ArticlePsychological research2021
Behavioral realism and lifelike psychophysiological responses in virtual reality by the example of a height exposure.
Article in Psychological research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Emotion Recognition in Immersive Virtual Reality: From Statistics to Affective Computing.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Pooled it
- How virtual urban green spaces influence stress and risk-taking.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Social cognitive impacts of digital art in metaverse environments: A cross-sectional study of user perception and behavioral patterns.PloS one · 2026Article
- Terrorism, Perceived Threat, and Support for Surveillance: A Virtual Reality Experiment on Cyber vs. Conventional Terrorism.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Audiovisual virtual reality for emotion induction: a dataset of physiological responses.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Association Between Sensation Seeking and Fear Response: Interventional Study of Personality and Behavior Using a Virtual Reality Heights Simulation.JMIR XR and spatial computing · 2025Article
- Virtual Reality experiments in the field.PloS one · 2025Article
- The Role of Immersive Experience in Anxiety Reduction: Evidence from Virtual Reality Sessions.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Examining the applicability of virtual battle space for stress management training in military personnel-A validation study.Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress · 2024Article
- The presence of fear: How subjective fear, not physiological changes, shapes the experience of presence.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024Article
- Distortions to Passage of Time Judgements (POTJ) due to virtual threat are predicted by autonomic activation.PloS one · 2024Article
- Reliability of repeated exposure to the human elevated plus-maze in virtual reality: Behavioral, emotional, and autonomic responses.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Architectural experience influences the processing of others' body expressions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Virtual reality assessment of walking in a modifiable urban environment: a feasibility and acceptability study.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The reality of virtual reality.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Real-life relevant face perception is not captured by the N170 but reflected in later potentials: A comparison of 2D and virtual reality stimuli.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- New is not always better: Virtual reality does not necessarily enhance mnemonic processing.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Measuring arousal and valence generated by the dynamic experience of architectural forms in virtual environments.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Virtual farm tours-Virtual reality glasses and tablets are suitable tools to provide insights into pig husbandry.PloS one · 2022Article
- The Paradox of Fiction Revisited-Improvised Fictional and Real-Life Social Rejections Evoke Associated and Relatively Similar Psychophysiological Responses.Brain sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly gaining importance as a valuable methodical tool for psychological research. The greatest benefit of using VR is generating rich, complex and vivid, but still highly controllable settings. As VR has been found to elicit lifelike psychophysiological and emotional responses, we examined by means of a height exposure whether VR resembles physical reality to the necessary degree to constitute a suitable framework for investigating real-life behavior in a controlled experimental context. As hypothesized, participants behaved in VR exactly as would be appropriate in a real environment: Being exposed to great height, participants walked significantly slower across a virtual steel girder construction protruding from a high-rise building as compared to participants who traversed the very same construction on the ground level. In the height condition, this realistic behavior could be predicted on basis of the participants' trait anxiety. Aligned with the behavioral responses, they showed realistic psychophysiological responses, i.e., an elevated heart rate when exposed to height. Interestingly, participants of the height condition reported a greater sense of presence, which indicates that emotions have an elevating effect on presence. As a conclusion, our findings provide further evidence that VR evokes lifelike responses at both behavioral and psychophysiological level and therefore increases ecological validity of psychological experiments.
Indexed as
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31520144What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.