How we can use virtual reality to study social interactions and to train social skills. What is the benefit of encountering virtual humans instead of real humans?

Professor Marianne Schmid Mast will talk about the advantages of using virtual reality for the study of human social behavior and for interpersonal skills training (e.g. public speaking, job interview). She is full professor of Organizational Behavior at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and has used immersive virtual reality in her research for more than 15 years to study how superiors interact with subordinates, how to empower women in leadership tasks, and how to make a better first impression in a job interview, to mention just a few examples. More recently, she has started to use virtual reality for training of social skills. In her talk, she will present some of her research and focus on the benefits and challenges of using virtual humans in immersive virtual reality for research and training.

Curriculum Vitae – Marianne Schmid Mast

Marianne Schmid Mast is full professor of Organizational Behavior at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne in Switzerland. After having received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Zurich (Switzerland), she pursued her research at Northeastern University in Boston (USA). She held positions as assistant professor in Social Psychology at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and she was a full professor at the Department of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland).

Her research addresses how individuals in power hierarchies interact, perceive, and communicate (verbally and nonverbally), how first impressions affect interpersonal interactions and evaluations, how people form accurate impressions of others, and how physician communication affects patient outcomes. She uses immersive virtual environment technology to investigate interpersonal behaviour and communication as well as computer-based automatic sensing to analyse nonverbal behaviour in social interactions. She is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior and in the Editorial Board of the journal Leadership Quarterly. Marianne Schmid Mast is a former member of the Swiss National Research Council and acted as president of the Swiss Psychological Society.