Emotional Experience in Real and Virtual Environments - Does Prior VR Experience Matter?

Virtual reality (VR) has a great potential to induce emotions effectively and naturally. There are already existing concepts to use this technology, e.g., for the therapy of anxiety disorders or to train emotional and social skills for different user groups. Some research results show that visual stimuli are experienced emotionally different in a virtual environment than in a real environment. The aim of the study was therefore, to investigate whether a person's emotional experience (induced by affective pictures) differs between real and virtual environments. Additionally, the influence of prior experience with VR on the emotional reactions was investigated. Furthermore, in an exploratory part the effect of immersive 360 degrees videos in VR was studied. The results indicate an effect of VR on the psychophysiological responses. The subjective assessments show that the affective pictures were able to induce significantly different emotional responses in VR. In addition, significantly different emotional responses are evident in both, the subjective and psychophysiological parameters regarding the 360 degrees VR-videos. Overall, prior VR experience did not show a significant effect.