Virtual Realities, Real-World Impacts: Psychophysiological Responses to Environmental Cues in Virtual Reality

Taking care about the environment means taking care about others. As such, pro-environmental attitudes build upon pro-social motifs. However, climate-related issues are seldom perceived as emotionally impacting, and a major role is played by the emotional distance we feel with respect to people around us and also from people further apart in space and time. Indeed, it is only thanks to feeling emotional contagion with others that we can build a social agency and a cooperative attitude for tackling global hazards. As such, social cognition represents a fundamental aspect of human psychology to be leveraged in order to bypass individualisms and shrink the affective barriers between an individual and the environment. But how can we put into practice these ideas? The present work investigates the feasibility of using Virtual Reality (VR) to provide individuals with emotionally engaging virtual social contexts, and explores the links between such social engagement and emotional reactivity to simulated future consequences of climate change. The use of VR indeed allows simulating real-life scenarios while manipulating variables of interest, such as other people’s behavior and environmental changes. I will present the results of three experiments showing that: (i) direct exposure to different social environments can induce behavioral and psychophysiological changes in participants, allowing to target emotional contagion in a complex virtual scenario developed ad-hoc; (ii) active participation to different social contexts (cooperation vs competition) impacts people’s attentive resources and physiological stress, with cooperation facilitating the emergence of a sense of social agency; (iii) witnessing virtual fellow citizens’ reactions to future consequences of climate change impacts people’s engagement with their surroundings, and possibly modulates emotional distance with respect to their fellow citizens. Altogether, this work provides evidence that the use of VR is promising to elicit emotional reactions to other people’s behaviors and emotions, representing a privileged channel to bolster interindividual connectedness and promote a sense of social agency. Importantly, it shows that these aspects of social cognition also represent a relevant factor when directly linked to climate change consequences. Further, these methods and results provide the basic tools and knowledge necessary to develop an innovative VR-based apparatus capable of tailoring the virtual experience on each single user. Emotional states during a virtual experience can indeed be inferred by recording concomitant physiological activity. The idea is to feed such activity back to a VR system which can, in turn, automatically and coherently adjust the characteristics of the environment. This goal represents the ongoing follow-up development of this thesis. In future, such a tool could be integrated with classical knowledge-based awareness-raising campaigns organized at local and national scales. These might indeed benefit from integrating such a novel device, suited for providing a significantly impactful emotional experiences and hopefully capable of shrinking the gap between us, other people and the environment.