Emotional responses to a public speaking task: effects of virtual audience size and attitude

Audience characteristics are often manipulated in virtual exposure or training programmes for public speaking anxiety. However, it is unclear how specific components influence stress-related emotional responses and whether public speaking anxiety levels moderate their relationships. In this study, 102 participants with varied public speaking anxiety levels gave a speech to a virtual audience consisting of either 2 or 6 members and with either an encouraging or a critical attitude. Physiological signals, speech characteristics, subjective stress levels, and audience evaluation were measured during the experiment. Results show that participants overall evaluated the encouraging audience more positively and felt more nervous in the critical audience condition. In people with higher public speaking anxiety levels, the nervousness was stronger in the critical condition, but their heart rate was higher in the encouraging condition. Speech characteristics were not influenced by the attitude conditions. Furthermore, virtual audience size was not related to any emotional responses, but we found that the higher participants’ public speaking anxiety, the more they trusted the small audience. We discuss these results in relation to previous findings for each emotional response and the factors that may have contributed to the emotional discordance.