Conference Agenda
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123: Social Interactions in a Digital World
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Digital technologies are fundamentally transforming how humans interact with each other and with increasingly autonomous systems. Understanding how these transformations affect both psychological and biological processes is a key challenge for contemporary biopsychology. This symposium brings together complementary multi-method approaches to investigate how social interaction is reshaped in digital contexts. Specifically, we examine (1) interaction with digital agents, (2) interaction within digitally mediated environments, and (3) interaction modified by artificial intelligence. First, Carlotta Julia Mayer and Monika Eckstein will present a within-subject study (N = 35 adults aged 70+) comparing mental health interviews by a social robot and a human interviewer. While physiological stress responses and subjective comfort during the interview did not differ, human interviewers were perceived as more trustworthy, underscoring the importance of assessing both subjective and autonomic responses. Second, Elisabeth Michels will introduce a psychophysiological toolkit for assessing human-computer interaction in real-world digital workflows, demonstrating how moment-to-moment user experience is dynamically linked to affective states and autonomic regulation. Third, Pablo Arias-Sarah will present an experimental platform enabling real-time transformation of facial and vocal features during videoconference interactions, illustrating how AI-based manipulations uncover mechanisms of liking and social bias. Finally, Sara Molteni will report experimental evidence (N = 55) on how AI-driven “gaze enrichment” during videoconferences reinstates links between emotional empathy, autonomic activation, and interpersonal closeness. Overall, this symposium advances a multi-method framework for examining benefits and challenges of social interactions in digital environments. | ||
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Trust, Stress, and Oxytocin: Biobehavioral Responses of Older Adults to Social Robot Interactions 1Laboratory for Clinical Neuropsychology, Department of Psychology, Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany; 2Institute of Medical Psychology, Heidelberg University Hospital, Heidelberg, Germany; 3Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Optimization and Biomechanics for Human-Centered Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany; 4Geriatric Center, Medical Faculty Heidelberg, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany; 5University of Zurich, Psychological Institute, Department of Clinical Biopsychology and Psychotherapy, Zurich, Switzerland Social robots hold potential as supporting tools in geriatric healthcare. However, for their successful implementation, psychological factors such as perceived safety, non-stressfulness, and trustworthiness by patients must be considered. This is especially important in potentially stressful situations with impact on mental health. In a within-subject experiment, 35 adults aged 70 or older interacted with both a remotely controlled social robot (Navel) and a human interviewer while discussing mental health topics. Neuroendocrine stress responses, assessed via salivary cortisol, alpha-amylase, oxytocin, and subjective measures were repeatedly taken during the experiment. Analyses showed no effect of the two interaction partners in psychophysiological outcomes, self-reported affect or subjective comfort with the interaction situation. However, the human interviewer was rated as significantly more trustworthy than the robot. Individual differences in computer anxiety, geriatric depressiveness, or social networks did not influence these outcomes. The findings suggest that social robots can engage with older adults without causing increased stress responses, while highlighting trust as a key challenge for future applications in geriatric psychodiagnostics and care. Beyond the Lab: Assessing User Experience in Real-World Settings via Psychophysiological Ambulatory Assessment 1Else Kroener Fresenius Center for Digital Health, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, TUD Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany; 2Health Psychology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria; 3Department of Medicine I, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, TUD Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany; 4Medical Oncology, National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT), University Hospital Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany User experience in digital work environments is increasingly relevant for employee health as occupational activities become more technology-driven. Existing field research, including our own, has linked digital systems to health-related outcomes, yet often lacks the temporal precision required to understand how momentary human-computer interactions contribute to these effects. Such insights are essential for developing health-supportive digital design. The present study evaluates a theory-guided, multimodal ambulatory assessment approach that enables continuous, ecologically valid measurement of user experience with minimal disruption to daily work. A sample of 22 administrative employees (77.3% female; Mage = 41, SDage = 