# Virtual Reality as a Reflection Technique for Public Speaking Training
## 7 Discussion  
Neither significant nor strong correlation was observed among the personal characteristics. Though there were some reports showing that women tended to judge themselves more harshly [34], there was no gender difference in self-bias nor personal confidence from the experimental results. In this experiment, there were few participants who had great public speaking anxiety but showed high personal confidence and few participants who had low confidence for public speaking skills but showed high or positive self-assessment. Personal confidence in public speaking skills may also be affected by presentation ability, and the anxiety around public speaking does not only come from low confidence or self-bias. Therefore, the personal characteristics are discussed separately. The experiment results showed that participants with low personal confidence in their public speaking skills could change their subjective impression more positively and closer to an objective impression from other people after VR reflection. People with low self-confidence tended to avoid looking back at their own performance in the first place. One of the possible reasons was that the avatar and a wider FOV from condition 3 were observing them from an objective and interactive perspective, which led to objective evaluation and allowed them to make a fair self-assessment. On the other hand, people who were confident with their public speaking skills did not have negative impressions of their own appearance, so they were more likely to have few fears and prefer to reflect in condition 1 where the most factual information was included. A similar perspective also worked for individuals with negative self-bias to reduce anxiety, but they benefited more from the use of an avatar. Though the negative self-evaluation is not always affected negatively, relatively large self-bias could show the negative self-images of the individuals, and many experimental studies demonstrated the detrimental effects of negative self-image in highly socially anxious and non-anxious participants [39]. The individuals with self-bias assessed themselves more negatively than they assessed others, and this was due to self-awareness. Self-awareness would bring them worries about how people would perceive them and thus self-awareness has been linked to increased social anxiety and negative self-assessment [40; 41]. When people face an avatar with their self-representation, they can feel higher ownership of that avatar and increase their self-awareness [42; 43]. So, maybe it was because of the use of an avatar, which excluded as much information about a person's unique appearance as possible, could weaken the self-awareness from reflection, and reduce the anxiety. However, a further evaluation of the perspective changing would be needed to reveal the reason. The results also showed that people with greater public speaking anxiety were less willing to watch the playback in condition 2. There were some limitations in both conditions2 and 3: (1) natural expressions and eye contact information were lost, and (2) there were some tracking errors in some cases especially from the occlusion of the body. Individuals with greater anxiety more easily fell into negative constructs [44] and blamed themselves for the negative outcomes. They felt that their behavior was strange by watching the avatar's unnatural behavior and supplemented the lost information with more negative imagination. This might be a reason for no improvement in self-evaluation as well as low willingness to watch playback. However, in condition 3, the viewpoint can be moved by head movement to check the 3D human body and surroundings, which may reduce feelings about unnatural behavior and distract negative thoughts. For the other parts, no significant correlation was observed between personal anxiety and training indicators. This is predictable, because the causes of anxieties are complicated.