Characterizing Physiological Responses to Fear, Frustration, and Insight in Virtual Reality
Physiological sensing often complements studies of human behavior in virtual reality (VR) to detect users’ affective and cognitive states. Some psychological states, such as fear and frustration, can be particularly hard to differentiate from a physiological perspective as they are close in the arousal and valence emotional space. Moreover, it is largely unclear how users’ physiological reactions are expressed in response to transient psychological states such as fear, frustration, and insight—especially since these are rich indicators for characterizing users’ responses to dynamic systems but are hard to capture in highly interactive settings. We conducted a study (N=24) to analyze participants’ pulmonary, electrodermal, cardiac, and pupillary responses to moments of fear, frustration, and insight in immersive settings. Participants interacted in five VR environments, throughout which we measured their physiological reactions and analyzed the patterns. We also measured subjective fear and frustration using questionnaires.
Oct 24, 2022
A Survey on Affective and Cognitive VR
In this paper, we introduce the term "Affective and Cognitive VR" and its main research lines. This survey also clarifies the different models of Affective and Cognitive States (ACS), presents the methods for measuring them with their respective advantages and drawbacks in VR, and showcases Affective and Cognitive VR studies done in an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) in a non-clinical context. We provide a comprehensive list of references with the analysis of 63 research articles and summarize future works directions.
Sep 6, 2021