Exploring subjective and physiological stress responses to virtual stimuli

Employees in many different jobs have to deal with (extreme) negative emotions on a regular basis. Virtual training could be a suitable method for learning to cope with those situations if it proves possible to evoke similar emotions in such a set-up. In this research, three experiments to induce stress using different virtual stimuli are described, i.e. video, games and injustice. Each of these stimuli can be used to increase the subjective experience of stress, which is reflected in skin conductance levels as well, though not in heart rate measurements. However, by comparing the results of each experiment, heart rate does seem clearly linked to the type of stimulus, with significantly lower results in the video experiment, while there is no clear pattern in the skin conductance measurements. It is therefore important to know what such physiological responses might indicate, irrelevant of the corresponding emotion induced, in order to extract the emotional experience from those physiological measurements.