Towards virtual training of emotion regulation

For professionals in military and law enforcement domains, learning to regulate one's emotions under threatening circumstances is crucial. The STRESS project envisions a virtual reality-based system to enable such professionals to train their emotion regulation skills. To explore the possibilities for such a system, this article describes an experiment performed to investigate the impact of virtual training on participants' experienced emotional responses in threatening situations. A set of 15 participants were asked to rate the subjective emotional intensity of a set of affective pictures at two different time points, separated by 6 h. The participants were divided into three groups: the first group performed a session of virtual training in between, in which they received a choice-reaction task; the second group performed a session of virtual training, in which they had to apply reappraisal strategies; and a control group, that did not have any training session. The results indicate that the reappraisal-based training caused the participants in that group to give significantly lower ratings for the emotional intensity of the negative pictures, whereas the content-based training resulted in significantly higher ratings compared to the group without training. Moreover, a second experiment, performed with the same participants 6 months later, indicated that these effects are fairly persistent over time, and that they transfer to different pictures with similar characteristics.