Nature versus art as elicitors of the sublime: A virtual reality study

Unveiling the underlying structure of awe in virtual reality and in autobiographical recall: an exploratory study

Over the last two decades, awe has attracted the attention of an increasing number of researchers. The use of virtual reality has been identified as one of the most effective techniques for eliciting awe, in addition to more personalized methods for inducing emotion, such as autobiographical recall. However, previous measures of awe were unable to uncover the hidden structure of this experience. Awe experience scale (AWE-S) has been validated as a comprehensive measure of contingent awe in English, providing new opportunities for analysis. In this two-phases study, we investigated whether the latent structure of the experience of awe evoked by the autobiographical recall technique (Study 1) overlapped with that induced by exposing participants to a validated virtual reality awe-eliciting training (Study 2). The original English AWE-S structure held both in autobiographical recall induction and virtual reality-based elicitation. Despite evidence of overlap between English and Italian structures, low correlations were found between Italian trait measures used to test the concurrent validity of the AWE-S in the Italian sample and AWE-S state dimensions. This study highlights cultural differences in awe experience, trait, and state variations, and provides new insights into the standardized induction of this emotion through simulated environments.

The Use of Immersive Virtual Reality in Sensory Sessions on a Specialist Dementia Unit: Service Evaluation of Feasibility and Acceptability

This service evaluation reviewed inclusion of Immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) relaxation activities as part of routine occupational therapy sensory sessions on a specialist dementia unit. Twenty-five sessions were completed over 13 wk with 14 participants. Nine participants chose to engage in multiple sessions. Feasibility was assessed through participant engagement and tolerability. Modal first session length was in the range 30 s to 2 min. This increased to over 2 min on second sessions. There was a lack of significant adverse effects measured by direct questioning, neuropsychiatric assessment before vs. after sessions and adverse incident reporting. Acceptability was assessed via structured review of user and staff feedback which noted positive experiences such as relaxation, openness to discussion, reminiscence, wider engagement and interest in future use. Further work is required to explore efficacy and use in other settings.

A Self-Help Virtual Therapeutic Experience Intervention for Overcoming Psychological Distress Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results From the European Multicentric COVID Feel Good Trial

OBJECTIVE

The general objective of the current study was to investigate the efficacy of a novel self-help virtual therapeutic experience (specifically, the COVID Feel Good intervention) in lowering the psychological burden experienced during the COVID-19 lockdowns in four European countries.

METHODS

We focused on participants recruited from June 2020 to May 2021 in the context of a European multicenter project including four university/academic sites. The total number of participants in the longitudinal studies was 107 (study 1, N = 40; study 2, N = 29; study 3, N = 38). The randomized controlled trial (study 4) included 31 participants in total, 16 in the intervention group and 15 in the control group. Primary outcome measures were depression, anxiety, stress symptoms, perceived stress level, and perceived hopelessness. The secondary outcome was experienced social connectedness.

RESULTS

Using separate linear mixed-effects models, the most consistent result across countries was a reduction in perceived stress after the participation in the COVID Feel Good intervention. By pooling the results of the models using a random-effects meta-analysis, we found that after the COVID Feel Good intervention, participants reported a decrease in perceived general distress (mean standardized effect size for general distress in the treatment groups compared with the control conditions was -0.52 [ p = .008, 95% confidence interval = -0.89 to -0.14]) and an increase in the perceived social connection (mean standardized effect size for social connection using COVID Feel Good compared with the control conditions was 0.50 [ p ≤ .001, 95% confidence interval = 0.25 to 0.76]).

CONCLUSIONS

Findings of this study indicate that a virtual self-help intervention is effective in reducing psychological distress. These results contribute to the growing literature supporting the use of digital psychological therapies to relieve psychological distress among the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic.Trial Registration : ISRCTN63887521.

"Standing Up for Earth Rights": Awe-Inspiring Virtual Nature for Promoting Pro-Environmental Behaviors

Virtual nature exposure has emerged as an effective method for promoting pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, also due to the increased emotional connection with nature itself. However, the role played by complex emotions elicited by virtual nature, such as awe, needs to be fully elucidated. Awe is an emotion stemming from vast stimuli, including nature, and virtual reality (VR) emerged as an effective medium to elicit it. One hundred nineteen participants were exposed to either one of four VR environments: (a) an awe-inspiring virtual nature, (b) a non-natural awe-inspiring virtual scenario, (c) a non-awe-inspiring virtual nature, (d) a non-natural non-awe-inspiring scenario. Pro-environmental attitudes, intentions, discrete emotions, and affect were measured and compared across the different conditions. Two ad hoc tasks were developed to measure two pro-environmental behaviors after each VR exposure. Participants were invited to sign a real petition against plastic production, consumption, and in favor of plastic recycling (a personally engaging behavior), and to take flyers to spread the word on the petition to friends and acquaintances (a socially engaging behavior). Awe-inspiring virtual nature resulted in a significantly increased number of flyers taken by participants (vs. control). Disposition toward the protection of the environment, positive emotional affect, and condition significantly correlated with the number of flyers taken. These results indicated that awe-inspiring virtual nature can influence socially engaging pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors but not personally engaging ones.

