Exploring Emotional Responses in Virtual Reality Through Skin Conductance Signal

Emotions play a critical role in human survival and adaptation, shaping various aspects of life and social interactions. Researchers have extensively investigated human and environmental factors contributing to emotions, their effects on the brain and behavior, and the use of physiological signals to identify and understand the influence of emotions on the central and autonomic nervous systems. Ethically and reliably eliciting emotional responses is crucial for developing systems capable of recognizing, understanding, and responding to human affective states. This research aims at utilizing virtual reality (VR) technology to elicit specific emotions and recognize them through monitoring Skin Conductance (SC) signal. By providing a highly immersive environment, compared to traditional two-dimensional screens, a VR protocol was developed to elicit four basic emotions (sadness, relaxation, happiness, and fear). Four emotional rooms were specifically created and validated with a small group of participants. Subsequently, 37 subjects underwent the protocol while their SC signal was monitored. The SC-based analysis demonstrated its efficacy in discerning patterns associated with different emotions, particularly through the analysis of SC peaks, linked to eccrine gland activity, which successfully distinguished emotions in five out of six comparisons. SC features displayed the ability to differentiate along both arousal and valence dimensions. These findings highlight VR technology as a highly effective tool for emotion elicitation, and suggest its adoption in various fields of psychophysiology and human-machine interaction, potentially replacing conventional two-dimensional video stimuli.