How disentangled sense of agency and sense of ownership can interact with different emotional events on stress feelings

Abstract

We used the virtual hand illusion paradigm to study how sense of agency and sense of (body) ownership can interact with different emotional events on stress feelings. Converging evidence for at least the partial independence of agency and ownership was found. For instance, sense of agency was a better predictor of individual anxiety levels than sense of ownership and males showed stronger effects related to agency-presumably due to gender-specific attribution styles and empathy skills. Moreover, agency and ownership also interacted with emotional events and led to different anxiety levels. Taken together, our findings suggest that the disentangled sense of agency and sense of ownership can interact with different emotional events and influenced stress feelings more in threatening situations than awarding ones.

Embodiment in Virtual Reality Intensifies Emotional Responses to Virtual Stimuli

“…It can affect the attitudes toward the social group to which the virtual body belongs (Farmer et al, 2012(Farmer et al, , 2014Banakou et al, 2013;Fini et al, 2013;Maister et al, 2013;Peck et al, 2013). Moreover, virtual body ownership can modualte pain perception (Martini et al, 2013(Martini et al, , 2014(Martini et al, , 2015Osumi et al, 2014;Giummarra et al, 2015;Nierula et al, 2017;Matamala-Gomez et al, 2018, the perceived body weight (Serino et al, 2016;Chirico et al, 2019;Wolf et al, 2020), motor performance (Matamala-Gomez et al, 2020a) or memory processes (Tacikowski et al, 2020b). Virtual body ownership also affects responses to physical threat stimuli delivered toward to the virtual body (Ehrsson, 2007;Ehrsson et al, 2007;Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008;Gentile et al, 2013).…”

“…Emotions organize motivation, attention, memory, performance, and decision-making Oatley et al ( 2006 ). There are specific findings that virtual embodiment modulates anxiety and arousal for stimuli that directly threaten the virtual body (Romano et al, 2014 ; Guterstam et al, 2015 ; Argelaguet et al, 2016 ; Chen et al, 2017 ). However, we do not know the impact of virtual embodiment on the intensity of general emotional reactions to virtual stimuli to date.…”

The body-ownership is unconsciously distorted in the brain: An event-related potential study of rubber hand illusion

“…That is, the detection of visuo-tactile temporal congruency is sufficient for the objects to be fully incorporated into the internal body model (Braun et al, 2018). The findings of RHI (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998), rubber foot illusion (Flögel et al, 2016), cat claw illusion (Chen et al, 2017), and the illusion based on things without visual resemblance with the body such as a table (Armel & Ramachandran, 2003) and the virtual balloon and square (Ma & Hommel, 2015) support this model.…”

Affective Virtual Reality: How to Design Artificial Experiences Impacting Human Emotions

“…Agency and body ownership can enhance emotions (e.g., increasing anxiety when avoiding knives). 15 However, presence and emotions can also be elicited with low agency level (e.g., passive VR 360 videos). 2 The VR space can be used to mix, blend, and deliver multisensory stimuli (visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory).…”