Virtual Reality’s Effect on Human Emotion and Behavior
Emotion is often experienced on an instinctive level, something we describe as a feeling instead of a thought. The last time you felt happy or loved the rush of emotion is likely to have come naturally to you. What does that have to do with virtual reality? Researchers describe virtual reality as a medium you experience rather than simply view — with a direct effect on our emotions.
There are some things that most Americans will never have the opportunity to experience. For example, what it’s like to be a refugee in in Syria. This changed when a journalist depicted what it would be like if you were really there — at this very moment, in the midst of the raging conflict.
The journalist, Nonny de la Peña, created a film depicting a busy street corner in Syria where a rocket hits and children run for safety.
After experiencing the film, Brian Bishop, a NY Times best-selling author, said “When a young child raced through the dusty aftermath, I tried to chase after him.” Other users have likewise described similarly heartbreaking experiences.
“The question of interest is whether sensorimotor experiences in virtual worlds are able to influence attitudes and behaviors in the physical world,” writes Jeremy Bailenson, professor at Stanford University and founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.
The answer to that question was answered by in an experiment as early as 2006 by Bailenson and his colleague Nick Yee from Stanford. “By embodying the body of an elderly avatar in a virtual environment, participants demonstrated a decrease in negative stereotypes against elderly individuals,” the researchers concluded. This was accomplished in a series of experiments which allowed participants to virtually step into another person’s body and experience the world through that person’s eyes.
To fully transform virtual reality (VR) into a more immersive experience, there is still work to be done. Neurophysicists at UCLA showed in an experiment that, when compared to memories of real experiences, there is a disparity in the manner that VR experiences are committed to memory, since the degree of sensory input from real-world experiences exceeds that derived from VR. For example, sound and smell are absent, but there are also less tangible elements of how the real world interacts with our brains that we do not yet fully understand.
Like any technology, virtual reality can be used for positive or negative purposes. For example, unscrupulous government leaders could use virtual reality to manipulate others. As some have theorized, ‘In the wrong hands, virtual reality could be a tool to spread fear and misinformation, a more powerful version of the propaganda that spread during World War II and the Cold War.” Our understanding of reality may be warped if we start believing that the virtual world is the real one, rather than an approximation. And it is still to be seen whether the potential for human connection is enhanced or reduced as a result of this medium.
The future is still young for virtual reality. But what is unquestionable is the power that this medium has on its viewer’s emotions and the limbic system of the human brain. Humans are unique in the animal kingdom for possessing the greatest variety of emotions and feelings. Scientists have found that emotions are practically non-existent in reptiles, amphibians and earlier species. If virtual reality is able to more deeply access our emotions, then it accesses a key element of what makes us human.
