Department of Psychology, Educational Sciences, and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Department of Psychology, University of Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg, Germany.
Curr Top Behav Neurosci. 2023;65:161-187. doi: 10.1007/7854_2022_405.
Emotions are frequently considered as the driving force of behavior, and psychopathology is often characterized by aberrant emotional responding. Emotional states are reflected on a cognitive-verbal, physiological-humoral, and motor-behavioral level but to date, human research lacks an experimental protocol for a comprehensive and ecologically valid characterization of such emotional states. Virtual reality (VR) might help to overcome this situation by allowing researchers to study mental processes and behavior in highly controlled but reality-like laboratory settings. In this chapter, we first elucidate the role of presence and immersion as requirements for eliciting emotional states in a virtual environment and discuss different VR methods for emotion induction. We then consider the organization of emotional states on a valence continuum (i.e., from negative to positive) and on this basis discuss the use of VR to study threat processing and avoidance as well as reward processing and approach behavior. Although the potential of VR has not been fully realized in laboratory and clinical settings yet, this technological tool can open up new avenues to better understand the neurobiological mechanisms of emotional responding in healthy and pathological conditions.
情绪通常被认为是行为的驱动力，而精神病理学的特点通常是情绪反应异常。情绪状态在认知-言语、生理-体液和运动-行为层面上都有体现，但迄今为止，人类研究缺乏一种全面且具有生态有效性的实验方案来描述这种情绪状态。虚拟现实 (VR) 可能有助于克服这种情况，因为它允许研究人员在高度控制但逼真的实验室环境中研究心理过程和行为。在本章中，我们首先阐明了存在和沉浸作为在虚拟环境中引发情绪状态的要求的作用，并讨论了用于情绪诱发的不同 VR 方法。然后，我们考虑了情绪状态在效价连续体上的组织（即从负到正），并在此基础上讨论了使用 VR 研究威胁处理和回避以及奖励处理和接近行为。尽管 VR 的潜力尚未在实验室和临床环境中得到充分实现，但这种技术工具可以开辟新的途径，以更好地理解健康和病理条件下情绪反应的神经生物学机制。
