ArticleRoyal Society open science2023
Walk the plank! Using mobile electroencephalography to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Are you afraid? Neurophysiological responses to multidimensional fear in an interactive semi-immersive environment.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2026Article
- VRSPi: towards a neuroadaptive VR exposure therapy system for spider phobia.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Virtual reality-based stress paradigms and early adversity: a scoping review of mechanisms and stress-response systems.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Review
- Walking on the Edge: Brain Connectivity Changes in Response to Virtual Height Challenges.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Virtually Connected: Do Shared Novel Activities in Virtual Reality Enhance Self-Expansion and Relationship Quality?Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Measuring Bound Attention During Complex Liver Surgery Planning: Feasibility Study.JMIR formative research · 2025Article
- Virtual reality-enabled high-performance emotion estimation with the most significant channel pairs.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Self-Assessed Experience of Emotional Involvement in Sensory Analysis Performed in Virtual Reality.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Walk the plank! Using mobile electroencephalography to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- The Promises and Pitfalls of Virtual Reality.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2023Article
- Monitoring Brain Activity in VR: EEG and Neuroimaging.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2023Article
- Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Ewww-Investigating the neural basis of disgust in response to naturalistic and pictorial nauseating stimuli.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most studies on emotion processing induce emotions through images or films. However, this method lacks ecological validity, limiting generalization to real-life emotion processing. More realistic paradigms using virtual reality (VR) may be better suited to investigate authentic emotional states and their neuronal correlates. This pre-registered study examines the neuronal underpinnings of naturalistic fear, measured using mobile electroencephalography (EEG). Seventy-five healthy participants walked across a virtual plank which extended from the side of a skyscraper-either 80 storeys up (the negative condition) or at street level (the neutral condition). Subjective ratings showed that the negative condition induced feelings of fear. Following the VR experience, participants passively viewed negative and neutral images from the international affective picture system (IAPS) outside of VR. We compared frontal alpha asymmetry between the plank and IAPS task and across valence of the conditions. Asymmetry indices in the plank task revealed greater right-hemispheric lateralization during the negative VR condition, relative to the neutral VR condition and to IAPS viewing. Within the IAPS task, no significant asymmetries were detected. In summary, our findings indicate that immersive technologies such as VR can advance emotion research by providing more ecologically valid ways to induce emotion.
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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.