Abstract

The diagnosis of a mental disorder requires an extensive practice of psychiatry students to succeed in diagnosing and dealing with patients. This exercise is usually practiced by reading case studies. However, this often lacks the possibility to interpret the actual behavior of the patients regarding their body language and their facial and verbal expressions. For this purpose, a virtual character could help provide a standardized and safe practice of the diagnostics of such disturbance pictures (Mavrogiorgou et al., 2021). The question arises to what extent the virtual character should simulate the actual behavior of the patients and which of the three components are necessary to provide a believable simulation. Therefore, this bachelor's thesis aims to design and model various virtual characters that represent the emotional state of a young patient with an affective disorder (depression), which varies in the number of emotional components. Finally, the effect of the different characters will be evaluated.