Streaming to Connect: Exploring How Social Connectedness Relates to Empathy Types and Physiological States in Remote Virtual Audiences

Figures

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  Figure 1. A pair of study participants and screenshots of gameplay. (top left) Gameplayer setup; (top right) screenshot of the ActiveHard task which illustrates errors as red crosses in white circles; (bottom left) viewer setup; (bottom right) screenshot of the Passive task.

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  Figure 2. (left) Experimental setup for viewer participant wearing physiological sensors. (right) Overview of physiological data collection.

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  Figure 3. Diagram of the study protocol (* denotes counterbalanced conditions).

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  Figure 4. Examples of vmHRV signals of gameplayer-viewer pairs during the ActiveHard condition. (left) A pair from the HIGH social connectedness group shows synchrony between gameplayers and viewers. (right) A pair from the LOW social connectedness group where synchrony between gameplayers and viewers is not observed.

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  Figure 5. Viewer’s perception of psychological stress felt by gameplayers (“perceivedstress”) and actual psychological stress reported by gameplayers (“playerstress”). “playerstress” acts as a reference for each condition (* denotes outliers).

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  Figure 6. Empathic Concern ratings for the HIGH and LOW closeness groups across experimental conditions. Significant between-group differences are marked with asterisks (* Bonferroni < 0.017, ** <0.001).

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  Figure 7. Affective empathy of viewers as a correlation between their perception of the gameplayer’s felt stress and their own felt stress for LOW and HIGH groups.

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  Figure 8. vmHRV across the conditions for the HIGH and LOW Closeness groups. Significant between-group differences are marked with asterisks (** <0.001).

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  Figure 9. vmHRV correlation across conditions for the HIGH and LOW Closeness groups.