Abstract
Learning to regulate one’s emotions under threatening circumstances is important, among others, for professionals like police officers and military personnel. To explore the opportunities of Virtual Reality-based training for such professionals, this paper describes an experiment performed to investigate the impact of virtual training on participants’ experienced emotional responses in threatening situations. A set of 15 participants was asked to rate the subjective emotional intensity of a set of affective pictures at two different time points, separated by six hours. The participants were divided into three groups: the first group performed a session of virtual training in between, in which they received a choice-reaction task, the second group performed a session of virtual training, in which they had to apply reappraisal strategies, and a control group did not have any training session. The results indicate that the reappraisal-based training caused the participants in that group to give significantly lower ratings for the emotional intensity of the negative pictures, whereas the content-based training resulted in significantly higher ratings compared to the group without training. Moreover, a second experiment, performed with the same participants six months later, indicated that these effects are fairly persistent over time, and that they transfer to different pictures with similar characteristics.
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Bosse, T., Gerritsen, C., de Man, J., Treur, J. (2013). Effects of Virtual Training on Emotional Response. In: Imamura, K., Usui, S., Shirao, T., Kasamatsu, T., Schwabe, L., Zhong, N. (eds) Brain and Health Informatics. BHI 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8211. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02753-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02753-1_3
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