Decoding subjective emotional arousal from EEG during an immersive Virtual Reality experience

Hofmann, Steffen; Klotzsche, Felix; Mariola, Alberto; Nikulin, Vadim V.; Villringer, Arno; Gaebler, Michael

doi:10.1101/2020.10.24.353722

Cited by 11 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 143 publications

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“…In order to investigate the neuronal underpinnings of emotional experience, VR can be combined with mobile EEG systems [38,39]. These systems possess acceleration sensors specifically designed to take movement into account which can then be integrated in data analysis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Walk the Plank! Using mobile EEG to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality

Basbasse

Packheiser

Peterburs

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Most studies on emotion processing rely on the presentation of emotional images or films. However, this methodology lacks ecological validity, limiting the extent to which findings can generalize to emotion processing in the wild. More realistic paradigms using Virtual Reality (VR) may be better suited to investigate authentic emotional states and their neuronal correlates. This preregistered study examines the neuronal underpinnings of naturalistic fear, measured using mobile electroencephalography (EEG). Seventy five healthy participants entered a simulation in which they walked across a virtual plank which extended from the side of a skyscraper either 80 stories up (the negative condition) or at street level (the neutral condition). Subjective ratings showed that the negative condition induced feelings of fear and presence. Following the VR experience, subjects passively viewed negative and neutral images from the International Affective Picture system (IAPS) outside of VR. We compared frontal alpha asymmetry between the plank and IAPS task and across valence of the conditions. Asymmetry indices (AI) in the plank task revealed greater right-hemispheric lateralization during the negative VR condition, relative to the neutral VR condition and to IAPS viewing. Within the IAPS task, no significant asymmetries were detected, though AIs in the VR task and in the IAPS task were negatively correlated suggesting that stronger right-hemispheric activation in the VR task was associated with stronger left-hemispheric activation during the IAPS task. In summary, our findings indicate that immersive technologies such as VR can advance emotion research by providing more ecologically valid ways to induce emotion.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Walk the Plank! Using mobile EEG to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality

Basbasse

Packheiser

Peterburs

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…Recently, a shift in emotion research using naturalistic paradigm is adapted to probe the cortical dynamics [38,34,35]. The stimuli in naturalistic paradigm includes virtual reality immersive experience [25], emotional and neutral movie clips [55,34], and emotionally salient films [20]. The naturalistic paradigm offers the probe to dynamically track the taskrelated neural responses, autonomic responses and subjective feedback in a more real, dynamic and natural environment [35].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The degree of context un/familiarity impacts the emotional feeling and preaware cardiac-brain activity: a study with emotionally salient naturalistic paradigm using DENS Dataset

Mishra¹,

Tiwary²

2021

Preprint

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Emotion experiments with naturalistic paradigms are emerging and giving new insights into dynamic brain activity. Context familiarity is considered as an important dimensions of emotion processing by appraisal theorists. However, how the context un/familiarity of the naturalistic stimuli influences the central and autonomic activity is not probed yet [check it]. Hence, we tried to address this issue in this work by breaking it down into three questions. 1) What is the relation between context un/familiarity with the neural correlates of self-assessment affective dimensions viz. valence and arousal; 2) the influence of context un/familiarity in cardiac-brain mutual interaction during emotion processing; 3.) brain network reorganization to accommodate the degree of context familiarity. We found that the less-context familiarity is primarily attributed to negative emotion feeling mediated by lack of predictability of sensory experience. Whereas, with high-context familiarity, both positive and negative emotions are felt. For less-context familiarity, the arousal activity is negatively correlated with EEG power. In addition, the cardiac activity for both high and less context familiarity is modulated before the reported self-awareness of emotional feeling. The correlation of cortical regions with cardiac activity and connectivity patterns reveals that ECG is modulated by salient feature during pre-awareness and correlates with AIC and conceptual hub in high-familiarity. Whereas, for the low familiarity, the cardiac activity is correlated with the exteroceptive sensory regions. In addition, we found that OFC and dmPFC have high connectivity with less-context familiarity, whereas AIC has high connectivity with high-context familiarity. To the best of our knowledge, the context familiarity and its influence on cardiac and brain activity have never been reported with a naturalistic paradigm. Hence, this study significantly contributes to understanding automatic processing of emotions by analyzing the effect of context un/familiarity on affective feelings, the dynamics of cardiac-brain mutual interaction, and the brain's effective connectivity during pre-awareness.

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“…First, one may, for instance, need to consciously entertain stronger doubts towards visceral and affective experiences. For this purpose, real-time affective monitoring [62,63], such as during the consumption of immersive journalism and VR news, could be investigated. By way of example, measurable physiological arousal parameters [64][65][66] could be visually displayed to the user to encourage a critical stance towards the experienced contents.…”

Section: Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facing Immersive “Post-Truth” in AIVR?

Aliman

Kester

2020

Philosophies

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In recent years, prevalent global societal issues related to fake news, fakery, misinformation, and disinformation were brought to the fore, leading to the construction of descriptive labels such as “post-truth” to refer to the supposedly new emerging era. Thereby, the (mis-)use of technologies such as AI and VR has been argued to potentially fuel this new loss of “ground-truth”, for instance, via the ethically relevant deepfakes phenomena and the creation of realistic fake worlds, presumably undermining experiential veracity. Indeed, unethical and malicious actors could harness tools at the intersection of AI and VR (AIVR) to craft what we call immersive falsehood, fake immersive reality landscapes deliberately constructed for malicious ends. This short paper analyzes the ethically relevant nature of the background against which such malicious designs in AIVR could exacerbate the intentional proliferation of deceptions and falsities. We offer a reappraisal expounding that while immersive falsehood could manipulate and severely jeopardize the inherently affective constructions of social reality and considerably complicate falsification processes, humans may neither inhabit a post-truth nor a post-falsification age. Finally, we provide incentives for future AIVR safety work, ideally contributing to a future era of technology-augmented critical thinking.

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Decoding subjective emotional arousal from EEG during an immersive Virtual Reality experience

Cited by 11 publications

References 143 publications

Walk the Plank! Using mobile EEG to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality

Walk the Plank! Using mobile EEG to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality

The degree of context un/familiarity impacts the emotional feeling and preaware cardiac-brain activity: a study with emotionally salient naturalistic paradigm using DENS Dataset

Facing Immersive “Post-Truth” in AIVR?

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