ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
Validating Virtual Reality for Public Speaking Research and Intervention: Comparing Anxiety, Voice, and Fluency Responses to Real and Virtual Audiences
Provisionally accepted
Lamia Bettahi1,2*
Angélique Remacle2,3
Michael Schyns4
Elodie Etienne5
Anne-Marie ETIENNE2Anne-Lise Leclercq2- 1Fund for Scientific Research – F.R.S.-FNRS, Brussels, Belgium
- 2University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
- 3Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
- 4Universite de Liege HEC Liege Ecole de gestion, Liège, Belgium
- 5Inria Centre de Recherche de Paris, Paris, France
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Public speaking (PS) is a widespread activity required in many personal and professional settings. This activity is known to elicit anxiety, subsequently affecting oral communication, especially voice and speech parameters. As mastering PS skills requires practice in situations that are as similar as possible to reality, virtual reality (VR) may represent a promising method for research, training and intervention in this domain. However, it is of paramount importance to first validate VR environments in their ability to reproduce authentic anxiety responses and communicative behaviors, which are often overlooked. Therefore, this study examined university students (N = 60) anxiety responses (self-reported and heart rate) as well as voice and fluency adjustments to a PS task performed either in (1) a real meeting room in front of an audience, (2) a virtual meeting room in front of an audience, and (3) the same virtual meeting room without any audience. As this last condition contained no anxious stimulus, it was included to act as a control for the anxiety induced by VR immersion. The main objective of this study was to examine the influence of the real vs virtual nature of the audience on anxiety, voice and fluency parameters. Our results showed that the virtual audience elicited changes in anticipatory anxiety (increased heart rate and self-reported anxiety) compared to the control condition. The participant's strong feeling of presence and lack of side effects such as cybersickness support the acceptability and usability of the virtual environment. Our results extend previous data and support the feasibility and relevance of using VR for PS. Additionally, we describe different VR immersion profiles among participants.
Keywords: fluency4, heart rate5, oral communication2, public speaking1, virtual reality6, voice3
Received: 27 Nov 2025; Accepted: 16 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Bettahi, Remacle, Schyns, Etienne, ETIENNE and Leclercq. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lamia Bettahi
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.