VR for Studying the Neuroscience of Emotional Responses

Emotions are frequently considered as the driving force of behavior, and psychopathology is often characterized by aberrant emotional responding. Emotional states are reflected on a cognitive-verbal, physiological-humoral, and motor-behavioral level but to date, human research lacks an experimental protocol for a comprehensive and ecologically valid characterization of such emotional states. Virtual reality (VR) might help to overcome this situation by allowing researchers to study mental processes and behavior in highly controlled but reality-like laboratory settings. In this chapter, we first elucidate the role of presence and immersion as requirements for eliciting emotional states in a virtual environment and discuss different VR methods for emotion induction. We then consider the organization of emotional states on a valence continuum (i.e., from negative to positive) and on this basis discuss the use of VR to study threat processing and avoidance as well as reward processing and approach behavior. Although the potential of VR has not been fully realized in laboratory and clinical settings yet, this technological tool can open up new avenues to better understand the neurobiological mechanisms of emotional responding in healthy and pathological conditions.