The work of Hanshans and colleagues confirms that people can feel stress in virtual reality environments. The researchers found that when they “used a 180-degree horror movie as a stressor for a healthy study population. . . . It was possible to provoke a measurable physiological stress reaction in all subjects through VR, although not all participants subjectively felt scared or stressed. EEG, SCR and peripheral skin temperature turned out to be equally well suited for real-time detection of stress. HRV failed to reliably show the stress response, which does not disqualify this measuring method, but might rather be connected with measurement timeframes and data preparation in our study. When it comes to the ease of use, the robustness of the measurement, costs and the possibility to implement the measuring technique within a wireless system (e.g., finger clips or even the VR hand controllers), we consider the skin conductance response (SCR) as the most promising physiological parameter to objectify stress in a virtual environment.”
Christian Hanshans, Tatjana Amler, Johannes Zauner, and Lukas Broll. “Inducing and Measuring Acute Stress in Virtual Reality: Evaluation of Canonical Physiological Stress Markers and Measuring Methods.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102107