Using Artificial Intelligence to Assist Psychological Testing

Balancing ecological validity and control in psychological testing is a challenge. We have explored the use of Interactive Virtual Environment Technology to create an environment for psychological testing. Specifically we have created a Cocktail Party World to provide experimental control in the study of the phenomena of ostracism in its various forms. To address ecological validity we have created an emotion-based agent version of the Cocktail Party World to add realism to the experiment. In our experiments the results were statistically highly significant for the punitive ostracism condition revealing that the use of agents whose emotional response was depicted on their faces increased the potency of the situation.