Adaptive Training for Aggression de-Escalation

The ability to de-escalate confrontations with aggressive individuals is a useful skill, in particular within professions in public domains. Nevertheless, offering appropriate training that enables students to develop such skills is a nontrivial matter. As a complementary approach to real-world training, the STRESS project proposes a simulation-based environment for training of aggression de-escalation. The main focus of the current paper is to make this system adaptive to the performance of the trainee. To realize this, first a number of learning goals have been identified. Based on these, several levels of difficulty were established, as well as a mechanism to switch up and down between these levels based on the user’s score. A preliminary evaluation demonstrated that the system successfully adapts its difficulty level to the performance of the user, and that users are generally positive about the adaptation mechanism.