Emotion induction in virtual environments: a novel paradigm using immersive scenarios in driving simulators

Emotions are central to all human experiences. Inducing and measuring emotions, however, has been one of the most difficult tasks, since the nature of emotions includes rapid changes and heterogeneity across different individuals. Until very recently, traditional methods for inducing emotional states mostly relied on the presentation of predefined visual or auditory stimuli including images, text or sound. However, with the rise of new emerging media and technologies such as movies, games and virtual/augmented reality, these classical emotion induction methods have been often criticized to be outdated and not being effective enough. In the present research, we propose a new emotion induction method based on immersive scenarios presented in virtual environments embedded in a driving simulator. The immersive scenarios presented realistic situations such as following a car or overtaking a truck, and succeeded in consistently and effectively inducing a different array of emotions in the participants. Therefore, our system can be adapted to numerous different kinds of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scenarios where emotions play a significant role.