ArticleiScience2026
An elephant in the room amplifies discomfort when the virtual reality space matches physical reality.
Article in iScience, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) produces powerful emotional responses, witnessed by decades of deployment in clinical psychology. When virtual content is experienced in one's actual physical space, whether through mixed reality (MR) or a VR replica of that space, the brain may treat events as more real, amplifying emotional responses. Twenty-nine participants experienced scenes with an animal (wolf, dog, rabbit, or squirrel) in three rooms (the real experimental room via MR, a VR model of that room, or an unrelated VR living room), with a Newton's Cradle on or off. A probabilistic agent prompted participants to alter one factor at a time; Markov matrices of the resulting transitions showed that the most discomforting configuration was [wolf, MR, cradle on] and the least discomforting was [dog, living room, cradle off]. These findings have direct implications for ethical guidelines and safety standards for MR content and for clinical applications such as exposure therapy.
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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.