The Potential of Virtual Reality for the Investigation of Awe

Abstract

The emotion of awe is characterized by the perception of vastness and a need for accommodation, which can include a positive and/or negative valence. While a number of studies have successfully manipulated this emotion, the issue of how to elicit particularly intense awe experiences in laboratory settings remains. We suggest that virtual reality (VR) is a particularly effective mood induction tool for eliciting awe. VR provides three key assets for improving awe. First, VR provides users with immersive and ecological yet controlled environments that can elicit a sense of “presence,” the subjective experience of “being there” in a simulated reality. Further, VR can be used to generate complex, vast stimuli, which can target specific theoretical facets of awe. Finally, VR allows for convenient tracking of participants’ behavior and physiological responses, allowing for more integrated assessment of emotional experience. We discussed the potential and challenges of the proposed approach with an emphasis on VR’s capacity to raise the signal of reactions to emotions such as awe in laboratory settings.

Space—A Virtual Frontier: How to Design and Evaluate a Virtual Reality Experience of the Overview Effect

“…Vastness is believed to be the key property of the stimulus capable of eliciting awe (Keltner and Haidt, 2003). Chirico et al (2016) proposed to use VR to create awe-inspiring experiences, as it is capable of producing vast stimuli, and can induce presence and enhance the ecological validity of the experience. The virtual environment should be designed to highlight the vastness of space and possibly other environments that may be included in the virtual journey to build up the sense of awe.…”

Developing Emotional Design: Emotions as Cognitive Processes and their Role in the Design of Interactive Technologies

“…Emotional appraisal leading to the experience of awe includes two distinctive elements, namely the feeling of vastness (perceptual or conceptual) and need for accommodation (i.e., the need for updating one's mental schemas to adapt them to the extraordinary). Recent research demonstrated that immersive technologies (e.g., Virtual Reality and 360° immersive videos) can be used to induce profound awe experiences in controlled environments, such as the lab (Gallagher et al, 2014 ; Chirico et al, 2016 , 2017 ; Gaggioli et al, 2016 ). For instance, Chirico et al ( 2017 ) were able to grasp subtle differences in the emergence of awe considering both self-reported and psychophysiological measures of this emotion.…”

Experimentally induced awe does not affect implicit and explicit time perception

“…Still in a previous fMRI study we found that using the same stimuli the aweexperience was accompanied by decreased focus on the self and an accompanying reduced activity of the default mode network (DMN), which has been implicated in selfreferential processing and mind-wandering (van Elk, Gomez, et al, 2019). More powerful manipulations, e.g., by using immersive virtual reality (VR; see for instance: Chirico, Ferrise, Cordella, & Gaggioli, 2018;Chirico, Yaden, Riva, & Gaggioli, 2016;Reinerman-Jones, Sollins, Gallagher, & Janz, 2013) are likely to induce stronger feelings of awe, thereby enhancing the likelihood of detecting an eventual effect of awe on time perception. For instance, viewing earth from space in a virtual environmentas if floating through a space stationelicited strong feelings of awe; and immersive 3D videos of vast landscapes induced stronger feelings of awe than the 2D videos that are typically used in studies on awe (and in the present study as well).…”