Promoting Emotional and Psychological Well-Being During COVID-19 Pandemic: A Self-Help Virtual Reality Intervention for University Students

Mental health problems are very common among university students, and the situation worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The closure of universities, the restrictions imposed, and the reduction of social activities led to considerable changes in students' lives, thus posing new mental health and emotional challenges. Within this context, promoting university students' general well-being, in particular emotional and psychological well-being, becomes essential. In addition to the possibility of online interventions aimed at overcoming distance limitations and reaching people at their home, other advanced technologies such as virtual reality (VR) have demonstrated the potential to improve people's well-being, quality of life, and positive experiences. The study reported in this article is aimed at exploring the feasibility and preliminary effectiveness of a self-help VR intervention lasting 3 weeks in promoting emotional well-being in university students. Forty-two university students voluntarily participated in a six-session intervention. In each session, a different virtual scenario was presented: two relaxing experiences and four transformative experiences based on metaphors or metaphoric ones aimed at encouraging students to be aware of their emotions and positive resources. Students were randomly allocated to an experimental group and to a waiting list group that started the intervention after 3 weeks. Before and after the six sessions, participants completed an assessment by completing online questionnaires. Results showed a significant increase in both emotional well-being and psychological well-being in the experimental group compared to the waiting list group. The majority of participants said that they would recommend the experience to other students.

Toward an Expanded Taxonomy of Happiness: A Conceptual Analysis of 16 Distinct Forms of Mental Wellbeing

Recent decades have seen a surge of scientific interest in happiness. However, its theoretical conceptualization is a work in progress. Much of the literature focuses on two main forms: hedonic (encompassing life satisfaction and positive affect) and eudaimonic (encompassing phenomena such as character development and meaning in life). However, this binary has been critiqued as being incomplete, in part because it reflects a Western-centric perspective that overlooks forms emphasized in non-Western cultures. As a result, scholars have begun to highlight other forms besides hedonia and eudaimonia. This article surveys the literature to identify 16 potential forms in total, classified according to whether they primarily pertain to feelings (hedonic, contented, mature, chaironic, and vital), thought (evaluative, meaningful, intellective, aesthetic, and absorbed) or action (eudaimonic, masterful, accomplished, harmonic, nirvanic, and relational). This article thus offers a more expansive, albeit still just provisional, taxonomy of this vital and still-evolving topic.

Effectiveness of a Virtual-Reality-Based Self-Help Intervention for Lowering the Psychological Burden during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Iran

BACKGROUND

The COVID-19 pandemic. In this framework, digital self-help interventions have the potential to provide flexible and scalable solutions for delivering evidence-based treatments that do not necessitate face-to-face meetings.

OBJECTIVE

as part of a multicentric project, the purpose of the current randomized controlled trial was to evaluate the efficacy of a Virtual-Reality-based self-help intervention (namely, COVID Feel Good) in lowering the psychological distress experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran.

METHODS

60 participants were randomly assigned to the experimental (COVID Feel Good intervention group) or the control (no-treatment control group) condition. At the beginning of the intervention (Day 0), at the end of the intervention (Day 7), and after a 2-week follow-up (Day 21), measurements of depressive and anxiety levels, general distress, perceived levels of stress, hopelessness (primary outcome measures), perceived interpersonal closeness with the social world, and fear of COVID-19 (secondary outcome measure) were collected. The protocol consists of two integrated parts: the first part includes a relaxing 10-min three-hundred-sixty-degree (360°) video, while the second one includes social tasks with specified objectives.

RESULTS

In terms of the primary outcomes, participants in the COVID Feel Good intervention group improved in depression, stress, anxiety, and perceived stress but not hopelessness. Secondary outcome results showed an improvement in perceived social connectedness and a substantial decrease in fear of COVID-19.

CONCLUSIONS

these findings on the efficacy of COVID Feel Good training add to the growing body of evidence demonstrating the feasibility of digital self-help interventions in promoting well-being during this unique period.

