Abstract
Stress reactivity involves a physiological response to a stressful task, as a biological mechanism related to mental and physical health outcomes. Traditional stressors evoke social evaluative threat, which is fear of judgment and a threat to social status, typically via public speaking tasks. To be well-suited for virtual reality, however, a novel approach is necessary in the design of new stress tasks. We hypothesized that a virtual reality stress task involving social evaluative threat through a dance competition in front of an audience, elicits a stress response, measured by autonomic nervous system, cortisol, and testosterone reactivity. Participants (n = 18) showed autonomic nervous system reactivity in terms of increased heart rate and decreased respiratory sinus arrhythmia, indicating a stress response. Levels of cortisol increased in response to the dance competition, especially within responders, whereas testosterone levels did not change significantly over time. A virtual reality dance competition involving physical social evaluative threat elicits a stress response.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation REU site SPIRE-EIT under IIS-1757900 (PI’s Eliot Winer and Stephen Gilbert). Special thanks to SPIT lab members, VRAC infrastructure, Vijay Kiran Kalivarapu and Tor Finseth.
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van Dammen, L., Barnett, N., Conrady, R., Wright, L., Thymes, B., Shirtcliff, E.A. (2021). Evoking Stress Reactivity in a Virtual Dance Competition. In: Cassenti, D., Scataglini, S., Rajulu, S., Wright, J. (eds) Advances in Simulation and Digital Human Modeling. AHFE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1206. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51064-0_7
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