The Future of Immersive Mood Induction in Affective Science: Using Virtual Reality to Test Effects of Mood Context on Task Performance

Abstract

A fundamental premise of affective and clinical science is that fluctuations in mood drive meaningful changes in cognition and behavior. These theories are often tested via laboratory mood induction procedures followed by performing an established task. Despite advances in understanding the temporal dynamics of emotions, it is still unclear whether it is the enduring mood that impacts subsequent task performance. Additionally, this design requires task switching, which may limit the impact of mood and affect task performance. We suggest that virtual reality (VR) offers a more powerful, immersive alternative to traditional mood induction methods and effectively addresses these limitations because it can be used to create mood contexts that occur simultaneously with task performance. VR creates an immersive, real-world experience while benefiting from a well-controlled laboratory setting (Diniz Bernardo et al., 2021). We first summarize the literature on mood induction methodologies, including evidence that VR creates a more immersive environment, leading to mood inductions that are greater in magnitude than other methods. We then report a novel empirical study on the feasibility of utilizing VR to create a mood context that occurs simultaneously with a gold-standard emotion regulation task. Our results indicate that VR was a powerful and enduring positive mood induction tool, resulting in immediate changes in mood and greater trial-by-trial positivity ratings during the concurrent task. Portions of this study were pre-registered on August 3, 2020, on the Clinical Trials website (project citation: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04496258).

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00213-1.

Keywords: Cognitive reappraisal; Context; Emotion; Mood induction; Virtual reality.

Fig. 1

Timeline of study and example of each trial type. Phases that occurred in VR are highlighted in gray. The top images indicate the two mood induction environments. Participants gave ratings for both positive and negative emotions for every trial

Fig. 2

Main effects of mood context and reappraisal. Note: Positive emotion ratings across different trial types (look-negative, look-neutral, decrease-negative) and mood contexts (neutral and positive). *p < .05

Fig. 3

Indirect effects of positive mood induction ratings on the relationship between mood context and positive emotion trial ratings. Note: Effects are standardized. **p < .001