Humans are social creatures – and yet many people find it difficult to make contact with others. Medical studies suggest that social phobias are one of the most widespread mental illnesses.

“Next to depression and alcoholism, social phobia is the third most common disorder in the area of mental illness” says Rahel Maué. The psychologist and systemic family therapist is part of an interdisciplinary research group at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam involved in the DISA project.

Since September 2019, the group has been working on digital innovations that support people with social anxiety in their difficult situation and enable them to participate more in society. Affected persons often fear that they might behave embarrassingly or inappropriately and thus meet with rejection by others, explains Maué. “As the disease progresses, many situations are avoided, and then a vicious circle begins in which the fears manifest themselves.”

Interdisciplinary approach to social innovations

In the collaborative, interdisciplinary approach of DISA, researchers from the fields of psychology, human-machine interaction, design, and information and media science have joined forces at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. “We often pursue joint projects in the context of social innovation because it makes a lot of sense to look at this topic from different perspectives,” says Professor Frank Heidmann, head of the Interaction Design Lab in the Department of Design. He heads the DISA project together with his colleague Professor Judith Ackermann, head of the Digital Participation and Inclusion Lab in the Department of Social and Educational Sciences.

Establishing a connection between social anxiety and digital technologies is promising “because we are dealing with a group of people who have great difficulty in making use of conventional care and therapy options,” says his colleague Maué. She explains that “on the one hand we have major bottlenecks in psychosocial care in Germany. On the other hand, therapy per se means social interaction and is therefore an obstacle in itself for people with social anxiety.”

Communication in the digital space can be a great help

Via digital support offers, people suffering from social phobia can get into an exchange with others without having to physically interact with them right away. Despite their fears, many affected persons have a great need for exchange and social interaction, which is why communication services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are interesting for them.

These social networks provide an opportunity to exchange information with other affected people and maybe even to get information and help. “At the same time, however, an extensive use of digital media can also harbour the risk of increased avoidance behaviour because users can tend to forgo analogue interaction and replace it with digital exchange. This can contribute to the manifestation of anxiety,” says Maué.

However, the use of social media has so far been studied in science mainly in a one-sided manner, i.e., in the context of excessive consumption and potential damage to mental health, says Leyla Dewitz, who is involved in the project as a research assistant for media studies and information science.

In a media use study that she conducted for the DISA project together with Judith Ackermann, the results also point in another direction: “We examined content on Instagram and Twitter and saw that people with social anxiety sometimes publish long and very personal postings there which, for example, retrospectively describe a day or even a year like in a diary entry,” says Dewitz. On Twitter, the researchers noticed a lot of content that was posted directly during anxiety situations, “in order to gain strength or relief from the feeling of not being alone,” says Dewitz.

Thus, affected persons can sometimes draw effective support from this in anxiety situations. In interviews with sufferers and therapists, however, the team found that modern communication methods and digital innovations have so far very rarely been used in therapy approaches. According to Dewitz, less scepticism and more willingness to use new technologies would be desirable here.

People-centred approaches: Technology is only a means to an end

The DISA project also aimed to develop its own innovative approaches. “From the very beginning, we were not interested in technology-centred approaches but always in human-centred approaches. We talked to the people concerned and assessed their requirements and needs. And now we are developing solutions together with them in a prototyping process,” says Frank Heidmann.

In order to establish contacts with self-help groups and experts, the VSSP e.V. (Bundesverband der Selbsthilfe Soziale Phobie, a German self-help association) was involved in the project from the beginning. “The VSSP also helped us find a group of 15 participants who gave us insights into their everyday lives with their fears in a workshop,” says Rahel Flechtner, research assistant at the Interaction Design Lab at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.

According to the motto “Helpers against fear”, the participants tinkered, talked, and learned together in a digital workshop. In the prototyping part of this workshop, they developed ideas for support in anxiety situations – such as a bracelet to which “courage moments” can be attached that remind the wearer of challenges they have overcome and provide strength in difficult situations.

This idea was later taken up in one of seven semester projects in which the DISA project team developed new technological approaches for social anxiety support together with students. The analogue bracelet was combined with an app that can assign “courage moments” to certain locations. The app sends a pulse to the bracelet whenever the wearer returns to a place that is linked to such a “courage moment”. “The students based this idea on a study that says that beautiful moments tend to be forgotten by people with anxiety, as they concentrate more on negative experiences. The app and bracelet are intended to remedy this,” says Rahel Flechtner.

Virtual reality makes social anxiety comprehensible

Another application developed within DISA, the interactive story “Hopohopo”, is especially close to the hearts of the project team. Hopohopo is a VR application that was designed together with affected persons, but not for them: “A huge problem of people with social anxiety is the fact that they feel misunderstood by other people,” says Leyla Dewitz. For many of them, it is important that the people around them can better understand their fears.

To this end, a virtual reality application was developed with significant support from two students, Moritz Gnann and Julia Drost. It is intended to make the feelings of affected persons in anxiety situations comprehensible through visual, acoustic, or haptic stimuli. Via VR glasses and controllers, users accompany a fictitious person with social anxiety in everyday situations and get an impression of how much space anxiety and dealing with anxiety-provoking situations take up in their life. People with social anxiety can benefit from using such applications to inform the people close to them about their condition, “because stigmatising and false basic assumptions can be questioned,” says psychologist Rahel Maué.

The digital innovations will now be further evaluated and presented at conferences until the end of the DISA project in December 2022. “It is not so rare at our UAS that students then go into business with an application and found a start-up or a design studio,” says Professor Frank Heidmann. In the best-case scenario, the ideas generated in the project thus become concrete digital innovations that can help people with social phobias to better manage their everyday lives.