An Embodied Perspective as a Victim of Sexual Harassment in Virtual Reality Reduces Action Conformity in a Later Milgram Obedience Scenario.

Group pressure can often result in people carrying out harmful actions towards others that they would not normally carry out by themselves. However, few studies have manipulated factors that might overcome this. Here male participants (n = 60) were in a virtual reality (VR) scenario of sexual harassment (SH) of a lone woman by a group of males in a bar. Participants were either only embodied as one of the males (Group, n = 20), or also as the woman (Woman, n = 20). A control group (n = 20) only experienced the empty bar, not the SH. One week later they were the Teacher in a VR version of Milgram's Obedience experiment where they were encouraged to give shocks to a female Learner by a group of 3 virtual males. Those who had been in the Woman condition gave about half the number of shocks of those in the Group condition, with the controls between these two. We explain the results through embodiment promoting identification with the woman or the group, and delegitimization of the group for those in the Woman condition. The experiment raised important ethical issues, showing that a VR study with positive ethical intentions can sometimes produce unexpected and non-beneficent results.

Virtual body ownership and its consequences for implicit racial bias are dependent on social context.

When people hold implicit biases against a group they typically engage in discriminatory behaviour against group members. In the context of the implicit racial bias of 'White' against 'Black' people, it has been shown several times that implicit bias is reduced after a short exposure of embodiment in a dark-skinned body in virtual reality. Embodiment usually leads to the illusion of ownership over the virtual body, irrespective of its skin colour. Previous studies have been carried out in virtual scenarios that are affectively neutral or positive. Here, we show that when the scenario is affectively negative the illusion of body ownership of White participants over a White body is lessened, and implicit bias is higher for White participants in a Black virtual body. The study was carried out with 92 White female participants, in a between-groups design with two factors: BodyType (their virtual body was White or Black) and a surrounding Crowd was Negative, Neutral or Positive towards the participant. We argue that negative affect prevents the formation of new positive associations with Black and distress leads to disownership of the virtual body. Although virtual reality is often thought of as an 'empathy machine' our results suggest caution, that this may not be universally the case.

Which Body Would You Like to Have? The Impact of Embodied Perspective on Body Perception and Body Evaluation in Immersive Virtual Reality.

In this experiment, we aimed to measure the conscious internal representation of one's body appearance and allow the participants to compare this to their ideal body appearance and to their real body appearance. We created a virtual representation of the internal image participants had of their own body shape. We also created a virtual body corresponding to the internal representation they had of their ideal body shape, and we built another virtual body based on their real body measures. Participants saw the three different virtual bodies from an embodied first-person perspective and from a third-person perspective and had to evaluate the appearance of those virtual bodies. We observed that female participants evaluated their real body as more attractive when they saw it from a third-person perspective, and that their level of body dissatisfaction was lower after the experimental procedure. We believe that third-person perspective allowed female participants to perceive their real body shape without applying the negative prior beliefs usually associated to the "self", and that this resulted in a more positive evaluation of their body shape. We speculate that this method could be applied with patients suffering from eating disorders, by making their body perception more realistic and therefore improve their body satisfaction.

An experimental study of a virtual reality counselling paradigm using embodied self-dialogue.

When faced with a personal problem people typically give better advice to others than to themselves. A previous study showed how it is possible to enact internal dialogue in virtual reality (VR) through participants alternately occupying two different virtual bodies - one representing themselves and the other Sigmund Freud. They could maintain a self-conversation by explaining their problem to the virtual Freud and then from the embodied perspective of Freud see and hear the explanation by their virtual doppelganger, and then give some advice. Alternating between the two bodies they could maintain a self-dialogue, as if between two different people. Here we show that the process of alternating between their own and the Freud body is important for successful psychological outcomes. An experiment was carried out with 58 people, 29 in the body swapping Self-Conversation condition and 29 in a condition where they only spoke to a Scripted Freud character. The results showed that the Self-Conversation method results in a greater perception of change and help compared to the Scripted. We compare this method with the distancing paradigm where participants imagine resolving a problem from a first or third person perspective. We consider the method as a possible strategy for self-counselling.

