Virtual Reality for Emotion Elicitation -- A Review

TL;DR

This review explores how Virtual Reality can actively and effectively evoke emotions through visual, audio-visual stimuli, and immersive experiences, highlighting its potential as a natural and motivational tool for emotion research.

Contribution

It addresses the gap in literature by focusing on active VR-based emotion induction methods and evaluates various VR stimuli for their effectiveness in eliciting emotions.

Findings

VR effectively evokes emotions through immersive stimuli

VR generates motivational and empathy mechanisms for emotion induction

VR is a promising ecologically valid paradigm for emotion research

Abstract

Emotions are multifaceted phenomena that affect our behaviour, perception, and cognition. Increasing evidence indicates that induction mechanisms play a crucial role in triggering emotions by simulating the sensations required for an experimental design. Over the years, many reviews have evaluated a passive elicitation mechanism where the user is an observer, ignoring the importance of self-relevance in emotional experience. So, in response to the gap in the literature, this study intends to explore the possibility of using Virtual Reality (VR) as an active mechanism for emotion induction. Furthermore, for the success and quality of research settings, VR must select the appropriate material to effectively evoke emotions. Therefore, in the present review, we evaluated to what extent VR visual and audio-visual stimuli, games, and tasks, and 360-degree panoramas and videos can elicit emotions based on the current literature. Further, we present public datasets generated by VR and emotion-sensing interfaces that can be used in VR based research. The conclusions of this survey reveal that VR has a great potential to evoke emotions effectively and naturally by generating motivational and empathy mechanisms which makes it an ecologically valid paradigm to study emotions.