Designing Awe in Virtual Reality: An Experimental Study

Abstract

Awe is a little-studied emotion with a great transformative potential. Therefore, the interest toward the study of awe’s underlying mechanisms has been increased. Specifically, researchers have been interested in how to reproduce intense feelings of awe within laboratory conditions. It has been proposed that the use of virtual reality (VR) could be an effective way to induce awe in controlled experimental settings, thanks to its ability of providing participants with a sense of “presence,” that is, the subjective feeling of being displaced in another physical or imaginary place. However, the potential of VR as awe-inducing medium has not been fully tested yet. In the present study, we provided an evidence-based design and a validation of four immersive virtual environments (VEs) involving 36 participants in a within-subject design. Of these, three VEs were designed to induce awe, whereas the fourth VE was targeted as an emotionally neutral stimulus. Participants self-reported the extent to which they felt awe, general affect and sense of presence related to each environment. As expected, results showed that awe-VEs could induce significantly higher levels of awe and presence as compared to the neutral VE. Furthermore, these VEs induced significantly more positive than negative affect. These findings supported the potential of immersive VR for inducing awe and provide useful indications for the design of awe-inspiring virtual environments.

Awe or horror: differentiating two emotional responses to schema incongruence

“…Although awe involved NFA (Shock), it also involved moderately high appraisals of certainty (for similar midscale appraisals of certainty, see Gordon et al, 2017;Tong & Jia, 2017) and amazement at things that support existing values and worldviews (low Chaos), indicating that the experiences were not difficult to assimilate. Previous research similarly found that NFA is either not salient in awe (e.g., not greater in awe relative to a contrast emotion, negatively correlated with awe ratings; Schurtz et al, 2012) or less salient than vastness (e.g., lower ratings, smaller neutral-contrast effect sizes; Chirico et al, 2017;Chirico, Ferrise, Cordella, & Gaggioli, 2018). The relatively low salience of NFA may be due to the "noetic" sense of revelation and intuitive insight often reported in awe (James, 1902), which would increase appraisals of certainty .…”

The Role of Social Relational Emotions for Human-Nature Connectedness

“…Fourth, despite the fact that current research emphasizes the benefits of direct engagement with nature, it simultaneously points to mounting evidence that physical contact with nature is decreasing (Rosa et al, 2018). In this context, Chirico et al (2018) compared virtual exposure to nature and actual contact with nature. The results indicate that while browsing nature photographs or watching a nature documentary are likely to improve mood, getting outdoors, and connecting directly with nature was associated with better well-being benefits.…”

Good vibrations: A review of vocal expressions of positive emotions

“…The study of vocal expression of positive emotions would benefit from capitalizing on empirically verified ways to induce high-intensity emotions in laboratory conditions, such as dyadic interaction tasks (e.g., romantic partners having conversations on enjoyable topics; Levenson, Carstensen, & Gottman, 1993), and virtual reality paradigms (e.g., Chirico, Ferrise, Cordella, & Gaggioli, 2018). Moreover, researchers could use self-report measures in combinations with physiological and behavioural measures to verify induction procedures, as well as to control for individual differences.…”