Measuring stress-reducing effects of virtual training based on subjective response

Training to cope with negative emotions or stress is important for professionals with a high pressure job, such as police officers and military personnel. The work reported in this paper is part of a project that aims to develop a Virtual Reality based training environment for such professionals. As a first step in that direction, an experiment was performed to investigate the impact of virtual training on the subjects’ experienced stress responses. A group of 10 participants was asked to rate the subjective emotional intensity of a set of affective pictures at two different time points, separated by six hours. Half of the group performed a session of virtual training in between, in which they were asked to actively apply reappraisal strategies as a form of emotion regulation, whereas the other half did not take part in this training session. The results indicate that the virtual training caused the participants in that group to give significantly lower ratings for the emotional intensity of the pictures