The relation between bystanders' behavioral reactivity to distress and later helping behavior during a violent conflict in virtual reality.

The occurrence of helping behavior is thought to be automatically triggered by reflexive reactions and promoted by intuitive decisions. Here, we studied whether reflexive reactions to an emergency situation are associated with later helping behavior in a different situation, a violent conflict. First, 29 male supporters of F.C. Barcelona performed a cued-reaction time task with a low and high cognitive load manipulation, to tap into reflexive and reflective processes respectively, during the observation of an emergency. Next, participants entered a bar in Virtual Reality and had a conversation with a virtual fellow supporter. During this conversation, a virtual Real Madrid supporter entered and started an aggressive argument with the fellow supporter that escalated into a physical fight. Verbal and physical interventions of the participant served as measures of helping behavior. Results showed that faster responses to an emergency situation during low, but not during high cognitive load, were associated with more interventions during the violent conflict. However, a tendency to describe the decision to act during the violent conflict as intuitive and reflex-like was related to more interventions. Further analyses revealed that a disposition to experience sympathy, other-oriented feelings during distressful situations, was related to self-reported intuitive decision-making, a reduced distance to the perpetrator, and higher in the intervening participants. Taken together, these results shed new light on helping behavior and are consistent with the notion of a motivational system in which the act of helping is dependent on a complex interplay between intuitive, reflexive and deliberate, reflective processes.

A Psychophysical Experiment Regarding Components of the Plausibility Illusion.

We report on the design and results of an experiment investigating factors influencing Slater's Plausibility Illusion (Psi) in virtual environments (VEs). Slater proposed Psi and Place Illusion (PI) as orthogonal components of virtual experience which contribute to realistic response in a VE. PI corresponds to the traditional conception of presence as "being there," so there exists a substantial body of previous research relating to PI, but very little relating to Psi. We developed this experiment to investigate the components of plausibility illusion using subjective matching techniques similar to those used in color science. Twenty-one participants each experienced a scenario with the highest level of coherence (the extent to which a scenario matches user expectations and is internally consistent), then in eight different trials chose transitions from lower-coherence to higher-coherence scenarios with the goal of matching the level of Psi they felt in the highest-coherence scenario. At each transition, participants could change one of the following coherence characteristics: the behavior of the other virtual humans in the environment, the behavior of their own body, the physical behavior of objects, or the appearance of the environment. Participants tended to choose improvements to the virtual body before any other improvements. This indicates that having an accurate and well-behaved representation of oneself in the virtual environment is the most important contributing factor to Psi. This study is the first to our knowledge to focus specifically on coherence factors in virtual environments.

A method for generating an illusion of backwards time travel using immersive virtual reality-an exploratory study.

We introduce a new method, based on immersive virtual reality (IVR), to give people the illusion of having traveled backwards through time to relive a sequence of events in which they can intervene and change history. The participant had played an important part in events with a tragic outcome-deaths of strangers-by having to choose between saving 5 people or 1. We consider whether the ability to go back through time, and intervene, to possibly avoid all deaths, has an impact on how the participant views such moral dilemmas, and also whether this experience leads to a re-evaluation of past unfortunate events in their own lives. We carried out an exploratory study where in the "Time Travel" condition 16 participants relived these events three times, seeing incarnations of their past selves carrying out the actions that they had previously carried out. In a "Repetition" condition another 16 participants replayed the same situation three times, without any notion of time travel. Our results suggest that those in the Time Travel condition did achieve an illusion of "time travel" provided that they also experienced an illusion of presence in the virtual environment, body ownership, and agency over the virtual body that substituted their own. Time travel produced an increase in guilt feelings about the events that had occurred, and an increase in support of utilitarian behavior as the solution to the moral dilemma. Time travel also produced an increase in implicit morality as judged by an implicit association test. The time travel illusion was associated with a reduction of regret associated with bad decisions in their own lives. The results show that when participants have a third action that they can take to solve the moral dilemma (that does not immediately involve choosing between the 1 and the 5) then they tend to take this option, even though it is useless in solving the dilemma, and actually results in the deaths of a greater number.