Rapuano Mariachiara, Iachini Tina, Ruggiero Gennaro
Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Immersive Virtual Reality, CS-IVR Department of Psychology, University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", Viale Ellittico, 31, 81100 Caserta, Italy.
J Clin Med. 2023 Feb 8;12(4):1339. doi: 10.3390/jcm12041339.
Today we are experiencing a hybrid real-virtual society in which the interaction with virtual humans is normal and "quasi-social". Understanding the way we react to the interaction with virtual agents and the impact of emotions on social dynamics in the virtual world is fundamental. Therefore, in this study we investigated the implicit effect of emotional information by adopting a perceptual discrimination task. Specifically, we devised a task that explicitly required perceptual discrimination of a target while involving distance regulation in the presence of happy, neutral, or angry virtual agents. In two Immersive Virtual Reality experiments, participants were instructed to discriminate a target on the virtual agents' t-shirts, and they had to provide the response by stopping the virtual agents (or themselves) at the distance where they could identify the target. Thus, facial expressions were completely irrelevant to the perceptual task. The results showed that the perceptual discrimination implied a longer response time when t-shirts were worn by angry rather than happy or neutral virtual agents. This suggests that angry faces interfered with the explicit perceptual task people had to perform. From a theoretical standpoint, this anger-superiority effect could reflect an ancestral fear/avoidance mechanism that prompts automatic defensive reactions and bypasses other cognitive processes.
如今，我们正经历着一个现实与虚拟混合的社会，在这个社会中，与虚拟人的互动是正常且“准社交”的。了解我们对与虚拟主体互动的反应方式以及情绪对虚拟世界中社会动态的影响至关重要。因此，在本研究中，我们采用了一种感知辨别任务来探究情绪信息的隐性影响。具体而言，我们设计了一项任务，该任务明确要求在有开心、中性或愤怒的虚拟主体在场的情况下进行目标的感知辨别，同时涉及距离调节。在两项沉浸式虚拟现实实验中，参与者被要求辨别虚拟主体T恤上的目标，并且他们必须通过在能够识别目标的距离处停下虚拟主体（或他们自己）来做出反应。因此，面部表情与感知任务完全无关。结果表明，当愤怒的虚拟主体穿着T恤时，感知辨别意味着更长的反应时间，而不是开心或中性的虚拟主体。这表明愤怒的面孔干扰了人们必须执行的明确感知任务。从理论角度来看，这种愤怒优势效应可能反映了一种祖传的恐惧/回避机制，该机制会引发自动防御反应并绕过其他认知过程。
