The underwood project: A virtual environment for eliciting ambiguous threat

Abstract

Threatening environments can be unpredictable in many different ways. The nature of threats, their timing, and their locations in a scene can all be uncertain, even when one is acutely aware of being at risk. Prior research demonstrates that both temporal unpredictability and spatial uncertainty of threats elicit a distinctly anxious psychological response. In the paradigm presented here, we further explore other facets of ambiguous threat via an environment in which there are no concrete threats, predictable or otherwise, but which nevertheless elicits a building sense of danger. By incorporating both psychological research and principles of emotional game design, we constructed this world and then tested its effects in three studies. In line with our goals, participants experienced the environment as creepy and unpredictable. Their subjective and physiological response to the world rose and fell in line with the presentation of ambiguously threatening ambient cues. Exploratory analyses further suggest that this ambiguously threatening experience influenced memory for the virtual world and its underlying narrative. Together the data demonstrate that naturalistic virtual worlds can effectively elicit a multifaceted experience of ambiguous threat with subjective and cognitive consequences.

The presence of fear: How subjective fear, not physiological changes, shapes the experience of presence.

“…It is possible though, that subjective anxiety, and not fear itself, mediated changes in presence. Simulations that specifically target anxiety (i.e., using an ambiguous or unpredictable environment instead of a physical threat; for example, see McCall et al, 2022) would be the best way to determine whether anxiety induces presence independent of fear. Indeed, it is possible that any sufficiently strong emotional response could be causally related to presence.…”

The Effects of Emotion on Retrospective Duration Memory using Virtual Reality

“…In the present study we sought to bridge the gap between ecological validity and experimental control in studying the effects of emotion on temporal duration memory by using virtual reality (VR). Previous work has demonstrated the utility of using VR to study mnemonic phenomena (e.g., Cadet et al, 2022;Quezada-Scholz et al, 2022;McCall et al, 2022). Although VR is not akin to the real-world, it can provide highly immersive naturally unfolding life-like events while retaining high experimental control (e.g., controlling for the time spent in an experience, or the stimuli presented).…”