Outline of an Empirical Study on the Effects of Emotions on Strategic Behavior in Virtual Emergencies

The applicability of appropriate coping strategies is important in emergencies or traumatic experiences such as car accidents or human violence. In this context, emotion regulation and decision making are relevant. However, research on human reactions to traumatic experiences is very challenging and most existing research uses retrospective assessments of these variables of interest. Thus, we are currently developing and evaluating novel methods to investigate human behavior in cases of emergency. Virtual reality scenarios of emergencies are employed to enable an immersive interactive engagement (e.g., dealing with fire inside a building) based on the modification of Valve’s popular SourceTM 2007 game engine. This paper presents our ongoing research project, which aims at the empirical investigation of human strategic behavior under the influence of emotions while having to cope with virtual emergencies.