Anxiety Induction in Virtual Environments: An Experimental Comparison of Three General Techniques

Abstract

Anxiety induction and elicitation of associated physiological arousal with Virtual Environments (VEs) is important in diverse domains. This paper evaluates three general anxiety induction techniques. The first augments the VE with a health bar that is often displayed in video games to indicate when the user's avatar gets hurt. The second augments the VE with aversive audiovisual stimuli which are employed in first-person shooter games when the user's avatar gets hurt and include preset heartbeat sound. The third introduces in the previous technique a biofeedback mechanism to control heartbeat sound. The results we obtained on a VE that reproduces a fire evacuation indicate that the third technique produces much higher physiological arousal than the other two, and measures of users' state anxiety are consistent with physiological results. We discuss possible reasons that could explain why the exploitation of auditory heartbeat biofeedback contributes to make the third technique more effective, by linking our study to research and theories of affect and emotions.

Psychological response to an emergency in virtual reality: Effects of victim ethnicity and emergency type on helping behavior and navigation

“…We have then suggested possible applications of virtual environments to teach how to overcome the psychological biases that hampers the provision of care during emergency situations. Further psychological aspects of virtual emergencies we are currently exploring concern the specific visual and auditory stimuli able to induce anxiety (Chittaro, 2014) and fear (Chittaro, Buttussi, & Zangrando, 2014) as a real emergency would. We are also studying the improvements in long-term memory retention of emergency procedures that such anxiety-inducing virtual emergencies produce compared to traditional training methods (Chittaro, & Buttussi, 2015).…”

“…Although several virtual training environments are designed to induce stress by adding time limits or threatening visual and auditory stimuli (Backlund et al, 2007;Chittaro, 2014;Tate et al, 1997;Toups et al, 2009) or include virtual humans that show emotional states, personality, and mood (e.g., Dugdale et al, 2004), none focus on psychological response to fire emergency. By psychological response, we mean the psychological processes involved in responding to an emergency, such as interpretation of the situation, affective evaluation of the experience, regulation of behavior expectations based on social norms, and influences of personality traits.…”

Neuroanatomical basis of concern-based altruism in virtual environment

“…The virtual experience was implemented using the C# programming language and NeoAxis (http://www.neoaxis.com), a game engine based on the Ogre rendering engine (http://www.ogre3d.org). VR has been shown to be effective in eliciting a high degree of sense of presence (Diemer, Alpers, Peperkorn, Shiban, & Mühlberger, 2015;Schubert, Friedmann, & Regenbrecht, 2001) and negative emotions (Chittaro, 2014;Diemer et al, 2015;Zanon et al, 2014). To increase sense of presence in the simulated experience, the scenario was experienced from a first-person perspective (Bergström, Kilteni, & Slater, 2016), with the help of an MRI-compatible headphones for audio stimuli, and goggles for visual stimuli.…”

“…Furthermore, the participant heard the sound of her/his own avatar coughing due to smoke inhalation and the visual field was reduced when (s)he was in danger, to simulate tunnel vision phenomena that occur in high stress conditions. This type of feedback has been shown to be effective in creating an experience of risk and danger in VR (Chittaro, 2014;Chittaro & Zangrando, 2010). Participants could track how much 'life energy' was left in their avatar on a bar labeled as 'life energy'.…”

Desktop virtual reality for emergency preparedness

“…In particular, we focused on skin conductance level (SCL), which is increasingly used in studies of fear and anxiety in VR, e.g. [Chittaro, 2014;Lister et al 2010;Mühlberger et al 2008;Tröger et al, 2012]. SCL is the more stable of the two components of the electrodermal signal and is typically used to measure the level of electrodermal activity during a given period of time [Andreassi 2007].…”