8.46) participated in a 7 - 15-day field study during routine use of a digital tumor documentation system. Data collection combined continuous heart rate variability (HRV) monitoring with repeated smartphone-based assessments of user experience, including usability and visual aesthetics. Multilevel analyses revealed that momentary user experience significantly predicted system-related evaluations such as acceptance. In addition, phasic HRV was associated with both subjective experience and evaluative outcomes, suggesting its suitability as a physiological indicator of real-time interaction dynamics. These findings support the feasibility and utility of psychophysiological ambulatory assessment for capturing user experience in naturalistic work settings with high temporal resolution. By integrating subjective and physiological data, this approach offers valuable insights for optimizing digital systems in ways that promote employee well-being. Future research should further leverage passive sensing technologies and data-driven methods to reduce participant burden and improve the detection of critical interaction episodes. Machine Mediated Social interactions—Uncovering How Augmented Reality Filters Causally Influence Social Interactions Grenoble University, France Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence techniques have enabled users to transform the voice and face of individuals in real time (e.g clone a person’s face or change their emotional expressions) . These so called Augmented Reality (AR) filters have been deployed to the social networks of billions of users. While no regulation exist to date, recent research suggest these filters may influence psychological processes.At the same time, AR filters can also enable scientists to control the social signals produced by participants in free social interactions, a critical feature to enable scientist to study free social interactions while controlling specific factors in their experiments. Therefore, AR filters can be used as tools to study social interactions, but also represent an increasingly important societal phenomenon to study. For these reasons we developed the experimental platform DuckSoup, which I will present during this talk. DuckSoup is an open-source videoconference experimental platform which enables researchers to perform human interaction experiments, while transforming the voice and face of participants in real time. I will present three studies where we used DuckSoup to investigate social cognition mechanisms. In two studies we aligned the smiles of interacting participants’ with face transformations to see how smile alignment influences liking. In another study, we transformed the vocal masculinity of participants during negotiation tasks to quantify how vocal masculinity biases negotiations. I will conclude highlighting that AR filters can enable us to uncover social cognition mechanisms, but also that we should study their impact on psychology to support ethical regulation. AI-driven Eye-gaze Correction Moderates the Link Between Emotional Empathy and Heart Rate During Digital Social Interaction 1Department of Psychology, Laboratory for Clinical Neuropsychology, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany; 2Department of Psychology, Laboratory for Biological Psychology, Clinical Psychology, and Psychotherapy, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany; 3Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology, University of Trier, Trier, Germany; 4Institute for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, University of Trier, Trier, Germany Eye contact is a fundamental component of social bonding. In digital video communication, mutual eye contact is prevented because individuals must choose between looking at their partner’s eyes on the screen or into the webcam. AI-driven gaze enrichment, which subtly adjusts gaze direction to enable mutual eye contact, may mitigate this constraint. Yet the extent to which restored eye contact enables socio-emotional processes such as emotional empathy to translate into physiological and relational outcomes remains poorly understood. We examined the impact of gaze enrichment on perceived eye contact, physiological arousal (i.e., heart rate), and social dynamics during digital dyadic interactions. Fifty-five healthy male participants completed the Fast Friends Procedure, a structured interaction that promotes rapid closeness via alternating responses to increasingly personal questions. Participants were randomly assigned to an AI-enriched gaze condition (n=25) or a standard gaze condition (n=30). Heart rate was recorded continuously during the interaction. Contrary to expectations, gaze enrichment did not influence perceived eye contact or heart rate. However, it moderated socio-physiological dynamics: emotional empathy fostered greater interpersonal closeness exclusively in the enriched condition, suggesting eye contact acts as a gate for empathy. In parallel, emotional empathy predicted stronger heart-rate increases only when gaze was enriched, consistent with heightened autonomic engagement during socially meaningful moments in more empathic individuals. Thus, AI-driven gaze enrichment appears not to shift subjective or physiological responses to social interaction per se, but to reinstate pathways linking empathy to autonomic activation and perceived closeness, subtly reshaping the dynamics of digital social interaction. | ||