Socailly Anxious Play: Design, Development, and Evaluation of Game-Based Digital Behavioural Markers for the Assessment of Social Anxiety

Abstract: Social relationships are essential for humans; neglecting our social needs can cause discomfort or even lead to the development of more severe issues such as loneliness, depression, or substance dependency. Although essential, some individuals face major challenges in forming and maintaining social relationships due to the experience of social anxiety, which is the intense fear of being evaluated by others. In this dissertation we look at the relationship between social anxiety and digital games from the lens of assessment and analyze whether we can use digital behavioural markers embedded in a gaming task to assess the severity of social anxiety. Furthermore, we explore how the found behavioural markers and the developed gaming task can be used to predict self-reported psychopathy. Overall, the results of this dissertation provide new insights about the relationship between social anxiety and its manifestation in-game, the influence of game mechanics on the experience of social stress, and how social anxiety as well as psychopathic traits may affect in-game behaviours, opening the way towards digital behavioural markers for the assessment of social anxiety.

Biography: Martin Dechant is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Dr. Regan Lee Mandryk. He focuses in his research on how digital games and immersive media can be used within the context of mental health assessment. One major focus in this work is social anxiety, where he investigates how digital media can help affected individuals to assess the severity of their anxiety as well as how digital media, especially digital games, may help individuals to overcome their own anxiety. Besides that, he also investigates how novel interaction technologies, such as eye tracking, can increase the enjoyment of digital games as well as a tool for the assessment of mental health.

After finishing his Master of Science in Media Informatics at the University of Regensburg he worked as a user experience designer and application developer for various companies in Europe as well as HCI lecturer (University of Regensburg, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) before joining the HCI lab in 2017 for his PhD.