Publication
Development of a Mixed-Reality Interactive Training System to Support Professional Socio-Emotional Interactions - MITHOS
Lara Chehayeb; Chirag Bhuvaneshwara; Manuel Anglet; Bernhard Hilpert; Ann-Kristin Meyer; Dimitra Tsovaltzi; Patrick Gebhard; Antje Biermann; Sinah Auchtor; Nils Lauinger; Julia Knopf; Andreas Kaiser; Fabian Kersting; Gregor Mehlmann; Florian Lingenfelser; Elisabeth André; Anna Welker; Kai Karren; Ruben Segundo; Garcia Ucharima; Dorothea Irmisch; Timo Sowa; Massimo Romanelli
In: Jana Tröge; Jan Stepczynski; Heike Wiesner; Christoph Runde. Virtuelle Beteiligung, reale Teilhabe: Transformative Technologien für eine inklusivere Gesellschaft. Pages 119-142, ISBN 9783593521312, 9783593462608, Campus Verlag, 2025.
Abstract
Professionals facing challenging workplace conflicts often experience shame and self-blame which relate to the feeling of incompetence, but may externalise as anger. Sending mixed signals fails the contingency rule for affect co-regulation processes, result in confusion for the others emotions and hinder emotion regulation, and lead to conflict escalation. Therefore, being able to constructively regulate one's emotions not only benefits individual experience of emotions but also influences conflict regulation. In classroom conflicts, teachers are mainly responsible for the co-regulation processes with students. MITHOS is a system aimed at training teachers' conflict resolution skills through realistic situative learning opportunities during classroom conflicts. In four stages, MITHOS supports teachers' socio-emotional self-awareness, perspective taking and positive regard. It provides a) a safe virtual environment to train free social interaction and receive natural social feedback from reciprocal student-agent reactions, b) spatial situational perspective taking through an avatar, c) individual virtual reflection guidance on emotional experiences through co-regulation processes, and d) expert feedback on professional behavioural strategies. This chapter presents the general concept of MITHOS with the four stages, as well as their implementation in a semi-automatic Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) system. The WoZ system affords collecting data that are used for developing the fully automated hybrid (machine learning and model-based) system, and to validate the underlying psychological and conflict resolution models. We present results validating the approach in terms of scenario realism, as well as of a systematic testing of the effects of external avatar similarity on antecedents of self-awareness with behaviour similarity. The chapter contributes to a common methodology of conducting interdisciplinary research for human-centered, socially interactive, and generalisable extended reality (XR) and presents a system designed and implemented to support it.
