Abstract
The use of virtual characters in a variety of research areas is widespread. One such area is healthcare. The study presented in this paper leveraged virtual patients to examine whether virtual patients are more likely to be correctly diagnosed due to gender and skin tone. Medical students at the University of Florida College of Medicine interacted with six virtual patients across two sessions. The six virtual patients comprised various combinations of gender and skin tone. Each virtual patient presented with a different cranial nerve injury. The results indicate a significant difference in correct diagnosis according to patient gender for one of the cases. In that case, female patients were correctly diagnosed more frequently than their male counterpart. The description of that case required that the virtual patient present with a visible bruise on the forehead. We hypothesize the results obtained could be due to a transfer of a real world gender bias.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Deaton, J.E., Barba, C., Santarelli, T., Rosenzweig, L., Souders, V., McCollum, C., Seip, J., Knerr, B.W., Singer, M.J.: Virtual environment cultural training for operational readiness (vector). Virtual Reality 8(3), 156–167 (2005)
Slater, M., Pertaub, D.P., Barker, C., Clark, D.M.: An experimental study on fear of public speaking using a virtual environment. CyberPsychology & Behavior 9(5), 627–633 (2006)
Pan, X., Gillies, M., Barker, C., Clark, D.M., Slater, M.: Socially anxious and confident men interact with a forward virtual woman: an experimental study. PloS One 7(4), e32931 (2012)
McRorie, M., Sneddon, I., de Sevin, E., Bevacqua, E., Pelachaud, C.: A model of personality and emotional traits. In: Ruttkay, Z., Kipp, M., Nijholt, A., Vilhjálmsson, H.H. (eds.) IVA 2009. LNCS, vol. 5773, pp. 27–33. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
MacDorman, K.F., Coram, J.A., Ho, C.C., Patel, H.: Gender Differences in the Impact of Presentational Factors in Human Character Animation on Decisions in Ethical Dilemmas. Presence 19(3), 213–229 (2010)
Zanbaka, C., Goolkasian, P., Hodges, L.: Can a virtual cat persuade you?: the role of gender and realism in speaker persuasiveness. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2006)
Fiske, S.T.: Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination at the seam between the centuries: Evolution, culture, mind, and brain. European Journal of Social Psychology 30(3), 299–322 (2000)
Van Ryn, M.: Research on the provider contribution to race/ethnicity disparities in medical care. Medical Care 40(1), I-140 (2002)
Cooper, L.A., Roter, D.L., Carson, K.A., Beach, M.C., Sabin, J.A., Greenwald, A.G., Inui, T.S.: The associations of clinicians’ implicit attitudes about race with medical visit communication and patient ratings of interpersonal care. American Journal of Public Health 102(5), 979–987 (2012)
Bodenhausen, G.V., Lichtenstein, M.: Social stereotypes and information-processing strategies: The impact of task complexity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52(5), 871 (1987)
Sabin, J.A., Rivara, F.P., Greenwald, A.G.: Physician implicit attitudes and stereotypes about race and quality of medical care. Medical Care 46(7), 678–685 (2008)
Chapman, K.R., Tashkin, D.P., Pye, D.J.: Gender bias in the diagnosis of copd. CHEST Journal 119(6), 1691–1695 (2001)
Harris, S.R., Kemmerling, R.L., North, M.M.: Brief virtual reality therapy for public speaking anxiety. Cyberpsychology & Behavior 5(6), 543–550 (2002)
Babu, S., Suma, E., Barnes, T., Hodges, L.F.: Can Immersive Virtual Humans Teach Social Conversational Protocols? In: IEEEE Virtual Reality Conference, pp. 215–218 (2007)
Deladisma, A.M., Gupta, M., Kotranza, A., Bittner IV, J.G., Imam, T., Swinson, D., Gucwa, A., Nesbit, R., Lok, B., Pugh, C., et al.: A pilot study to integrate an immersive virtual patient with a breast complaint and breast examination simulator into a surgery clerkship. The American Journal of Surgery 197(1), 102–106 (2009)
Johnsen, K., Raij, A., Stevens, A., Lind, D., Lok, B.: The validity of a virtual human experience for interpersonal skills education. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1049–1058. ACM (2007)
Kenny, P., Parsons, T.D., Gratch, J., Leuski, A., Rizzo, A.A.: Virtual patients for clinical therapist skills training. In: Pelachaud, C., Martin, J.-C., André, E., Chollet, G., Karpouzis, K., Pelé, D. (eds.) IVA 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4722, pp. 197–210. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Haider, A.H., Sexton, J., Sriram, N., Cooper, L.A., Efron, D.T., Swoboda, S., Villegas, C.V., Haut, E.R., Bonds, M., Pronovost, P.J., et al.: Association of unconscious race and social class bias with vignette-based clinical assessments by medical students. JAMA 306(9), 942–951 (2011)
Rossen, B., Johnsen, K., Deladisma, A., Lind, S., Lok, B.: Virtual humans elicit skin-tone bias consistent with real-world skin-tone biases. In: Prendinger, H., Lester, J.C., Ishizuka, M. (eds.) IVA 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5208, pp. 237–244. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Hirsh, A.T., Hollingshead, N.A., Matthias, M.S., Bair, M.J., Kroenke, K.: The influence of patient sex, provider sex, and sexist attitudes on pain treatment decisions. The Journal of Pain (2014)
Hirsh, A.T., Alqudah, A.F., Stutts, L.A., Robinson, M.E.: Virtual human technology: Capturing sex, race, and age influences in individual pain decision policies. Pain 140(1), 231–238 (2008)
Wandner, L.D., Stutts, L.A., Alqudah, A.F., Craggs, J.G., Scipio, C.D., Hirsh, A.T., Robinson, M.E.: Virtual human technology: patient demographics and healthcare training factors in pain observation and treatment recommendations. Journal of Pain Research 3, 241–247 (2009)
Hirsh, A.T., George, S.Z., Robinson, M.E.: Pain assessment and treatment disparities: a virtual human technology investigation. Pain 143(1), 106–113 (2009)
Elderkin-Thompson, V., Waitzkin, H.: Differences in clinical communication by gender. Journal of General Internal Medicine 14(2), 112–121 (1999)
Waitzkin, H.: Information giving in medical care. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 81–101 (1985)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rivera-Gutierrez, D.J., Kopper, R., Kleinsmith, A., Cendan, J., Finney, G., Lok, B. (2014). Exploring Gender Biases with Virtual Patients for High Stakes Interpersonal Skills Training. In: Bickmore, T., Marsella, S., Sidner, C. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8637. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09767-1_50
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09767-1_50
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09766-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09767-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)