The effect of emotional narrative virtual environments on user experience

The surrounding world has a strong impact on the way we feel and perceive the events that happens in daily life. The power of environments to elicit emotions in humans has been widely studied in experimental psychology by using exposure to photographs or real situations. These researches do not reproduce the vividness of events in ordinary life and do not permit to control the situations that happen within. By reproducing a realistic scenario similar to daily life and by controlling the social narratives happening within, Virtual Reality (VR) is a powerful tool to investigate the effect of environments on humans’ feelings and emotions. In this study we have animated the emotional content of a realistic virtual scenario with a dynamic scene in order to introduce a novel approach to investigate the effect of environments in human feeling based on the Emotional Narrative Virtual Environment (ENVE) paradigm. A sample of 36 subjects experimented 3 ENVEs with a Fear, Disgust and Happy emotional content, made to live with a social narratives, in an immersive VR setup. Results showed the ability of ENVE to elicit specific emotional state in participants and corroborate the idea that the ENVE approach can be used in environmental psychology or to treat persons with mental disease.