce robust increases in anxiety, autonomic arousal, and negative performance evaluations in healthy volunteers. In the air conditions, we observed small increases in anxiety when participants prepared a speech and then presented in VR, however the presence of a virtual audience did not amplify this effect. Consequently, our results suggest CO2 challenge in combination with virtual speech task may be required to model anxiety, hyperarousal, and negative evaluations of social performance in social environments in healthy volunteers.