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Sketchpad Series

Stepping Into VR: Embodied sense of presence in a virtual environment mediates physiological and behavioral indices of fear

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 3 - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT, Constitution A.

William R. Lopez¹ (w.lopez26@ncf.edu), Christian Daloul¹, Emma Leigh D. Cunningham¹, Cassidy F. Brand¹, Peter F. Cook¹; ¹New College of Florida

Laboratory studies of emotional arousal and fear have suffered from low ecological validity and small effect sizes. The sense of embodied presence in virtual reality environments may aid in eliciting high-intensity emotional responses. To assess the efficacy of virtual reality environments in studying fear and to determine the importance of embodied presence in those environments, we exposed participants to virtual heights in one of two conditions. All participants took an elevator to the 80th floor of a building and had to walk to the end of a beam extending over the edge. In the control condition, participants were instructed to hold a cane horizontally as a balance aid. In the embodied feedback condition, participants were instructed to use the cane to feel along the ground in the real-world environment. We measured peak EDA relative to baseline during walking, time to reach the end of the beam, and post-hoc self-reported fear on a 7-point Likert scale (10 points in the pilot). In the pilot, self-report data and EDA measures of fear were moderately high, suggesting that experiencing heights in VR produced a genuine fear response in most subjects. EDA values and walking time measures were much lower in participants in the embodied feedback condition, indicating that the sense of embodied presence in VR accounts for a significant portion of the fear response. Strikingly, there was a much smaller effect of the embodied feedback on self-reported fear, indicating a dissociation between conscious experience of fear and physiological and behavioral indicators.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions