MITHOS: Interactive Mixed Reality Training to Support Professional Socio-Emotional Interactions at Schools

TL;DR

MITHOS is an interactive mixed reality training system designed to enhance teachers' socio-emotional conflict resolution skills through realistic virtual scenarios, feedback, and reflection to improve classroom interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel semi-automatic Wizard-of-Oz system for training teachers in conflict resolution using immersive XR environments and validated psychological models.

Findings

Validated scenario realism and social feedback effectiveness

Demonstrated impact of avatar similarity on self-awareness

Established a methodology for interdisciplinary XR research

Abstract

Teachers in challenging conflict situations often experience shame and self-blame, which relate to the feeling of incompetence but may externalise as anger. Sensing mixed signals fails the contingency rule for developing affect regulation and may result in confusion for students about their own emotions and hinder their emotion regulation. Therefore, being able to constructively regulate emotions not only benefits individual experience of emotions but also fosters effective interpersonal emotion regulation and influences how a situation is managed. MITHOS is a system aimed at training teachers' conflict resolution skills through realistic situative learning opportunities during classroom conflicts. In four stages, MITHOS supports teachers' socio-emotional self-awareness, perspective-taking and positive regard. It provides: a) a safe virtual environment to train free social interaction and receive natural social feedback from reciprocal student-agent reactions, b) spatial situational perspective taking through an avatar, c) individual virtual reflection guidance on emotional experiences through co-regulation processes, and d) expert feedback on professional behavioural strategies. This chapter presents the four stages and their implementation in a semi-automatic Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) System. The WoZ system affords collecting data that are used for developing the fully automated hybrid (machine learning and model-based) system, and to validate the underlying psychological and conflict resolution models. We present results validating the approach in terms of scenario realism, as well as a systematic testing of the effects of external avatar similarity on antecedents of self-awareness with behavior similarity. The chapter contributes to a common methodology of conducting interdisciplinary research for human-centered and generalisable XR and presents a system designed to support it.