Virtual Viewing Time: The Relationship between Presence and Sexual Interest in Androphilic and Gynephilic Men

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) has successfully been used in the research of human behavior for more than twenty years. The main advantage of VR is its capability to induce a high sense of presence. This results in emotions and behavior which are very close to those shown in real situations. In the context of sex research, only a few studies have used high-immersive VR so far. The ones that did can be found mostly in the field of forensic psychology. Nevertheless, the relationship between presence and sexual interest still remains unclear. The present study is the first to examine the advantages of high-immersive VR in comparison to a conventional standard desktop system regarding their capability to measure sexual interest. 25 gynephilic and 20 androphilic healthy men underwent three experimental conditions, which differed in their ability to induce a sense of presence. In each condition, participants were asked to rate ten male and ten female virtual human characters regarding their sexual attractiveness. Without their knowledge, the subjects’ viewing time was assessed throughout the rating. Subjects were then asked to rate the sense of presence they had experienced as well as their perceived realism of the characters. Results suggested that stereoscopic viewing can significantly enhance the subjective sexual attractiveness of sexually relevant characters. Furthermore, in all three conditions participants looked significantly longer at sexually relevant virtual characters than at sexually non-relevant ones. The high immersion condition provided the best discriminant validity. From a statistical point of view, however, the sense of presence had no significant influence on the discriminant validity of the viewing time task. The study showed that high-immersive virtual environments enhance realism ratings as well as ratings of sexual attractiveness of three-dimensional human stimuli in comparison to standard desktop systems. Results also show that viewing time seems to be influenced neither by sexual attractiveness nor by realism of stimuli. This indicates how important task specific mechanisms of the viewing time effect are.

Virtual reality applications for diagnosis, risk assessment and therapy of child abusers

“…In each experimental condition, the VT paradigm for measuring sexual interest was applied. Results showed that a highly immersive VR application of the VT paradigm can enhance the sexual salience of virtual characters as well as the classification accuracy of this paradigm (Fromberger et al, ).…”

“…The subjective feeling of being there, the feeling of being in the virtual environment even if one is physically in another reality, is called presence (Schuemie, van der Straaten, Krijn, & van der Mast, 2001). The amount of presence, which depends on the technological basis of a VR system (e.g., extent of the field of view), can be subsumed under the term immersion (Fromberger, Meyer, Kempf, Jordan, & Müller, 2015). In the context of computer-generated (virtual) characters, social presence is another important concept within VR: social presence describes the subjective feeling that a virtual character in fact exists in the environment (Parsons et al, 2017).…”

Questionnaire Measures and Physiological Correlates of Presence: A Systematic Review

“…Some examples are the field of view, image latency, and frame rate of the image stream (Slater, 1999). On the other hand, presence has been defined as the subjective and psychological reaction to immersive environments (Fromberger et al, 2015). As already introduced in the previous section of the present article, some studies have systematically used the terminology "immersion" and "presence" as synonyms (e.g., Jennett et al, 2008;Amin et al, 2016;Papachristos et al, 2017;Lum et al, 2018).…”

Violent Video Games in Virtual Reality

“…However, as PEGI is part of IARC [36], an international effort to standardize ratings, they are representative of global game rating approaches. We also focus primarily on the aspects of PEGI related to violent content, though we believe VR may also have significant impact on the experience of sexual [30] or discriminatory content [31]. We will explain the current structure of the content descriptors and PEGI questionnaire, including what content calls for a higher age rating, before discussing what we see as important limitations and issues with the process that need attention and research.…”

“…Again, the realism of violence is not just in the "depiction" but in the involvement. Similarly, a game will require a 16 rating over 12 when a "depiction of nudity…could result in sexual arousal" (Q15), and presence/body ownership in VR could make nude or seminude characters more arousing [30]. VR, particularly from a first-person perspective, increases realism in a manner PEGI does not currently take into consideration (that the events feel real).…”