Program

Interacting with our environment evokes complex responses across behavioral, subjective, and physiological levels. Researchers often face the challenge of achieving a good balance between naturalistic and unconstrained behavior while ensuring precise and insightful biological readouts. Virtual reality (VR) enables naturalistic (i.e., dynamic and interactive) experiments with simultaneous recording of multimodal psychophysiological and behavioral measures, such as electrophysiology, autonomic measures, eye and body movements. These data can be used to identify characteristic patterns in clinical and healthy samples.

In this symposium, we present the work of five researchers, who use interactive VR paradigms beyond “button presses” to study the psychophysiology of socio-affective processes.

Sabrina Gado will kick-off the symposium with findings from a recent meta-analysis and an experimental study on the effects of social anxiety on exploration behavior and autonomic responsiveness.

Leon Kroczek will then present how emotional expressions and interpersonal distance influence socio-affective processing in a naturalistic approach task which combines mobile EEG and VR.

Michael Gaebler will present a set of studies on the behavior and psychophysiology of perceiving virtual humans in 3D and immersive VR.

Marius Rubo will present eye-tracking and behavioral data from dyadic interactions in social VR.

Finally, Marta Andreatta will conclude the symposium with a clinical study testing in VR the (possible) beneficial effect of exposure therapy on pathological learning mechanisms in anxiety patients.

In summary, this symposium showcases and highlights VR's potential to exploit rich behavioral patterns allowing for a nuanced understanding of the physiological underpinnings of (mal)adaptive socio-affective processes.