Virtual Reality for Awe and Imagination

Empirical research has explored the potential of the emotion of awe to shape creativity, while theoretical work has sought to understand the link between this emotion and transformation in terms of imagining new possible worlds. This branch of study relies on the transformative potential of virtual reality (VR) to examine and invite cognitive and emotional components of transformative experiences (TEs) within the interdisciplinary model of Transformative Experience Design (TED) and the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF). TED suggests using the epistemic and emotional affordances of interactive technologies, such as VR, to invite TEs. The ATF can provide insight into the nature of these affordances and their relationship. This line of research draws on empirical evidence of the awe-creativity link to broaden the discourse and consider the potential impact of this emotion on core beliefs about the world. The combination of VR with these theoretical and design-oriented approaches may enable a new generation of potentially transformative experiences that remind people that they can aspire to more and inspire them to work toward imagining and creating a new possible world.

Inside the Michelangelo effect: The role of art and aesthetic attractiveness on perceived fatigue and hand kinematics in virtual painting

It has recently been discovered that during a virtual reality task of painting, if the subjects have the illusion of recreating an artistic masterpiece, they improve their performances and perceive less fatigue compared to simply coloring a virtual canvas. This phenomenon has been called the Michelangelo effect. However, it was unclear if this effect was related to the aesthetic experience of beauty or if it was specific to artistic stimuli. To clarify this point, 26 healthy subjects performed the virtual task of erasing a blank sheet on the canvas, revealing an image that could be a painting or a photo, classified as beautiful or not. Beautiful paintings were famous artistic portraits, non-beautiful paintings were rough reproductions of them. Photos of popular people were matched with paintings according to their similarity for somatic traits, posture, and clothes. Beautiful and non-beautiful photos were classified according to whether the pictured person was famous or not for their beauty. For each stimulus the objective beauty, subjective beauty, and effort to complete the task perceived by the subject were self-assessed on a numerical rating scale, recorded and analyzed. Furthermore, the hand kinematic trajectory was instrumentally recorded and its spatiotemporal parameters were computed. Less fatigue was perceived for the paintings than for the photos (p = .020), but not for beautiful versus non-beautiful stimuli (p = .325). Only in the artistic stimuli, subjective beauty was found to be negatively correlated with perceived fatigue (p = .030) and performed errors (p = .005). The kinematic parameters were found to be affected by the interactions between the gender of the participant and that of the person in the photo. These results supported the idea that the Michelangelo effect was stronger when subjects interacted with artefacts, modulated by the perceived beauty of the artistic stimulus.

Defining Transformative Experiences: A Conceptual Analysis

The concept of transformative experience (TE) has been widely explored by several disciplines from philosophy to neurobiology, and in different domains, from the spiritual to the educational one. This attitude has engendered heterogeneous models to explain this phenomenon. However, a consistent and clear understanding of this construct remains elusive. The aim of this work is to provide an initial comprehensive interdisciplinary, cross-domain, up-to-date, and integrated overview on the concept of TEs. Firstly, all the models and theories on TEs were reviewed to extract and analyze TEs’ main components emerging from different disciplines. Then, this preliminary analysis was integrated with an in-depth examination of redundancies and particularities across domains and disciplines, to provide an integrated theoretical framework of TEs and a preliminary interdisciplinary operational definition of TEs. This examination, in turn, can help organize current research and theories, thus providing suggestions for operationalizing TEs as well as encouraging new interdisciplinary research endeavors.

A Virtual Reality-Based Self-Help Intervention for Dealing with the Psychological Distress Associated with the COVID-19 Lockdown: An Effectiveness Study with a Two-Week Follow-Up

The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of a novel self-administered at-home daily virtual reality (VR)-based intervention (COVID Feel Good) for reducing the psychological burden experienced during the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. A total of 40 individuals who had experienced at least two months of strict social distancing measures followed COVID Feel Good between June and July 2020 for one week. Primary outcome measures were depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms, perceived stress levels, and hopelessness. Secondary outcomes were the experienced social connectedness and the level of fear experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Linear mixed-effects models were fitted to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. Additionally, we also performed a clinical change analysis on primary outcome measures. As concerning primary outcome measures, participants exhibited improvements from baseline to post-intervention for depression levels, stress levels, general distress, and perceived stress (all p < 0.05) but not for the perceived hopelessness (p = 0.110). Results for the secondary outcomes indicated an increase in social connectedness from T0 to T1 (p = 0.033) but not a significant reduction in the perceived fear of coronavirus (p = 0.412). Among these study variables, these significant improvements were maintained from post-intervention to the 2-week follow-up (p > 0.05). Results indicated that the intervention was associated with good clinical outcomes, low-to-no risks for the treatment, and no adverse effects or risks. Globally, evidence suggests a beneficial effect of the proposed protocol and its current availability in 12 different languages makes COVID Feel Good a free choice for helping individuals worldwide to cope with the psychological distress associated with the COVID-19 crisis, although large scale trials are needed to evaluate its efficacy.