Investigating motivational aspects and psychobiological stress responses in high-risk sports combining Virtual Reality to a wing-suit flight simulator: study protocol of the project StressVR

Abstract

Over the last decades, the prevalence of high-risk sports activities including skydiving, base-jumping, and wingsuit flying has co-developed with a modern globalized lifestyle. The practice of such extreme sports with a risk-taking and even life-threatening character shows continuously increasing popularity and participation rates have grown exponentially. Interestingly, the precise motivational aspects of high-risk sports and their psychobiological underpinnings have been rather hardly characterized. This limited knowledge is attributable to the fact that the possibility to investigate high-risk sports in a laboratory setting was relatively limited. The central methodological aim of the presented project StressVR is to use groundbreaking new technology in high-risk sports research by implementing Virtual Reality (VR) technology into a psychobiological research environment. Using a first-of-its-kind VR wingsuit-flight simulator, StressVR will identify and characterize the kinetics of psychobiological reactions in the context of high-risk sport behavior, also considering critical and traumatic life events, personality traits, attachment representations as well as biomolecular readout variables including cortisol, beta-endorphin, alpha-amylase activity, and pH in saliva. Additionally, peripheral stress markers including heart rate, respiration rate, and skin conductance will be assessed during the VR experiment. The results of StressVR will not only help to improve the current understanding of why individuals do high-risk sports: This could also mean that risk sports athletes do not act “headlessly” and “carelessly” but do follow their metabolic needs as a mechanism of emotion regulation. Here, we summarize the concepts of StressVR and provide the study protocol to address the aimed scientific questions.