ArticlePloS one2021
Heart rate variability analysis for the assessment of immersive emotional arousal using virtual reality: Comparing real and virtual scenarios.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Knowledge Gain and the Impact of Stress in a Fully Immersive Virtual Reality-Based Medical Emergencies Training With Automated Feedback: Randomized Controlled Trial.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Trial
- Toward a biologically grounded understanding of autonomic function in developmental science.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2026Review
- Virtual reality transition to underground: human responses across sequential spatial transitions.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Effects of Cognitive Style and Evaluation Context on Hedonic and Sensory Perception of Café Latte: A Comparison of Sensory Booth, Real-Life, and Mixed Reality Environments.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Multi-method characterization of neurophysiological and biological stress responses in surgical teams during real surgical procedures.Frontiers in neuroergonomics · 2026Article
- Exploratory Investigation of Motor and Psychophysiological Outcomes Following VR-Based Motor Training with Augmented Sensory Feedback for a Pilot Cohort with Spinal Cord Injury.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Virtual Reality Education Increases Neurologic Immersion and Empathy in Nursing Students.Nursing reports (Pavia, Italy) · 2025Article
- A Pilot Study on Emotional Equivalence Between VR and Real Spaces Using EEG and Heart Rate Variability.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Heart Rate Variability in Adolescents with Autistic Spectrum Disorder Practicing a Virtual Reality Using Two Different Interaction Devices (Concrete and Abstract): A Prospective Randomized Crossover Controlled Trial.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Effects of virtual reality on spatiotemporal gait parameters and freezing of gait in Parkinson's disease.NPJ Parkinson's disease · 2025Article
- Measuring Stress and Perceptions for a Virtual Reality-Based Pericardiocentesis Procedure Simulation for Medical Training: Usability Study.JMIR serious games · 2025Article
- Viewing mock crimes in virtual reality increases presence without impacting memory.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Simulated virtual reality experiences for predicting early treatment response in panic disorder.Frontiers in digital health · 2025Article
- Enhancing emotion recognition in virtual reality: a multimodal dataset and a temporal emotion detector.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Fear-related psychophysiological patterns are situation and individual dependent: A Bayesian model comparison approach.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- Heart Rate Variability during Online Video Game Playing in Habitual Gamers: Effects of Internet Addiction Scale, Ranking Score and Gaming Performance.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Virtual and Reality: A Neurophysiological Pilot Study of the Sarcophagus of the Spouses.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Impact of Correlated Color Temperature on Visitors' Perception and Preference in Virtual Reality Museum Exhibitions.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Heart Rate Variability in Healthy Subjects During Monitored, Short-Term Stress Followed by 24-hour Cardiac Monitoring.Frontiers in physiology · 2022Article
- Multimodal Assessment of Changes in Physiological Indicators when Presenting a Video Fragment on Screen (2D) versus a VR (3D) Environment.Behavioural neurology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many affective computing studies have developed automatic emotion recognition models, mostly using emotional images, audio and videos. In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has been also used as a method to elicit emotions in laboratory environments. However, there is still a need to analyse the validity of VR in order to extrapolate the results it produces and to assess the similarities and differences in physiological responses provoked by real and virtual environments. We investigated the cardiovascular oscillations of 60 participants during a free exploration of a real museum and its virtualisation viewed through a head-mounted display. The differences between the heart rate variability features in the high and low arousal stimuli conditions were analysed through statistical hypothesis testing; and automatic arousal recognition models were developed across the real and the virtual conditions using a support vector machine algorithm with recursive feature selection. The subjects' self-assessments suggested that both museums elicited low and high arousal levels. In addition, the real museum showed differences in terms of cardiovascular responses, differences in vagal activity, while arousal recognition reached 72.92% accuracy. However, we did not find the same arousal-based autonomic nervous system change pattern during the virtual museum exploration. The results showed that, while the direct virtualisation of a real environment might be self-reported as evoking psychological arousal, it does not necessarily evoke the same cardiovascular changes as a real arousing elicitation. These contribute to the understanding of the use of VR in emotion recognition research; future research is needed to study arousal and emotion elicitation in immersive VR.
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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.